“Well, Jesus, Hutch-“ Guy began.
“I am not saying,” Hutch said, “that you will walk into the Bramford and
be hit on the head with a piano or eaten by spinsters or turned to stone. I am simply saying that the record is there and ought to be considered along with the reasonable rent and the working fireplace: the house has a high incidence of unpleasant happenings. Why deliberately enter a danger zone? Go to the Dakota or the Osborne if you’re dead set on nineteenth-century splendor.”
“The Dakota is co-op,” Rosemary said, “and the Osborne’s going to be torn down.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a little bit, Hutch?” Guy said. “Have there been any other ‘unpleasant happenings’ in the past few years? Besides that baby in the basement?”
“An elevator man was killed last winter,” Hutch said. “In a not-at-the dinner-table kind of accident. I was at the library this afternoon with the Times Index and three hours of microfilm; would you care to hear more?”
Rosemary looked at Guy. He put down his fork and wiped his mouth. “It’s silly,” he said. “All right, a lot of unpleasant things have happened there. That doesn’t mean that more of them are going to happen. I don’t see why the Bramford is any more of a ‘danger zone’ than any other house in the city. You can flip a coin and get five heads in a row; that doesn’t mean that the next five flips are going to be heads too, and it doesn’t mean that the coin is any different from any other coin. It’s coincidence, that’s all.”
“If there were really something wrong,” Rosemary said, “wouldn’t it have been demolished? Like the house in London?”
“The house in London,” Hutch said, “was owned by the family of the last chap murdered there. The Bramford is owned by the church next door.”
“There you are,” Guy said, lighting a cigarette; “we’ve got divine protection.”
“It hasn’t been working,” Hutch said.
The waiter lifted away their plates.
Rosemary said, “I didn’t know it was owned by a church,” and Guy said, “The whole city is, honey.”
“Have you tried the Wyoming?” Hutch asked. “It’s in the same block, I think.”
“Hutch,” Rosemary said, “we’ve tried everywhere. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, except the new houses, with neat square rooms that are all exactly alike and television cameras in the elevators. “Is that so terrible?” Hutch asked, smiling
“Yes,” Rosemary said, and Guy said, “We were set to go into one, but we backed out to take this.”
Hutch looked at them for a moment, then sat back and struck the table with wide-apart palms. “Enough,” he said. “I shall mind my own business, as I ought to have done from the outset. Make fires in your working fireplace! I’ll give you a bolt for the door and keep my mouth shut from this day forward. I’m an idiot; forgive me.”
Rosemary, smiled. “The door already has a bolt,” she said. “And one of those chain things and a peephole.”
“Well, mind you use all three,” Hutch said. “And don’t go wandering through the halls introducing yourself to all and sundry. You’re not in Iowa.”
“Omaha.”
The waiter brought their main courses.
On the following Monday afternoon Rosemary and Guy signed a two-year lease on apartment 7E at the Bramford. They gave Mrs. Cortez a check for five hundred and eighty-three dollars-a month’s rent in advance and a month’s rent as security-and were told that if they wished they could take occupancy of the apartment earlier than September first, as it would be cleared by the end of the week and the painters could come in on Wednesday the eighteenth.
Later on Monday they received a telephone call from Martin Gardenia, the son of the apartment’s previous tenant. They agreed to meet him at the apartment on Tuesday evening at eight, and, doing so, found him to be a tall man past sixty with a cheerful open manner. He pointed out the things he wanted to sell and named his prices, all of which were attractively low. Rosemary and Guy conferred and examined, and bought two air conditioners, a rosewood vanity with a petit-point bench, the living room’s Persian rug, and the andirons, fire screen, and tools. Mrs. Gardenia’s rolltop desk, disappointingly, was not for sale. While Guy wrote a check and helped tag the items to be left behind, Rosemary measured the living room and the bedroom with a six-foot folding rule she had bought that morning.
The previous March, Guy had played a role on Another World, a daytime television series. The character was back now for three days, so for the rest of the week Guy was busy. Rosemary winnowed a folder of decorating schemes she had collected since high school, found two that seemed appropriate to the apartment, and with those to guide her went looking at furnishings with Joan Jellico, one of the girls from Atlanta she had roomed with on coming to New York. Joan had the card of a decorator, which gave them entrance to wholesale houses and showrooms of every sort. Rosemary looked and made shorthand notes and drew sketches to bring to Guy, and hurried home spilling over with fabric and wallpaper samples in time to catch him on Another World and then run out again and shop for dinner. She skipped her sculpture class and canceled, happily, a dental appointment.
On Friday evening the apartment was theirs; an emptiness of high ceilings and unfamiliar dark into which they came with a lamp and a shopping bag, striking echoes from the farthest rooms. They turned on their air conditioners and admired their rug and their fireplace and Rosemary’s vanity; admired too their bathtub, doorknobs, hinges, molding, floors, stove, refrigerator, bay windows, and view. They picnicked on the rug, on tuna sandwiches and beer, and
made floor plans of all four rooms, Guy measuring and Rosemary drawing. On the rug again, they unplugged the lamp and stripped and made love in the nightglow of shadeless windows. “Shh!” Guy hissed afterwards, wide-eyed with fear. “I hear-the Trench sisters chewing!” Rosemary hit him on the head, hard.
They bought a sofa and a king-size bed, a table for the kitchen and two bentwood chairs. They called Con Ed and the phone company and stores and workmen and the Padded Wagon.
The painters came on Wednesday the eighteenth; patched, spackled, primed, painted, and were gone on Friday the twentieth, leaving colors very much like Rosemary’s samples. A solitary paperhanger came in and grumbled and papered the bedroom.
They called stores and workmen and Guy’s mother in Montreal. They bought an armoire and a dining table and hi-fi components and new dishes and silverware. They were flush. In 1964 Guy had done a series of Anacin commercials that, shown time and time again, had earned him eighteen thousand dollars and was still producing a sizable income.
They hung window shades and papered shelves, watched carpet go down in the bedroom and white vinyl in the hallway. They got a plug-in phone with three jacks; paid bills and left a forwarding notice at the post office.
On Friday, August 27th, they moved. Joan and Dick Jellico sent a large potted plant and Guy’s agent a small one. Hutch sent a telegram: The Bramford will change from a bad house to a good house when one of its doors is marked R. and G. Woodhouse.
And then Rosemary was busy and happy. She bought and hung curtains, found a Victorian glass lamp for the living room, hung pots and pans on the kitchen wall. One day she realized that the four boards in the hall closet were shelves, fitting across to sit on wood cleats on the side walls. She covered them with gingham contact paper and, when Guy came home, showed him a neatly filled linen closet. She found a supermarket on Sixth Avenue and a Chinese laundry on Fifty-fifth Street for the sheets and Guy’s shirts.
Guy was busy too, away every day like other women’s husbands. With Labor Day past, his vocal coach was back in town; Guy worked with him each morning and auditioned for plays and commercials most afternoons. At breakfast he was touchy reading the theatrical page-everyone else was out of town with Skyscraper or Drat! The Cat! or The Impossible Years or Hot September; only he was in New York with residuals-from-Anacin-but Rosemary knew that very soon he’d get something good, and quietly she set his coffee before him and quietly took for herself the newspaper’s other section.