Buddies (8 page)

All of which is by way of introduction to the story of Greg and Calvin, because they were most frequently mentioned at list sessions as the Ideal Couple. Television was hesitantly taking up the gay scene, but no one was satisfied with the men the networks chose to interview. “Greg and Cal should be on the air,” I was told. “
They
should speak for us, not those bitter political queens!” Another told me, “They’re so handsome. So correct.” Greg and Cal were a commercial for gays.

So it seemed. Greg was in his mid-twenties then, dark, quiet, slow-moving, and impressively solid. Calvin was a little older, fair, slight, mercurial. They mixed a notable chemistry, for while neither was astonishing on his own, together they were a compound of infinitely sympathetic currents, flowing between each other and outward to all around them. They were very social, very popular. They were always giving dinners, and because the guests were all, like Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, you were flattered to have been asked. But there was something else going on, something clammy in the compound. You had only to let slip a faux pas—as I tend to, as a matter of course if not policy—and Greg would turn upon you the blackest, most intense eyes ever flashed. And once, when I was one of the last guests to leave, Cal pleaded with me to stay as if he feared to be alone with Greg. Fascinated, I took another scotch. But then Greg came out of the kitchen, sat down next to me, asked a few irrelevant questions, and ever so politely threw me out as Calvin stood against the wall like Saint Sebastian waiting for the arrows.

Calvin and I dated back to an East Side gym, now vanished, where two bodybuilders had a titanic fight over him in the weight room while he scrambled into his clothes in a panic and begged someone, anyone, to hide him out for a few hours. I spoke up. This was what we call a “mixed” gym (i.e., about fifteen percent straight and one hundred thirty percent gay), and the two bodybuilders—I had thought—were of the straight percentile. If Calvin actually had charm enough to draw strangers into the parish, he had to be quizzed, had to lend Stonewall his data. I took him to my place for coffee and sat entranced; he
was
that charming. Or was he rather a deftly tactful flatterer, the kind who makes you feel that you have somehow notched yourself up a rating or two and are about to have a wonderful life? I felt so elated when Calvin left that I had to go right up to Dennis Savage’s apartment and stand to ten minutes of nonstop insults and grouching before I felt like me again.

Everyone called him Calvin then, in response to his whimsical dignity. Such a tidy bon vivant would bear no nicknames.
Calvin.
He was like one of James M. Barrie’s lost boys who had found himself in one of the less onerous Professions. He wore high style without study. He was learned but he was funny. Anytime you ran into him—and you often did—he was on his way somewhere and took you along, to cocktails, surprise parties, screenings. He must have known a thousand doting people. And while you never quite caught the names, everyone present was lively and unique. You would hear the names again, when the times were ready. “Calvin,” they would say, “tell us about it.” And “Calvin, what did you do,
then?
” He never spoke of sex. He was the eternal kid, though he was getting on. And he did drink too much—this was something we of early Stonewall avoided almost politically, as reminiscent of the old have-not queer, dejected by hustlers and decaying with isolation.

Calvin and I lost track of each other after a while, as happens. I’d hear his name every so often, but we’d never meet. Then one day I ran into him: and suddenly he was Cal, not Calvin, and when he saw you he wouldn’t blurt out some amusing confidence but tell you about people coming into inheritances. He knew a wholly different crowd, too; and Greg had entered the picture.

I disliked Greg at first sight, though I could understand why so many men liked to be around him. He was a hot preppy, and that’s hard to pull off. He was so damn poised, so
ready
for everything. After a while, you began to feel that, every time you met him, he was reading from a script. And there was a new feeling of a collection at his and Calvin’s dinners, as at that famous Bloomsbury jape at which all the guests had names ending in -bottom. Higginbottom. Pillbottom, Clambottom. The Calvin I had known never gave a thought to the luster of his cohorts. So I blamed Greg. He was the type who rated his associates on a scale.

*   *   *

Now I’ll let Calvin speak for himself. We were having drinks at the Mayfair, and I told Calvin that he and Greg were the Ideal Couple, and he asked, “Says who?”

“Everyone but me.”

He nodded. He was drunk. “We arranged it, you know. I’m sure you know. You know, don’t you?”

“Look, Calvin—”

“It’s Cal.”

“
Calvin.
Don’t give me secret dish. Or by the time I get off the phone tonight you’ll be ruined.”

