LAGUNA BEACH — Banking away from the freeways toward the seashore, Laguna Canyon Road fairly sings of the beauty, escape and fun ahead. It skims past a shallow lagoon, then sweeps by towering eucalyptus trees and cattle grazing on hillsides.

The road spills out onto Coast Highway and Main Beach, where on a warm fall day the carefree and the bronzed play volleyball and bask in the sunshine.

In town, beyond the cookie and T-shirt shops, designer boutiques of gold and silk, Marieta Ermatinger, 63, stands in her laundry, The Cleaners, and talks of a side of Laguna that belies this idyllic picture.

It's a world she has come to know through some of her customers. She liked them and knew their names. Much cleaner than your average single male, they turned their socks right side out and paired them. Not even women do that, she said.

Then, all of a sudden, one day, they just didn't show up.

Some had mentioned that they were dying of AIDS and probably wouldn't be bringing in their laundry much longer. On others she recognized the cancerous purple splotches or gauntness that signaled the infections within.

A few were only kids in their 20s. One was a street person who brought in his sleeping bag for cleaning. The last one, a successful real estate agent, went--snap!--just like that, only the week before.

Some people ask her, how can you do their laundry? "I say they need laundry done like anybody else. I'm not sleeping with them for chrissakes."

The laundress dropped her chin into her palms, elbows on the counter. She stared unseeing out the front windows, past the whiz of cars, to the shimmering sea beyond. The scent of bleach lingered in the breeze. "Gosh," she said, shaking her head, "we've lost a lot of guys in this town."

Ten years into the epidemic, the ugly face of AIDS has surfaced in this picturesque community like no other.

Last year, the city's annual rate of new cases was 1.42 per 1,000 people, surpassing the 1.29 rate in San Francisco, the highest among major U.S. cities, according to the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The statistics come as no surprise to those who know that the town is a gay tourist mecca, where an estimated 25% of the 26,000 residents are gay. Since 1985, there have been 184 AIDS cases reported in Laguna Beach; 119 have died.

Yet, unlike San Francisco, AIDS in Laguna Beach remains curiously invisible to outsiders.