Authors: Ira Levin
S
HE HAD BEEN EATING
her meat rare; now she ate it nearly raw—broiled only long enough to take away the refrigerator’s chill and seal in the juices.
The weeks before the holidays and the holiday season itself were dismal. The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemary—some center of resistance and remembered well-being—and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now
she
was inside
it;
pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world. Numbed and exhausted, she began to sleep more, and to eat more too—more nearly raw meat.
She did what had to be done: cooked and cleaned, sent Christmas cards to the family—she hadn’t the heart for phone calls—and put new money into envelopes for the elevator men, doormen, porters, and Mr. Micklas. She looked at newspapers and tried to be interested in students burning draft cards and the threat of a city-wide transit strike, but she couldn’t: this was news from a world of fantasy; nothing was real but her world of pain. Guy bought Christmas presents for Minnie and Roman; for each other they agreed to buy nothing at all. Minnie and Roman gave them coasters.
They went to nearby movies a few times, but most evenings they stayed in or went around the hall to Minnie and Roman’s, where they met couples named Fountain and Gilmore and Wees, a woman named Mrs. Sabatini who always brought her cat, and Dr. Shand, the retired dentist who had made the chain for Rosemary’s tannis-charm. These were all elderly people who treated Rosemary with kindness and concern, seeing, apparently, that she was less than well. Laura-Louise was there too, and sometimes Dr. Sapirstein joined the group. Roman was an energetic host, filling glasses and launching new topics of conversation. On New Year’s Eve he proposed a toast—“To 1966, The Year One”—that puzzled Rosemary, although everyone else seemed to understand and approve of it. She felt as if she had missed a literary or political reference—not that she really cared. She and Guy usually left early, and Guy would see her into bed and go back. He was the favorite of the women, who gathered around him and laughed at his jokes.
Hutch stayed as he was, in his deep and baffling coma. Grace Cardiff called every week or so. “No change, no change at all,” she would say. “They still don’t know. He could wake up tomorrow morning or he could sink deeper and never wake up at all.”
Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent’s Hospital to stand beside Hutch’s bed and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible breathing. The second time, early in January, his daughter Doris was there, sitting by the window working a piece of needlepoint. Rosemary had met her a year earlier at Hutch’s apartment; she was a short pleasant woman in her thirties, married to a Swedishborn psychoanalyst. She looked, unfortunately, like a younger wigged Hutch.
Doris didn’t recognize Rosemary, and when Rosemary had re-introduced herself she made a distressed apology.
“Please don’t,” Rosemary said, smiling. “I know. I look awful.”
“No, you haven’t changed at all,” Doris said. “I’m terrible with faces. I forget my
children
, really I do.”
She put aside her needlepoint and Rosemary drew up another chair and sat with her. They talked about Hutch’s condition and watched a nurse come in and replace the hanging bottle that fed into his taped arm.
“We have an obstetrician in common,” Rosemary said when the nurse had gone; and then they talked about Rosemary’s pregnancy and Dr. Sapirstein’s skill and eminence. Doris was surprised to hear that he was seeing Rosemary every week. “He only saw me once a month,” she said. “Till near the end, of course. Then it was every two weeks, and
then
every week, but only in the last month. I thought that was fairly standard.”
Rosemary could find nothing to say, and Doris suddenly looked distressed again. “But I suppose every pregnancy is a law unto itself,” she said, with a smile meant to rectify tactlessness.
“That’s what
he
told me,” Rosemary said.
That evening she told Guy that Dr. Sapirstein had only seen Doris once a month. “Something is wrong with me,” she said. “And he knew it right from the beginning.”
“Don’t be silly,” Guy said. “He would tell you. And even if he wouldn’t, he would certainly tell
me
.”
“Has he? Has he said
anything
to you?”
“Absolutely not, Ro. I swear to God.”
“Then why do I have to go every week?”
“Maybe that’s the way he does it now. Or maybe he’s giving you better treatment, because you’re Minnie and Roman’s friend.”
