People in Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

them?"
     
    "Yes I did," the newcomer snapped, tired and annoyed.
     
    "Here you go."
     
    He dumped a pile of black ribbons onto the table, then picked out one to wrap around his upper arm, finally extending it for a companion to fasten.
     
    "I tried to tie it on myself," he said.   "But I couldn't get the ribbon to lie flat.   Will you pin it?"
     
    Peter drank down his tea and thumbed through a discarded copy of New York magazine.   The Home family was featured on the cover seated around a bountiful dinner table.   The men all had oversize heads with receding blond hairlines and Quasimodo postures.   There were huge portions on their plates.
     
    Some art director's idea of political commentary, thought Peter.   The women were uniformly thin-lipped over plates of diverse lettuce.   They smiled, watching their husbands eat.
     
    "We have a close family," Home told the reporter.   "My children never have to make appointments to see me."
     
    On the next page Home was in the backseat of his limo talking on the phone and printing out on his mobile fax machine.
     
    "Private sector," he said.   "That's the future.   The whole city should be run by businessmen.   I could do a much better job with the prison system than any government official.   I'd love to buy the prison system and show New York how to treat its criminals.
     
    And my attorneys have assured me that having a monopoly on crime does not violate any antitrust laws.   It just has to do with your definition of trust."
     
    Peter closed the magazine, replacing it neatly underneath the umbrella stand.   He looked through the coffee shop window at some goings-on at the church across the way.   It was a large crowd that morning, a somber one.   Many of the I men were wearing suits but some were more relaxed, in tasteful white slacks or light prints.   Even the pallbearers lifting the casket out of the hearse had something very casual about them.
     
    I would never wear white to a funeral, Peter thought.   Some of the men had ponytails, others were more normal.   The women were somehow not as attractive as the men.   Not that, exactly, they just weren't as well dressed.
     
    Something is not right here, he thought.   Only then did Peter realize that the men were arriving alone or with each other, in couples and groups.   The women came in couples or with men they couldn't possibly be involved with.
     
    This is gay, he thought.   This is a homosexual church.
     
    Then he realized that it was not a homosexual church, but a Catholic one, filled with homosexuals.   He watched them walking up the white marble staircase, preparing to mourn.
     
    Ever since Kate had begun her gay affair Peter had been slapped in the face by homosexuality practically every day.   How ironic that her affair had coincided with this AIDS thing.   It was like running into someone he hadn't thought about for years and then seeing them coincidentally three times a week until the recognition became an embarrassment.   Peter had always been around gay men-being in the theater, how could he avoid it?
     
    Not that he wanted to avoid it, of course.   Anyway, most technicians tended to be straight except for the women.   But he had to admit that his and Kate's inner circle were all heterosexual couples.   It had just turned out that way.   Some of the men he knew had been bisexual at one time, but those experiments were all over now, he noted with some relief.   Now things were more clearly defined.
     
    Peter had once had a gay affair.   It was with a master electrician named Carl Jacobs.   Carl was twenty years older and had taken him on as an apprentice.   When Peter worked with someone closely he always fell in love.   It was part of being in theater.
     
    When the show was over they would rarely see each other again, but that distance wasn't resented.   It was normal.   Carl's hair was completely white and his face was.   wrinkled.   He had a purely white beard,