Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin Page B

making,” she said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The way you haven’t been looking at me.”
    “What are you talking about? I’ve been looking at you.”
    “No you haven’t.”
    “I have so . Honey, what is it? What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing. Never mind.”
    “No, don’t say that. What is it? What’s bothering you?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Ah look, honey, I know I’ve been kind of preoccupied, with the part and the crutches and all; is that it? Well gee whiz, Ro, it’s important , you know? But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, just because I’m not riveting you with a passionate gaze all the time. I’ve got to think about practical matters too.” It was awkward and charming and sincere, like his playing of the cowboy in Bus Stop .
    “All right,” Rosemary said. “I’m sorry I’m being pesty.”
    “You? You couldn’t be pesty if you tried.”
    He leaned across the table and kissed her.
     
     
    Hutch had a cabin near Brewster where he spent occasional weekends. Rosemary called him and asked if she might use it for three or four days, possibly a week. “Guy’s getting into his new part,” she explained, “and I really think it’ll be easier for him with me out of the way.”
    “It’s yours,” Hutch said, and Rosemary went down to his apartment on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street to pick up the key.
    She looked in first at a delicatessen where the clerks were friends from her own days in the neighborhood, and then she went up to Hutch’s apartment, which was small and dark and neat as a pin, with an inscribed photo of Winston Churchill and a sofa that had belonged to Madame Pompadour. Hutch was sitting barefoot between two bridge tables, each with its typewriter and piles of paper. His practice was to write two books at once, turning to the second when he struck a snag on the first, and back to the first when he struck a snag on the second.
    “I’m really looking forward to it,” Rosemary said, sitting on Madame Pompadour’s sofa. “I suddenly realized the other day that I’ve never been alone in my whole life—not for more than a few hours, that is. The idea of three or four days is heaven.”
    “A chance to sit quietly and find out who you are; where you’ve been and where you’re going.”
    “Exactly.”
    “All right, you can stop forcing that smile,” Hutch said. “Did he hit you with a lamp?”
    “He didn’t hit me with anything,” Rosemary said. “It’s a very difficult part, a crippled boy who pretends that he’s adjusted to his crippled-ness. He’s got to work with crutches and leg-braces, and naturally he’s preoccupied and—and, well, preoccupied.”
    “I see,” Hutch said. “We’ll change the subject. The News had a lovely rundown the other day of all the gore we missed during the strike. Why didn’t you tell me you’d had another suicide up there at Happy House?”
    “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Rosemary asked.
    “No, you didn’t,” Hutch said.
    “It was someone we knew. The girl I told you about; the one who’d been a drug addict and was rehabilitated by the Castevets, these people who live on our floor. I’m sure I told you that .”
    “The girl who was going to the basement with you.”
    “That’s right.”
    “They didn’t rehabilitate her very successfully, it would seem. Was she living with them?”
    “Yes,” Rosemary said. “We’ve gotten to know them fairly well since it happened. Guy goes over there once in a while to hear stories about the theater. Mr. Castevet’s father was a producer around the turn of the century.”
    “I shouldn’t have thought Guy would be interested,” Hutch said. “An elderly couple, I take it?”
    “He’s seventy-nine; she’s seventy or so.”
    “It’s an odd name,” Hutch said. “How is it spelled?”
    Rosemary spelled it for him.
    “I’ve never heard it before,” he said. “French, I suppose.”
    “The name may be but they aren’t,” Rosemary said. “He’s from right