“No.”
“Well
I
don’t know; ask
him
,” Guy said. “Maybe you’re more fun to examine than she was.”
She asked Dr. Sapirstein two days later. “Rosemary, Rosemary,” he said to her; “what did I tell you about talking to your friends? Didn’t I say that every pregnancy is different?”
“Yes, but—”
“And the treatment has to be different too. Doris Allert had had two deliveries before she ever came to me, and there had been no complications whatever. She didn’t require the close attention a first-timer does.”
“Do you always see first-timers every week?”
“I try to,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, Rosemary. The pain will stop very soon.”
“I’ve been eating raw meat,” she said. “Just warmed a little.”
“Anything else out of the ordinary?”
“No,” she said, taken aback; wasn’t that enough?
“Whatever you want, eat it,” he said. “I told you you’d get some strange cravings. I’ve had women eat paper. And stop worrying. I don’t keep things from my patients; it makes life too confusing. I’m telling you the truth. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Say hello to Minnie and Roman for me,” he said. “And Guy too.”
She began the second volume of
The Decline and Fall
, and began knitting a red-and-orange striped muffler for Guy to wear to rehearsals. The threatened transit strike had come about but it affected them little since they were both at home most of the time. Late in the afternoon they watched from their bay windows the slow-moving crowds far below. “Walk, you peasants!” Guy said. “Walk! Home, home, and be quick about it!”
Not long after telling Dr. Sapirstein about the nearly raw meat, Rosemary found herself chewing on a raw and dripping chicken heart—in the kitchen one morning at four-fifteen. She looked at herself in the side of the toaster, where her moving reflection had caught her eye, and then looked at her hand, at the part of the heart she hadn’t yet eaten held in red-dripping fingers. After a moment she went over and put the heart in the garbage, and turned on the water and rinsed her hand. Then, with the water still running, she bent over the sink and began to vomit.
When she was finished she drank some water, washed her face and hands, and cleaned the inside of the sink with the spray attachment. She turned off the water and dried herself and stood for a while, thinking; and then she got a memo pad and a pencil from one of the drawers and went to the table and sat down and began to write.
Guy came in just before seven in his pajamas. She had the Life Cookbook open on the table and was copying a recipe out of it. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
She looked at him. “Planning the menu,” she said. “For a party. We’re giving a party on January twenty-second. A week from next Saturday.” She looked among several slips of paper on the table and picked one up. “We’re inviting Elise Dunstan and her husband,” she said, “Joan and a date, Jimmy and Tiger, Allan and a date, Lou and Claudia, the Chens, the Wendells, Dee Bertillon and a date unless you don’t want him, Mike and Pedro, Bob and Thea Goodman, the Kapps”—she pointed in the Kapps’ direction—“and Doris and Axel Allert, if they’ll come. That’s Hutch’s daughter.”
“I know,” Guy said.
She put down the paper. “Minnie and Roman are not invited,” she said. “Neither is Laura-Louise. Neither are the Fountains and the Gilmores and the Weeses. Neither is Dr. Sapirstein. This is a very special party. You have to be under sixty to get in.”
“Whew,” Guy said. “For a minute there I didn’t think I was going to make it.”
“Oh, you make it,” Rosemary said. “You’re the bartender.”
“Swell,” Guy said. “Do you really think this is such a great idea?”
“I think it’s the best idea I’ve had in months.”
“Don’t you think you ought to check with Sapirstein first?”
“Why? I’m just going to give a party; I’m not going to swim the English Channel or climb Annapurna.”
Guy went to the sink and turned on the water. He held a glass under it. “I’ll be in rehearsal then, you know,” he said. “We start on the seventeenth.”
“You won’t have to do a thing,” Rosemary said. “Just come home and be charming.”
“And tend bar.” He turned off the water and raised his glass and drank.
