Love & Mrs. Sargent by Patrick Dennis Read Free Book Online Page B

one of the accumulated empty bottles out of the car every half mile or so—to a cut-rate liquor store on the Skokie Highway for seven more quarts of Smirnoff’s hundred proof. Dicky realized that he could have effected a considerable saving by getting it in case lots, but he didn’t trust himself with that much vodka on hand. One bottle a day kept him going until the cocktail hour, when he openly downed two scotch mists, and nobody suspected anything.
    His vodka ration locked into the trunk, Dicky would drive north to Waukegan where he paid a weekly visit to two torpid whores who worked in a large trailer hitched to a small Chevrolet. The girls claimed to be sisters. One was named Shirley, the other Almeda, They depended mostly on the Great Lakes Naval Station for their clientele and then only in the evenings and on Sundays. Therefore they welcomed Dicky’s Wednesday afternoon calls. He was known to them as Royal Stewart. One called him Roy-boy, the other Honeybunch. They had no idea that he was Richard Sargent, junior, but they were bright enough tosense that he was a rich kid from Lake Forest and they charged accordingly. After some dispirited badinage concerning Dicky’s astonishing proportions, his formidable prowess as a lover—neither of which, as Dicky knew, happened to be in the least noteworthy—Dicky would take into a curtained alcove which ever sister happened to be operant that week and perform quickly and joylessly that rite, the very notion of which was said to drive other men to madness. He considered the experience, when he thought of it at all, to be something a man Simply Does, like shaving every morning or acquiring regular toilet habits. He was always home by sundown, stretched out on the blue sofa, his pen, his pad and his vodka at hand.
    The ladies of the household joked among themselves over what they called Dicky’s Afternoon Off. They were a little mysti fied, a little curious, but they chose not to pry. Dicky, after all, was the Man of the Family.
    But today was Monday. Dicky lay on the blue sofa, his shirt open, his belt loosened, his moccasins kicked off. On the table next to him were the squat glass of ice and vodka, his cigarettes, the ball-point pen and the yellow pad. At the top of the pad were written, in Dicky’s cramped hand, thirteen words:
     
    Chapter Three
PARIS
Paris lay before them like an oasis in the desert.
     
    These thirteen words—one for every half hour—represented his literary output for the day. All the lights were off, save for a dim one shining through the shutters of the bar. A honey blonde gazed at him from beneath impossible eyelashes, her breasts rose and fell, a tear coursed down one cheek. Finally shespoke in husky, breathless tones. “But don’t you see, darling,” she said, “you’ve got to marry me. I . . . I’m going to have a baby— our baby.”
    A man’s voice, loud and urgent, burst in. “We will return to Memory Movie Matinee after this brief message: Feel a cold coming on? Feel head-achey, irritable, all run down? Don’t wait until a pesky cold gets you down. Get Hay-Spray today. Yes, folks, Hay-Spray, that amazing new nasal spray containing . . .”
    Dicky reached out and pressed the remote control button. The room was quiet. Glassily, he stared at the television screen. A chesty young man appeared, stripped to the waist. His face indicated extreme agony. Silently, violently, he sneezed. Suddenly his skin seemed to melt away and Dicky was treated to a sort of X-ray image showing the unfortunate young gentleman’s sinuses, his inflamed throat, his lungs—all filled with a terrible, dripping, sludge-like mucous. Then a dainty hand wearing a prop wedding ring as wide as a watchband held out a plastic spray bottle of Hay-Spray.
    Dicky lifted his glass and looked into the vodka. It was a welcome change. He had heard the commercial so many times that he knew it by heart. He knew, for example, that Hay-Spray had been developed in the