evening so they could go down together to pick up their dry laundry.
Guy was home, eating a bag of Fritos and watching a Grace Kelly movie. “Them sure must be clean clothes,” he said.
Rosemary told him about Terry and the Castevets, and that Terry had remembered him from Another World . He made light of it, but it pleased him. He was depressed by the likelihood that an actor named Donald Baumgart was going to beat him out for a part in a new comedy for which both had read a second time that afternoon. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what kind of a name is Donald Baumgart? ” His own name, before he changed it, had been Sherman Peden.
Rosemary and Terry picked up their laundry at eight o’clock, and Terry came in with Rosemary to meet Guy and see the apartment. She blushed and was flustered by Guy, which spurred him to flowery compliments and the bringing of ashtrays and the striking of matches. Terry had never seen the apartment before; Mrs. Gardenia and the Castevets had had a falling-out shortly after her arrival, and soon afterwards Mrs. Gardenia had gone into the coma from which she had never emerged. “It’s a lovely apartment,” Terry said.
“It will be,” Rosemary said. “We’re not even halfway furnished yet.”
“I’ve got it!” Guy cried with a handclap. He pointed triumphantly at Terry. “Anna Maria Alberghetti!”
CHAPTER 4
A PACKAGE CAME from Bonniers, from Hutch; a tall teakwood ice bucket with a bright orange lining. Rosemary called him at once and thanked him. He had seen the apartment after the painters left but not since she and Guy had moved in; she explained about the chairs that were a week late and the sofa that wasn’t due for another month. “For God’s sake don’t even think yet about entertaining,” Hutch said. “Tell me how everything is.”
Rosemary told him, in happy detail. “And the neighbors certainly don’t seem abnormal,” she said. “Except normal abnormal like homosexuals; there are two of them, and across the hall from us there’s a nice old couple named Gould with a place in Pennsylvania where they breed Persian cats. We can have one any time we want.”
“They shed,” Hutch said.
“And there’s another couple that we haven’t actually met yet who took in this girl who was hooked on drugs, whom we have met, and they completely cured her and are putting her through secretarial school.”
“It sounds as if you’ve moved into Sunnybrook Farm,” Hutch said; “I’m delighted.”
“The basement is kind of creepy,” Rosemary said. “I curse you every time I go down there.”
“Why on earth me?”
“Your stories .”
“If you mean the ones I write, I curse me too; if you mean the ones I told you, you might with equal justification curse the fire alarm for the fire and the weather bureau for the typhoon.”
Rosemary, cowed, said, “It won’t be so bad from now on. That girl I mentioned is going down there with me.”
Hutch said, “It’s obvious you’ve exerted the healthy influence I predicted and the house is no longer a chamber of horrors. Have fun with the ice bucket and say hello to Guy.”
The Kapps in apartment 7D appeared; a stout couple in their middle thirties with an inquisitive two-year-old daughter named Lisa. “What’s your name?” Lisa asked, sitting in her stroller. “Did you eat your egg? Did you eat your Captain Crunch?”
“My name is Rosemary,” Rosemary said. “I ate my egg but I’ve never even heard of Captain Crunch. Who is he?”
On Friday night, September 17th, Rosemary and Guy went with two other couples to a preview of a play called Mrs. Dally and then to a party given by a photographer, Dee Bertillon, in his studio on West Forty-eighth Street. An argument developed between Guy and Bertillon over Actors Equity’s policy of blocking the employment of foreign actors—Guy thought it was right, Bertillon thought it was wrong—and though the others present buried the