“We’ll
hire
a bartender,” Rosemary said. “The one Joan and Dick used to have. And when you’re ready to go to sleep I’ll chase everyone out.”
Guy turned around and looked at her.
“I want to see them,” she said. “Not Minnie and Roman. I’m tired of Minnie and Roman.”
He looked away from her, and then at the floor, and then at her eyes again. “What about the pain?” he asked.
She smiled drily. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. “It’s going to be gone in a day or two. Dr. Sapirstein told me so.”
Everyone could come except the Allerts, because of Hutch’s condition, and the Chens, who were going to be in London taking pictures of Charlie Chaplin. The bartender wasn’t available but knew another one who was. Rosemary took a loose brown velvet hostess gown to the cleaner, made an appointment to have her hair done, and ordered wine and liquor and ice cubes and the ingredients of a Chilean seafood casserole called
chupe
.
On the Thursday morning before the party, Minnie came with the drink while Rosemary was picking apart crabmeat and lobster tails. “That looks interesting,” Minnie said, glancing into the kitchen. “What is it?”
Rosemary told her, standing at the front door with the striped glass cold in her hand. “I’m going to freeze it and then bake it Saturday evening,” she said. “We’re having some people over.”
“Oh, you feel up to entertaining?” Minnie asked.
“Yes, I do,” Rosemary said. “These are old friends whom we haven’t seen in a long time. They don’t even know yet that I’m pregnant.”
“I’d be glad to give you a hand if you’d like,” Minnie said. “I could help you dish things out.”
“Thank you, that’s sweet of you,” Rosemary said, “but I really can manage by myself. It’s going to be buffet, and there’ll be very little to do.”
“I could help you take the coats.”
“No, really, Minnie, you do enough for me as it is. Really.”
Minnie said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind. Drink your drink now.”
Rosemary looked at the glass in her hand. “I’d rather not,” she said, and looked up at Minnie. “Not this minute. I’ll drink it in a little while and bring the glass back to you.”
Minnie said, “It doesn’t do to let it stand.”
“I won’t wait long,” Rosemary said. “Go on. You go back and I’ll bring the glass to you later on.”
“I’ll wait and save you the walk.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Rosemary said. “I get very nervous if anyone watches me while I’m cooking. I’m going out later, so I’ll be passing right by your door.”
“Going out?”
“Shopping. Scoot now, go on. You’re too nice to me, really you are.”
Minnie backed away. “Don’t wait too long,” she said. “It’s going to lose its vitamins.”
Rosemary closed the door. She went into the kitchen and stood for a moment with the glass in her hand, and then went to the sink and tipped out the drink in a pale green spire drilling straight down into the drain.
She finished the
chupe
, humming and feeling pleased with herself. When it was covered and stowed away in the freezer compartment she made her own drink out of milk, cream, an egg, sugar, and sherry. Shaken in a covered jar, it poured out tawny and delicious-looking. “Hang on, David-or-Amanda,” she said, and tasted it and found it great.
F
OR A LITTLE WHILE
around half past nine it looked as if no one was going to come. Guy put another chunk of cannel coal on the fire, then racked the tongs and brushed his hands with his handkerchief; Rosemary came from the kitchen and stood motionless in her pain and her just-right hair and her brown velvet; and the bartender, by the bedroom door, found things to do with lemon peel and napkins and glasses and bottles. He was a prosperous-looking Italian named Renato who gave the impression that he tended bar only as a pastime and would leave if he got more bored than he already was.
Then the Wendells came—Ted and Carole—and a minute later Elise Dunstan and her husband Hugh, who limped. And then Allan Stone, Guy’s agent, with a beautiful Negro model named Rain Morgan, and Jimmy and Tiger, and Lou and Claudia Comfort and Claudia’s brother Scott.
Guy put the coats on the bed; Renato mixed drinks quickly, looking less bored. Rosemary pointed and gave names: “Jimmy, Tiger, Rain, Allan, Elise, Hugh, Carole, Ted—Claudia and Lou and Scott.”