“I hope so.”

“Enough.”

“No,
listen.
It’s a hoax.”

“What isn’t?”

“We figured out what the championship would be and we scored it. We did, didn’t we? We arranged it. Don’t you see that? We aren’t even friends. We’re
partners.
”

Why was he telling me this? I wondered. Isn’t this sort of thing supposed to be a secret? Of course, you have to get people to reveal all sorts of privileged information if you want to understand the world, tell stories, be a writer. Stonewall had thrown up something like a hundred different words for what you can do in bed, but we still had only one name for love—that one. If Calvin and Greg were our Ideal Couple, I decided, we needed more words.

I thought that notion worth talking over with Dennis Savage.
He
thought it second-rate dish, but, like everyone, rather liked the picture Calvin and Greg made together. “If you were really smart,” he told me, “you’d become a photo journalist and do a visual essay on those two. Catch them at the beach, in the park, on their terrace, in the workplace … Greg looks so amazing in those dark suits of his, and then he comes out in a sweater and jeans and you just think … what are you looking at?”

“What do you believe a photo essay would reveal about those two?” I said.

He was fumbling with a do-it-yourself framing kit he had bought to mount the
Follies
poster I had given him. “Why do they make these screws so tiny? Who has fingers small enough to—”

“Use a screwdriver.”

“There’s no screwdriver in the kit.”

“Don’t you just have one?” I asked. “Men are supposed to.”

“Of course I have one!” he cried.

“Let’s see it.”

Without a word he marched over to the couch and folded up like old cardboard. He disgruntles easily. So I went downstairs, came back with my tool chest, and took over the framing.

“Actually,” I said, “a photo essay on those two might disclose arresting aperçus about friendship.”

“Poor Cal.”

“Oh, suddenly it’s poor Cal, huh?”

“Well, he
is
in over his head. Anybody would be with Greg.” Dennis Savage and Greg went to college together. “He majored in intimidation.”

“You got this wired all wrong,” I said, readjusting the fastenings.

“He had this roommate he used to beat up all the time.”

“Oh—”

“I was next door, wasn’t I? I heard them.”

“It was wrestling practice.”

“Wrestling practice does not yield screams of ‘Please, Greg, no! I promise! I promise!’ Does it?”

“You surely did not hear—”

“I was there, you.”

I silently drove the headbars into their slots.

“I was there,” he repeated, coming over to watch the operation.

“‘I promise’?”

“He promised.”

Can I believe this? Dennis Savage is known to season his dish.

“The best thing,” he tells me, “is once the roommate ran away from campus. Literally ran away.”

“Why?”

“I suppose life in a small room with Megalon the Fire Monster made him nervous.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it’s hard to run away from Hamilton. There’s almost nothing to take.”

“So?”

“So Greg found him and brought him back.”

“And it was hushed up.”

“Hushed up? The spring mixer was entitled Runaway Roommates in their honor! Everyone knew about it.”

“Did Greg get in trouble, at least?”

“The Gregs of the world never get in trouble,” Dennis Savage opines. “The family’s too powerful. Everything about Greg is right. His background, his address, his business, his looks. Think about it.”

“And the lover? How right is he?”

“Come on, they make a marvelous couple.”

“Calvin told me they aren’t lovers. They aren’t even friends, he said.”

“What an odd thing to say. The two of them are inseparable.”

“He says they arranged it.”

“Well, if they did, they couldn’t have arranged it better. No one person that I know of could afford that apartment, or attract quite that array of party guests, or just get that kind of respect.”

“Manhattan’s Ideal Couple,” I said. “They won the contest. They arranged it.”

“
They
didn’t arrange anything,” Dennis Savage laughed. “Greg arranges.”

“And Calvin…”

“… makes the promise.” He shrugged. “Because we have to show the world what we’re worth in our spotless white sweaters at our faultless dinners. Just wait. Ten years from now, when Hollywood makes a progressive film with a gay couple in it, that’s what we’ll look like. Greg and Calvin.”

“Are you being ironic or do you believe that?” I asked.

“People respect a handsome picture above all,” he said, surveying my handiwork. “Nice job.”

“You know,” I said after some thought. “I find it hard to visualize you at Hamilton. Or at any college.”

He nodded. “And you’re a pig.”

