Nine & a Half Weeks Read Online Free

not married that is, owns even one cat, let alone more.” “Hm,” I say. “Cats are for kids and little old ladies, if you ask me,” he continues. “Or farms, or whatever.” “Well,” I say, “then why—” “They’re nothing but a nuisance,” he interrupts. “At least these don’t shed much,” I offer feebly; and finally I say, “Nobody’s forcing you to keep cats.”
    “That’s a laugh,” he says. “That’s a real laugh, if I do say so. You have absolutely no idea….”
    There are three cats in his apartment, all equally homely. They are as oblivious of him as he seems of them. While he provides them with food and fresh water and a daily change of litter, he seems to take doing this for granted in much the same way in which they expect the regular presence of these commodities. There is no observable exchange of affection between them, or only if one chooses so to interpret a cat’s slow progress across his prone body, and his wordless tolerance of such behavior; a questionable interpretation at best, considering the lack of expression these encounters evoke in either cat or man.
    He is sitting on the couch. I’m sitting on two bed pillows on the floor, one of his calves at either side of me, my back against the couch, neck and shoulders supported by its front edge; my head, bent back, rests between his thighs. He plays with my hair: taking up strand after strand and curling each around a finger; pushing four fingers under a section of hair, lifting it up, and pulling it gently away from the skin; rubbing a small area of scalp at a time, his hands moving slowly across my head, over and over.
    Cronkite bids us good-night and we watch the ensuing game show and then a program consisting entirely of policemen alternately involved in car chases and crashes. The repetitive images (at the end of the news he has turned off the sound) form a soothing and oddly appropriate accompaniment to the story of the cats, which he unfolds for me at leisure. The first one came into his life along with the woman who lived with him briefly four years ago. She had just moved her cat into his apartment when she was offered a lucrative position in Zurich and decided to live abroad. The cat stayed behind—with him. For a number of months he continued to think of himself as only a stopgap caretaker of the animal, which appeared, from the first, to feel at home: mangy, scruffy, with a nearly bald tail and as eager an assortment of ambiguous colors as the garments that have been popular for the last several winters: fashioned from a substance enigmatically referred to as “fun fur,” imitating the concept and construction, if not the appearance, of an early American quilt. He tried, at first energetically, to relocate the cat. But he was soon forced to acknowledge that the people he knew (some of whom would have taken in a kitten, while others might have been tempted by a Siamese) were hard put to disguise, for the duration of their awkward visits, how appalled they were at the thought of welcoming this particular animal into their attractive and carefully assembled Manhattan apartments. At one point he even placed an ad in the Times. Though he listed both his home and his office number, and though the ad ran five consecutive days, he received not one call in response. Off and on, as the months went by, he considered giving the cat to an animal shelter. But he decided to put off such a solution, at least for the time being. This sort of option, he thought, would always be open to him; in the meantime, something more suitable might turn up.
    A year later he housed his eleven-year-old niece, in New York for a spelling contest in which she did not place. In gratitude for the care with which he had shown the girl around town, her mother—his sister—presented him with a second cat, apparently in a manner that made refusal impossible. “It was just a kitten, not much better looking than the old one, and out of its gourd for the