Fit to Be Tied

Arloc Simpson is fabulously wealthy but desperately lonely, living a solitary life for many years. When one day he reads the obituary of a former lover, he knows at once he's in trouble. "Pneumonia is a code word when you read it in the paper!" For the first time, he wrestles with the idea of his own mortality, and has a blood test, the results of which he cannot bring himself to read. The envelope sits, unopened, taunting him. "It's my enemy. And my apartment isn't big enough for both of us!" So he leaves, and walks, and walks, and walks and meets HIM! Arloc meets someone he believes may be the great love of his life, Boyd, a young runaway with no family who is working as an angel at Radio City's Christmas Spectacular. Arloc invites him up for a drink, but when Boyd readies to leave, Arloc is terrified that his last chance for happiness will slip away, so he kidnaps him. At that moment, Arloc's mother, Nessa, descends upon him. A flamboyant, fast-talking, heavy-drinking promiscuous woman, Nessa has fled her loveless marriage and, with nowhere else to go, seeks refuge with her son. When she stumbles upon the angel, bound and gagged in the closet, she realizes her son is in trouble, and asks Boyd to stay by paying him, "I'll pay you one pearl each day you stay and pretend to love him." Thus the three of them live together and form what turns out to be a fragile, wonderful "m