Bob and Thea Goodman brought another couple, Peggy and Stan Keeler. “Of
course
it’s all right,” Rosemary said; “don’t be silly, the more the merrier!” The Kapps came without coats. “What a trip!” Mr. Kapp (“It’s Bernard”) said. “A bus, three trains, and a ferry! We left five hours ago!”
“Can I look around?” Claudia asked. “If the rest of it’s as nice as this I’m going to cut my throat.”
Mike and Pedro brought bouquets of bright red roses. Pedro, with his cheek against Rosemary’s, murmured, “Make him feed you, baby; you look like a bottle of iodine.”
Rosemary said, “Phyllis, Bernard, Peggy, Stan, Thea, Bob, Lou, Scott, Carole…”
She took the roses into the kitchen. Elise came in with a drink and a fake cigarette for breaking the habit. “You’re so lucky,” she said; “it’s the greatest apartment I’ve ever seen. Will you look at this kitchen? Are you all right, Rosie? You look a little tired.”
“Thanks for the understatement,” Rosemary said. “I’m not all right but I will be. I’m pregnant.”
“You aren’t! How
great!
When?”
“June twenty-eighth. I go into my fifth month on Friday.”
“That’s
great!
” Elise said. “How do you like C. C. Hill? Isn’t he the dreamboy of the western world?”
“Yes, but I’m not using him,” Rosemary said.
“No!”
“I’ve got a doctor named Sapirstein, an older man.”
“What
for?
He can’t be better than Hill!”
“He’s fairly well known and he’s a friend of some friends of ours,” Rosemary said.
Guy looked in.
Elise said, “Well congratulations, Dad.”
“Thanks,” Guy said. “Weren’t nothin’ to it. Do you want me to bring in the dip, Ro?”
“Oh, yes, would you? Look at these roses! Mike and Pedro brought them.”
Guy took a tray of crackers and a bowl of pale pink dip from the table. “Would you get the other one?” he asked Elise.
“Sure,” she said, and took a second bowl and followed after him.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Rosemary called.
Dee Bertillon brought Portia Haynes, an actress, and Joan called to say that she and her date had got stuck at another party and would be there in half an hour.
Tiger said, “You dirty stinking secret-keeper!” She grabbed Rosemary and kissed her.
“Who’s pregnant?” someone asked, and someone else said, “Rosemary is.”
She put one vase of roses on the mantel—“Congratulations,” Rain Morgan said, “I understand you’re pregnant”—and the other in the bedroom on the dressing table. When she came out Renato made a Scotch and water for her. “I make the first ones strong,” he said, “to get them happy. Then I go light and conserve.”
Mike wig-wagged over heads and mouthed
Congratulations
. She smiled and mouthed
Thanks
.
“The Trench sisters lived here,” someone said; and Bernard Kapp said, “Adrian Marcato too, and Keith Kennedy.”
“And Pearl Ames,” Phyllis Kapp said.
“The Trent sisters?” Jimmy asked.
“Trench,” Phyllis said. “They ate little children.”
“And she doesn’t mean just ate them,” Pedro said; “she means
ate them!
”
Rosemary shut her eyes and held her breath as the pain wound tighter. Maybe because of the drink; she put it aside.
“Are you all right?” Claudia asked her.
“Yes, fine,” she said, and smiled. “I had a cramp for a moment.”
Guy was talking with Tiger and Portia Haynes and Dee. “It’s too soon to say,” he said; “we’ve only been in rehearsal six days. It plays much better than it reads, though.”
“It couldn’t play much worse,” Tiger said. “Hey, what ever happened to the other guy? Is he still blind?”
“I don’t know,” Guy said.
Portia said, “Donald Baumgart? You know who
he
is, Tiger; he’s the boy Zöe Piper lives with.”
“Oh, is
he
the one?” Tiger said. “Gee, I didn’t know he was someone I knew.”
