Significant Others Read Online Free PDF

was to stop you from abandoning human contact altogether?
    He had taken the test in April, and it had come back positive. That is, he was carrying the virus or had already fought it off, one or the other. According to some doctors, this gave him (and a million others) a 10 to 25 percent chance of developing a full-blown case, but other doctors disagreed.
    What did doctors know?
    All he knew was that his health was fine. No night sweats or sluggishness. No unusual weight loss or mysterious purple blotches. He ate his vegetables and popped his vitamins and kept stress to a minimum. For a man who’d lost twelve friends and a lover in less than three years, he was doing all right.
    Just the same, a mild case of the flu or the slightest furriness of the tongue was now capable of filling him with abject terror. The other paramount emotion, grief, became more and more unpredictable as the numbers grew. His tears could elude him completely at the bedside of a dying friend, only to surface weeks later during a late-night Marilyn Monroe movie on TV.
    And people talked of nothing else. Who has it. Who thinks he has it. Who’s positive. Who couldn’t possibly be negative. Who will never take the test. Who’s almost ready to take the test.
    To get away from the tragedy—and the talk—some of his friends had moved to places like Phoenix and Charlottesville, but Michael couldn’t see the point of it. The worst of times in San Francisco was still better than the best of times anywhere else.
    There was beauty here and conspicuous bravery and civilized straight people who were doing their best to help. It was also his home, when all was said and done. He loved this place with a deep and unreasoning passion; the choice was no longer his.
    When he reached the nursery, a renegade Pinto was parked in his usual place out front. He spotted Polly among the arborvitae, clipping a can for a customer, and tapped the horn gently to get her attention. “Someone we know?” he hollered, pointing toward the offending car.
    His young employee set her clippers down and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “David’s new squeeze,” she yelled back. “I’ll get him to move it.”
    He could see another parking space at the end of the block, so he decided not to make an issue of it. “That’s O.K.,” he told her. “Don’t break up the lovebirds.” It was lunchtime, after all, and David and his new beau were undoubtedly in the greenhouse making goo-goo eyes over Big Macs.
    He parked and walked back to the nursery in the toasty sunshine. Polly was on the sidewalk now, hefting the arborvitae into the back of the customer’s station wagon. “Sorry about that. Didn’t know you’d be back so soon.”
    “No problem,” he said.
    Brushing the dirt off her hands, Polly followed him to the office. “How did it go? Did you bring me a lipstick print?”
    “Shit,” he murmured, remembering his promise.
    “You didn’t,” she said calmly. “That’s O.K.”
    “I didn’t meet her,” he explained. “She and Mary Ann had rotten chemistry, so I decided not to risk it.”
    Polly shrugged.
    “You’re disappointed,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” So far she had cajoled lipstick prints from Linda Evans, Kathleen Turner and Diana Ross.
    “Was she gorgeous?” Polly asked, leaning dreamily against the cash register.
    “Yeah,” he answered. “In a Fellini sort of way.” He thought it wise to downplay the thrill of it all.
    Polly sighed. “She’s welcome in my movie any ol’ day.”
    He amused himself by picturing the confrontation: the voluptuously rotund Wren Douglas putting the moves on pretty Polly Berendt, muscular yet petite in her faded green coveralls. “Well,” he said, “she shows every sign of being hopelessly het.”
    “So?” said Polly. “I’m no separatist.”
    He laughed. The new lesbian adventurism was a source of endless amusement to him. If gay men could no longer snort and paw the ground in fits of purple