Free Buddies by Ethan Mordden Page B

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