“He’s writing a great play,” Portia said. “At least the first two scenes are great. Really burning anger, like Osborne before he made it.”
Rosemary said, “Is he still blind?”
“Oh, yes,” Portia said. “They’ve pretty much given up hope. He’s going through hell trying to make the adjustment. But this great play is coming out of it. He dictates and Zöe writes.”
Joan came. Her date was over fifty. She took Rosemary’s arm and pulled her aside, looking frightened. “What’s the
matter
with you?” she asked. “What’s
wrong?
”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Rosemary said. “I’m pregnant, that’s all.”
She was in the kitchen with Tiger, tossing the salad, when Joan and Elise came in and closed the door behind them.
Elise said, “What did you say your doctor’s name was?”
“Sapirstein,” Rosemary said.
Joan said, “And he’s satisfied with your condition?”
Rosemary nodded.
“Claudia said you had a cramp a while ago.”
“I have a pain,” she said. “But it’s going to stop soon; it’s not abnormal.”
Tiger said, “What kind of a pain?”
“A—a
pain
. A sharp pain, that’s all. It’s because my pelvis is expanding and my joints are a little stiff.”
Elise said, “Rosie, I’ve had that—two times—and all it ever meant was a few days of like a Charley horse, an ache through the whole area.”
“Well, everyone is different,” Rosemary said, lifting salad between two wooden spoons and letting it drop back into the bowl again. “Every pregnancy is different.”
“Not
that
different,” Joan said. “You look like Miss Concentration Camp of 1966. Are you sure this doctor knows what he’s doing?”
Rosemary began to sob, quietly and defeatedly, holding the spoons in the salad. Tears ran from her cheeks.
“Oh, God,” Joan said, and looked for help to Tiger, who touched Rosemary’s shoulder and said, “Shh, ah, shh, don’t cry, Rosemary. Shh.”
“It’s good,” Elise said. “It’s the best thing. Let her. She’s been wound up all night like—like I-don’t-
know
-what.”
Rosemary wept, black streaks smearing down her cheeks. Elise put her into a chair; Tiger took the spoons from her hands and moved the salad bowl to the far side of the table.
The door started to open and Joan ran to it and stopped and blocked it. It was Guy. “Hey, let me in,” he said.
“Sorry,” Joan said. “Girls only.”
“Let me speak to Rosemary.”
“Can’t; she’s busy.”
“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to wash glasses.”
“Use the bathroom.” She shouldered the door click-closed and leaned against it.
“Damn it, open the door,” he said outside.
Rosemary went on crying, her head bowed, her shoulders heaving, her hands limp in her lap. Elise, crouching, wiped at her cheeks every few moments with the end of a towel; Tiger smoothed her hair and tried to still her shoulders.
The tears slowed.
“It hurts so much,” she said. She raised her face to them. “And I’m so afraid the baby is going to die.”
“Is he doing anything for you?” Elise asked. “Giving you any medicine, any treatment?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
Tiger said, “When did it start?”
She sobbed.
Elise asked, “When did the pain start, Rosie?”
“Before Thanksgiving,” she said. “November.”
Elise said,
“In November?”
and Joan at the door said,
“What?”
Tiger said,
“You’ve been in pain since November and he isn’t doing anything for you?”
“He says it’ll stop.”
Joan said, “Has he brought in another doctor to look at you?”
Rosemary shook her head. “He’s a very good doctor,” she said with Elise wiping at her cheeks. “He’s well known. He was on
Open End
.”
Tiger said, “He sounds like a sadistic
nut
, Rosemary.”
Elise said, “Pain like that is a warning that something’s not right. I’m sorry to scare you, Rosie, but you go see Dr. Hill. See
somebody
besides that—”
“That nut,” Tiger said.
Elise said, “He
can’t
be right, letting you just go on suffering.”
“I won’t have an abortion,” Rosemary said.
Joan leaned forward from the door and whispered, “Nobody’s
telling
you to have an abortion! Just go see another doctor, that’s all.”
