The Tree of Idleness

Perhaps Jasmine was right, Charles mused. Perhaps it would be an interesting selling point to his own novel on modern-day Alexandria that he had written at least a portion of it while he was on sabbatical and living in the same house where Durrell had written the Quartet.

Charles felt an urge to read further into the Amalfi book.

And then back down to the square in the twilight after dinner with those fairy lights in the olive trees around the fringe of the stone café terrace, and, in that soft light and twittering laughter of the Mediterranean men and wisps of strong Turkish tobacco drifting up, eyeing and being eyed until I got the certain look from one I fancied and took him back up to the villa and let him fuck me in long, slow, sweeping strokes on the terrace under the stars.

And maybe, if he was really, really beautiful and masterful, taking him back to my bed for a night of sleep broken by brief periods of wanton lust, waking to the feel of a hot poker at my hole and a wheedling whisper for permission at my ear and arching back to accept the homage of a throbbing need to be deep inside me. Breakfasting on the terrace by the small pool and then pulling him into the pool and wrapping my legs around his waist and letting the swirling water soften the rhythmic in and outing as I threw my head back and watched the morning Mediterranean light filter through the sighing branches of the olive trees and thought about my late afternoon visit to the Tree of Idleness café in the Bellapais square, already assessing which eyes I would respond to today.

The light was dimming and the children had had their swim and Jasmine had fed them their dinner and Charles was still sitting at the writing desk, in the darkening living room, reading from the Amalfi book. Whenever he lifted his head, his eyes went to the strange painting over the desk. It was marked with the signature of the famous British painter, Valery Cramner, who had recently died, but surely such a valuable painting wouldn't be here in a rental villa. Would it? It was such a sad, haunting painting, devoid of life, even though the colors of the empty café chairs in front of the sun-sparkling stone wall were luminous. And then his attention to go to the house itself. He felt the very walls of the villa murmuring to him, humming in a singsong tune to return his attention to the book.

Charles had had feelings for other men before—the feelings that the almost poetic prose of the Amalfi book was infusing him with—but he'd been far too sensible to pursue any of them. He wanted tenure at the university. In Egypt that required a straight-laced life and publication. He was quite fond of Jasmine, and he worshipped their children. And that was enough for him. Or it had been enough for him before they had come up here to Bellapais. Reading this Amalfi chap's book, though, was getting his juices going, surfacing urges in him that he hadn't had since his undergraduate days.

"It's time to go down to Kyrenia, Charles," Jasmine was saying. She was standing by the desk. She had intruded into the murmuring of the walls around Charles, and he resented the intrusion. It seemed like the very walls of the villa were indignant at the intrusion—and the Amalfi book was as well. There seemed to be a tension gripping the villa at the mere presence of a woman and children. The maleness of the place permeated the villa.

"Umm, um," Charles responded, returning his eyes to the text. He scooted a bit further under the desk, not wanting Jasmine to see that he was sexually aroused.

"It's dark now," Jasmine was saying in the wheedling voice of hers when she was a bit on edge. "And you know we are spending the night down at my grandaunt's Kyrenia house in preparation for the funeral tomorrow."

Charles looked up, glassy-eyed, trying to focus. "Perhaps you and the children could go on down yourselves for the night, honey," he offered. "You know, I have some ideas running through my head. Some very important elements of the novel. Perhaps it would be good for me to stay here tonight and work on the writing. You know, without any distractions at all. It might be just what I need to jump start this."

Jasmine was torn. Charles had been slow in getting the novel started. She'd done everything she could to goose that along. Charles needed this to get tenure. The family needed Charles to get tenure.

Charles waited until he was quite sure that Jasmine and the children were on the road down to Kyrenia. He knew exactly what to do then. The walls were murmuring to him; the Amalfi book had practically dropped in his lap. He'd been hard since he had opened the book and started reading those passages. He hadn't been this hard and jittery and full of the electricity of lust and anticipation since his undergraduate days. He even could hear the sounds from the square below. The activity at the Tree of Idleness down in the Bellapais square. The sounds of men's voices and of the baglama playing. There's no reason he should hear those sounds up here on the mountainside above the square. But he did.

Charles went into the bedroom and stripped down. He then pulled on a tight T-shirt and those jeans Jasmine insisted were two sizes too small for him—without briefs under them. He stood back and looked at himself in the mirror. Yes, the outline at his basket was quite discernible. He knew he was good looking, but he also knew the size of him was his most attracting feature. He was humming as he descended the steep cobble-stoned pathway toward the welcoming, twinkling fairy lights laced through the spreading Tree of Idleness in the square below and toward the sound in the outdoor café of male laughter and raunchy bravado.

[Authors' Notes: The setting of this novel, the historical casting of Cyprus during the 1958--2008 period covered by the narrative as well as the villa itself on the mountainside in the upper reaches of the Cypriot ancient abbey village of Bellapais, is real, as are the Tree of Idleness café in the Bellapais square, the British author Lawrence Durrell and his celebrated >i>The Alexandria Quartet and Bitter Lemons. Both books were, in fact, penned while Durrell lived in the Bellapais villa between 1953 and 1957. One of this novel's authors, habu, also lived in the villa and penned novels there in the mid 1990s. The character of Layla is also based on a real person.

Beyond this foundation, the events and characters are fictional, as is the novel, The Tree of Idleness, which is attributed to Mark Amalfi. The inspiration for this novel comes from a writing exercise entered into by the two authors, who are amalgamated here into the author Shabbu: habu, who lives on the East Coast of the United States, and sabb, who, until recent years, lived on the East Coast of the Australia and has since moved to Europe. The two have met in cyber space to spin stories together. The exercise set here was to use the same three-paragraph passage in stories by each of the authors and by the two combined and then to weave them into a coherent work using, to a limited extent, literary devices woven so skillfully by Lawrence Durrell in the The Alexandria Quartet. These include the weaving of subplots with minor characters throughout the series of separate stories that are able to stand on their own as stories, multiple intertwined and doomed love relationships, the major plotlines being twisted as stories unfold, and the resolution of selected threads in one story occurring in separate stories. We hope that we have both succeeded to some extent in this exercise and entertained the reader in the process.]