Bill, a young gay man living in California, returns to Boston in the summer of 1987 to visit his old college roommate and briefly lover, David. He, David, and their buddy Lou drive to Provincetown for a week's gay vacation, where the old ties of friendship among them deepen. But their good time is threatened by increasingly volatile personalities and a growin AIDS epidemic encircling them in an ever tighter grasp.<br><br>Their emotions explode one evening with the unexpected arrival of George, whose added presence brings to a head the simmering anxieties, fears, and resentments these friends have long harbored but have not openly shared. Will their friendships fall apart? Or will they discover a deeper love that binds them together?

Maid Service

“Good way to avoid Sida,” Bill said, proud of himself for remembering his Boston friends’ French slang word for AIDS. In recent years David’s renunciation of sex appeared not only prescient, but somewhat less strictly “asexual” and more something of a model for David’s personal relations of all sorts. Pushing his plate of half-eaten, limp French fries to Lou, Bill guessed that this was what was being referred to.


“But it’s not like he’s a misanthrope, Lou. You and he seem closer than ever.”


Lou closed his eyes and sighed. His huge, floppy eyelids, Bill noticed, were more wrinkled than in the past. For a moment or two, the only thing Bill heard was Tom Jones singing “What’s New Pussycat?” over the diner’s muzak.


“I don’t count. Philip doesn’t count. And of course, youdon’t count. We’re not human. We’re beneath his contempt.”


Bill let a waitress, this one much younger and smiling, take away his plate piled with gnawed chicken bones. Bill thought for a moment about what Lou said.


Chapter 10