Rosemary took the towel from Elise and pressed it to each eye in turn. “He said this would happen,” she said, looking at mascara on the towel. “That my friends would think their pregnancies were normal and mine wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Tiger asked.
Rosemary looked at her. “He told me not to listen to what my friends might say,” she said.
Tiger said, “Well you
do
listen! What kind of sneaky advice is
that
for a doctor to give?”
Elise said, “All we’re telling you to do is check with another doctor. I don’t think any reputable doctor would object to that, if it would help his patient’s peace of mind.”
“You do it,” Joan said. “First thing Monday morning.”
“I will,” Rosemary said.
“You promise?” Elise asked.
Rosemary nodded. “I promise.” She smiled at Elise, and at Tiger and Joan. “I feel a lot better,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Well you look a lot worse,” Tiger said, opening her purse. “Fix your eyes. Fix everything.” She put large and small compacts on the table before Rosemary, and two long tubes and a short one.
“Look at my dress,” Rosemary said.
“A damp cloth,” Elise said, taking the towel and going to the sink with it.
“The garlic bread!” Rosemary cried.
“In or out?” Joan asked.
“In.” Rosemary pointed with a mascara brush at two foil-wrapped loaves on top of the refrigerator.
Tiger began tossing the salad and Elise wiped at the lap of Rosemary’s gown. “Next time you’re planning to cry,” she said, “don’t wear velvet.”
Guy came in and looked at them.
Tiger said, “We’re trading beauty secrets. You want some?”
“Are you all right?” he asked Rosemary.
“Yes, fine,” she said with a smile.
“A little spilled salad dressing,” Elise said.
Joan said, “Could the kitchen staff get a round of drinks, do you think?”
The
chupe
was a success and so was the salad. (Tiger said under her breath to Rosemary, “It’s the tears that give it the extra zing.”)
Renato approved of the wine, opened it with a flourish, and served it solemnly.
Claudia’s brother Scott, in the den with a plate on his knee, said, “His name is Altizer and he’s down in—Atlanta, I think; and what he says is that the death of God is a specific historic event that happened right now, in our time. That God literally died.” The Kapps and Rain Morgan and Bob Goodman sat listening and eating.
Jimmy, at one of the living-room windows, said, “Hey, it’s beginning to snow!”
Stan Keeler told a string of wicked Polish-jokes and Rosemary laughed out loud at them. “Careful of the booze,” Guy murmured at her shoulder. She turned and showed him her glass, and said, still laughing, “It’s only ginger ale!”
Joan’s over-fifty date sat on the floor by her chair, talking up to her earnestly and fondling her feet and ankles. Elise talked to Pedro; he nodded, watching Mike and Allan across the room. Claudia began reading palms.
They were low on Scotch but everything else was holding up fine.
She served coffee, emptied ashtrays, and rinsed out glasses. Tiger and Carole Wendell helped her.
Later she sat in a bay with Hugh Dunstan, sipping coffee and watching fat wet snowflakes shear down, an endless army of them, with now and then an outrider striking one of the diamond panes and sliding and melting.
“Year after year I swear I’m going to leave the city,” Hugh Dunstan said; “get away from the crime and the noise and all the rest of it. And every year it snows or the New Yorker has a Bogart Festival and I’m still here.”
Rosemary smiled and watched the snow. “This is why I wanted this apartment,” she said; “to sit here and watch the snow, with the fire going.”
Hugh looked at her and said, “I’ll bet you still read Dickens.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Nobody stops reading Dickens.”
Guy came looking for her. “Bob and Thea are leaving,” he said.
By two o’clock everyone had gone and they were alone in the living room, with dirty glasses and used napkins and spilling-over ashtrays all around. (“Don’t forget,” Elise had whispered, leaving. Not very likely.)
“The thing to do now,” Guy said, “is move.”
“Guy.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to Dr. Hill. Monday morning.”
He said nothing, looking at her.