Free Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

said.
    “And why do they have all those files and things in the living room?” she asked.
    “ That he told me,” Guy said, taking off his shirt. “He puts out a newsletter for stamp collectors. All over the world. That’s why they get so much foreign mail.”
    “Yes, but why in the living room?” Rosemary said. “They have three or four other rooms, all with the doors closed. Why doesn’t he use one of those?”
    Guy went to her, shirt in hand, and pressed her nose with a firm fingertip. “You’re getting nosier than Minnie,” he said, kissed air at her, and went out to the bathroom.
     
     
    Ten or fifteen minutes later, while in the kitchen putting on water for coffee, Rosemary got the sharp pain in her middle that was the night-before signal of her period. She relaxed with one hand against the corner of the stove, letting the pain have its brief way, and then she got out a Chemex paper and the can of coffee, feeling disappointed and forlorn.
    She was twenty-four and they wanted three children two years apart; but Guy “wasn’t ready yet”—nor would he ever be ready, she feared, until he was as big as Marlon Brando and Richard Burton put together. Didn’t he know how handsome and talented he was, how sure to succeed? So her plan was to get pregnant by “accident” the pills gave her headaches, she said, and rubber gadgets were repulsive. Guy said that subconsciously she was still a good Catholic, and she protested enough to support the explanation. Indulgently he studied the calendar and avoided the “dangerous days,” and she said, “No, it’s safe today, darling; I’m sure it is.”
    And again this month he had won and she had lost, in this undignified contest in which he didn’t even know they were engaged. “Damn!” she said, and banged the coffee can down on the stove. Guy, in the den, called, “What happened?”
    “I bumped my elbow!” she called back.
    At least she knew now why she had become depressed during the evening.
    Double damn! If they were living together and not married she would have been pregnant fifty times by now!

CHAPTER 7
     
    T HE FOLLOWING EVENING after dinner Guy went over to the Castevets’. Rosemary straightened up the kitchen and was debating whether to work on the window-seat cushions or get into bed with Manchild in The Promised Land when the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Castevet, and with her another woman, short, plump, and smiling, with a Buckley-for-Mayor button on the shoulder of a green dress.
    “Hi, dear, we’re not bothering you, are we?” Mrs. Castevet said when Rosemary had opened the door. “This is my dear friend Laura-Louise McBurney, who lives up on twelve. Laura-Louise, this is Guy’s wife Rosemary.”
    “Hello, Rosemary! Welcome to the Bram!”
    “Laura-Louise just met Guy over to our place and she wanted to meet you too, so we came on over. Guy said you were staying in not doing anything. Can we come in?”
    With resigned good grace Rosemary showed them into the living room.
    “Oh, you’ve got new chairs,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Aren’t they beautiful!”
    “They came this morning,” Rosemary said.
    “Are you all right, dear? You look worn.”
    “I’m fine,” Rosemary said and smiled. “It’s the first day of my period.”
    “And you’re up and around?” Laura-Louise asked, sitting. “On my first days I experienced such pain that I couldn’t move or eat or anything . Dan had to give me gin through a straw to kill the pain and we were one-hundred-per-cent Temperance at the time, with that one exception.”
    “Girls today take things more in their stride than we did,” Mrs. Castevet said, sitting too. “They’re healthier than we were, thanks to vitamins and better medical care.”
    Both women had brought identical green sewing bags and, to Rosemary’s surprise, were opening them now and taking out crocheting (Laura-Louise) and darning (Mrs. Castevet); settling down for a long evening of needlework and conversation.