Free Buddies by Ethan Mordden

Besides, as a storyteller I am bound for life to play a kind of devil’s advocate about everything. I may not carry a notebook around, but I don’t miss a move.
    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