Free Buddies by Ethan Mordden Page A

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