Nine & a Half Weeks Read Online Free Page A

first couple of days and the other one no help at all, snarling and carrying on as if I’d brought in a boa constrictor. After a while, somehow or other, they ended up getting along.
    “Then one night I come home and I see some kids in the alley. They move off but, you know, making a big deal out of being casual. So I go back there like a fool and on the ground, what can I tell you, it was in pretty bad shape. I go upstairs like a sane man, and fix myself a drink and start reading the paper, thinking: in an hour it’ll be gone. And an hour later 1 tell myself, you need another cat like a hole in the head.
    “And 1 think, if anything, somebody should kill it, not pick it up, it’s too far gone. I cook myself some eggs, I eat a salad, I have some coffee; I tell myself I’ll go for a walk after the eleven o’clock news. Sure enough, it’s still there, only somebody’s pushed it over by the garbage cans. So I take a newspaper out of the trash and bring it up here and next morning 1 think, what am I, a nurse, and take it to the vet where I’d had the other two spayed, and by the time 1 picked it up, six days later, it was pretty chipper. Should’ve been, for $68.80. And every time I go out of town I have to have my cleaning lady come in all the way from Queens; and sometimes she can’t, and not one of my friends has the sense to live around here and I can’t very well ask somebody who won’t take money for it to come all the way down from Central Park West in the Eighties, or from Sixty-fifth and York, or from godforsaken Brooklyn Heights. Even Andy, Thirtieth and Park to here isn’t exactly a five-minute stroll. And the kid down the hall had to go away to Michigan State, Michigan State, Chris-sakes! That leaves him out. So now I keep rotating a couple of other neighbors and I hate asking favors of people I’d just as soon never lay eyes on….”
    “They don’t shed much,” I say for the second time this evening, and he says, “big deal.”
    I WENT TO work every day, an articulate businesswoman, liked by my friends, valued by my superiors. At 5 P.M. sharp I cleared my desk, exchanged pleasantries with colleagues going down in the elevator, and went home—to his apartment. 1 went to mine only to pick up clothes and later, once a week, the mail. In the mornings we took the same subway line back to work, sharing the Times: a well-shaven man in a pinstriped business suit, carrying an attache case—good teeth, charming smile; I with my own briefcase and my summer handbag and heels and lip gloss and freshly washed hair. An attractive, well-educated couple in New York City, average, middle-class, civilized.
    “Up, UP, time to get up,” he shouts from the doorway. He is holding a scuffed metal TV tray with a plate of scrambled eggs, three toasted English muffins, a pot of tea, one cup. A peeled, sectioned orange sits in a small wooden salad bowl. He grins broadly above the tray. “What on earth is this rush,” I say. “It’s nine-thirty, please…” I push both pillows behind me against the wall, sit up, smooth the blanket over my legs. “And it’s Saturday!” He sets down the tray and mops up the few drops of spilled tea with the roll of paper towels he has brought along, clutched under his left arm. “It’s Saturday,” I repeat. “I hope you don’t want to go anywhere, I don’t want to see a soul. I want to stay right here and sleep until noon and the rest of the day I want to do nothing more strenuous than calling my sister and reading next week’s TV Guide.”
    “Sounds exciting,” he says. “You can do that when we get back. I have to go to Bloomingdale’s.” “You better go back to playing on those indoor courts,” I say. “You’ve clearly been in the sun too long. No way will I go to Bloomingdale’s on a Saturday.” “It’ll take no more than half an hour, I swear. An hour and a half, all in all. Half an hour up, half there, half an hour back. The sooner you stop talking and eat,