*   *   *

Whenever friends would burst into a salute to monogamy, I would cite Greg and Calvin in a cautionary lecture on the terrorism of suitability in gay coupling. Of arranging and promising. True, plenty of men were showing up with the most unsuitable characters in tow—hot little tricks no better than hustlers, idiots whose very presence I took as a dire insult. Then I realized that I was falling into the Greg-and-Calvin camp, demanding that categories of education and bearing be satisfied before romance could commence, before admirable witnesses would form an admiring circle. Is this liberation? “I promise” haunted me. What, precisely, is one required to promise?

I had the chance to find out when Dennis Savage called me and said, “You’d better get up here pronto. It’s Cal and is he in a state!”

It’s Calvin, I muttered in the elevator. It was Calvin before he promised, when he was himself.

Dennis Savage was right enough about Calvin’s state. At first I thought he might be zonked on some new substance, so little aware was he. But after a while I got the impression that he was just scared. Carlo was there, half watching and half thinking of some pickup—Carlo, pure hunk, and our set’s contact with Stonewall as absolute sex.

“Did you see the picture I framed?” I asked Carlo, explaining how Dennis Savage didn’t have a screwdriver—or, for all we knew, a church key or a driver’s license.

“Do you want to stay here tonight, Cal?” Dennis Savage was asking. “Are you afraid to go home?”

Calvin’s mouth worked, but little came out. “I … I’m sorry about all this. I … if only … I wished…”

“Has a story been structured?” I asked, plopping down next to Carlo.

“Not yet,” said Dennis Savage, gently patting Calvin on the back.

“So what’s the new thing?” I said to Carlo, who could always be counted on to report on some arcane sexual practice introduced in San Francisco, or some outrageously exclusive party he could get us into.

“Sure,” Carlo said. He’s a dazzling man; it’s interesting to see how quiet new people get when they meet him. “Last night I fucked this beautiful kid, and then he got me to call his parents and say I was his teacher and I was keeping him after school.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s pretty damn new.”

“Come here and do something,” Dennis Savage told me. “Cheer him.”

“Talk, Calvin.”

“Could I have some more tea?” Calvin asked. He seemed ready to open up.

“Do you want to tell us what happened?” I asked. He sadly shook his head. “Was it … wrestling practice?”

“Wrestlers,” said Carlo, warming to the subject. “Can you imagine what they might do to you in bed? They have all those holds and body locks.”

“Why did you come here, Calvin?” I asked. “Are you afraid Greg will find you? Are you afraid he won’t?”

“Don’t listen to that waster,” Dennis Savage told Calvin.

“He doesn’t have a screwdriver,” I told Carlo. “He can’t put a frame together. Can you imagine?”

“He gives me yogurt,” said Carlo, looking on the good side. “Blueberry. And he puts that healthy crinkle stuff on it.”

“Wheat germ,” Dennis Savage put in.

“So what’s the deal, Calvin?” I said. “Do you want to break free? Huh? Are you afraid he won’t let you? Is it time to stop trying to live life in the Movement’s picture window?”

“Wheat germ is good for you?” said Carlo, enchanted by the oxymoron. “Wheat
germ?
”

“I’ll tell you how easy it is to break free,” I went on. “Make the relationship disreputable and Greg’ll drop you like that. Let’s try it. Let’s see.”

“You can’t destroy a relationship on the moment,” said Dennis Savage. “You don’t—”

“A good paddling,” Carlo put in, “could make an affair fresh. Especially when the guy who’s going to be paddled is a little afraid of it.”

“Greg goes for appearances, right?” I said.

Silence.

“Doesn’t he?”

Still silence.

“He makes the arrangements, doesn’t he?”

“It’s really the threat of being paddled,” Carlo went on, “not getting paddled in itself. Though some very sweet kids—”

“Sabotage the appearance,” I offered, “and you’re free. Ruin the arrangement. Break your promise.”

“How can he do that?” asked Dennis Savage.

“What are Greg’s values? Let’s chart.” I was a teacher once. “Greg’s values are virility, money, correct taste, career success, and no passions, in something like that order. Make yourself useless to that system and he’ll have to find another partner. Stroll through Tiffany’s in a merry widow. Hang out in video arcades. Leave a Harold Robbins novel on your beach blanket. Wear purple. Get fired. Drool.”