the press was that her husband had many good friends around the world and that she saw nothing wrong with that. Privately she told her outraged parents that Costa had had affairs before and that this would soon wear itself out like all the others. Her husband would leave on extended business trips, and she would see newspaper photographs of him with Noelle in Constantinople or Tokyo or Rome. Melina Demiris was a proud woman, but she was determined to endure the humiliation because she truly loved her husband. She accepted the fact, though she could never fathom the reason, that some men needed more than one woman and that even a man in love with his wife could sleep with another woman. She would have died before she let another man touch her. She never reproached Constantin, because she knew that it would serve no purpose except to alienate him. They had on balance a good marriage. She was aware that she was not a passionate woman, but she let her husband use her in bed whenever he wished, and she tried to give him what pleasure she could. If she had known of the ways that Noelle made love to her husband, she would have been shocked, and if she had known how much her husband enjoyed it, she would have been miserable.
Noelle’ s chief attraction for Demiris, for whom women no longer held any surprises, was that she was a constant surprise. To him who had a passion for puzzles, she was an enigma, defying solution. He had never met anyone like her. She accepted the beautiful things he gave her, but she was just as happy when he gave her nothing. He bought her a lavish villa at Portofino overlooking the exquisite blue, horseshoe bay, but he knew that it would have made no difference if it had been a tiny apartment in the old Plaka section of Athens.
Demiris had met many women in his life who had tried to use their sex to manipulate him in one way or another. Noelle never asked anything of him. Some women had come to him to bask in his reflected glory, but in Noelle’ s case she was the one who attracted the newspapermen and photographers. She was a star in her own right. For a while Demiris toyed with the idea that perhaps she was in love with him for himself, but he was too honest to maintain the delusion.
In the beginning it was a challenge to try to reach the deep core inside Noelle, to subjugate it and make it his. At first Demiris had tried to do it sexually, but for the first time in his life, he had met a woman who was more than a match for him. Her sensual appetites exceeded his. Anything he could do, she could do better and more often and with more skill, until finally he learned to relax in bed and enjoy her as he had never enjoyed another woman in his life. She was a phenomenon, constantly revealing new facets for him to enjoy. Noelle could cook as well as any of the chefs to whom he paid a king’ s ransom and knew as much about art as the curators he kept on yearly retainers to seek out paintings and sculpture for him. He enjoyed listening to them discussing art with Noelle and their amazement at the depth of her knowledge.
Demiris had recently purchased a Rembrandt, and Noelle happened to be at his summer island when the painting arrived. There was a young curator there who had found the painting for him.
“ It’ s one of the Master’ s greatest,” the curator had said as he unveiled it.