John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“So I ruined you too, huh?”

“I was a very warm and loving girl at one time with high hopes. The girls knew that. I thought you’d make Levy Pants nationwide.” Mrs. Levy’s head bounced up and down, up and down. “Look. Now it’s just a little run-down concern with a few outlets. Your daughters are disillusioned. I’m disillusioned. That young man you fired is disillusioned.”

“You want me to kill myself?”

“You make your own decisions. You always have. I’ve just existed for your pleasure. I’m just another old sports car. Use me when you wish. I don’t care.”

“Oh, shut up. Nobody wants to use you for anything.”

“You see that? You’re always attacking. It’s insecurity, guilt complexes, hostility. If you were proud of yourself and of the way you treat other people, you’d be pleasant. Just take Miss Trixie as another example. Look at what you’ve done to her.”

“I’ve never done anything to that woman.”

“That’s just it. She’s alone, afraid.”

“She’s almost dead.”

“Since Susan and Sandra are gone, I feel a guilt complex myself. What am I doing? Where is my project? I am a woman of interests, ideals.” Mrs. Levy sighed. “I feel so useless. You’ve caged me in with hundreds of material objects that don’t satisfy the real me.” Her bouncing eyes looked coldly at her husband. “Bring me Miss Trixie and I won’t write that letter.”

“What? I don’t want that senile bag out here. Whatever happened to your bridge club? The last time you didn’t write a letter you got a new dress. Settle for that. I’ll buy you a ball gown.”

“It’s not enough that I’ve kept that woman active. She needs personal help.”

“You’ve already used her as a guinea pig for that correspondence course you took. Why not let her alone. Let Gonzalez retire her.”

“Do that and you’ll kill her. Then she’ll really feel unwanted. You’ll have a death on your hands.”

“Oh, boy.”

“When I think of my own mother. On the beach in San Juan every winter. A tan, a bikini. Dancing, swimming, laughing. Boyfriends.”

“She has heart failure every time a wave knocks her down. What she doesn’t lose in the casinos she spends on the house doctor at the Caribe Hilton.”

“You don’t like my mother because she’s on to you. She was right. I should have married a doctor, somebody with ideals.” Mrs. Levy bounced sadly. “It really doesn’t matter to me very much anymore. Suffering has only strengthened me.”

“How much would you suffer if somebody pulled the wires out of that goddam exercising board?”

“I told you already,” Mrs. Levy said angrily. “Leave the board out of this. Your hostility’s getting the upper hand. Take my advice, Gus. Go see that analyst in the Medical Arts building, the one that helped Lenny pull his jewelry shop out of the red. He cured Lenny of that complex he had about selling rosaries. Lenny swears by that doctor. Now he’s got some kind of exclusive agreement with a bunch of nuns who peddle the rosaries in about forty Catholic schools all over the city. The money’s rolling in. Lenny’s happy. The sisters are happy. The kids are happy.”

“That sounds great.”

“Lenny’s put in a beautiful line of statues and religious accessories.”

“I bet he’s happy.”

“He is. You should be the same. Go see that doctor before it’s too late, Gus. For the girls’ sake you should be helped. I don’t care.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

“You’re a very mixed-up person. Sandra, personally, is much happier since she was psychoanalyzed. Some doctor at the college helped her out.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Sandra may have a setback when she hears of what you did to that young activist. I know the girls will at last turn against you completely. They’re warm and compassionate, just like I was before I was brutalized.”

“Brutalized?”

“Please. Not another word of sarcasm.” An aquamarine-nailed gesture warned from the bouncing and undulating board. “Do I get Miss Trixie or do the girls get the letter?”

“You get Miss Trixie,” Mr. Levy said finally. “You’ll probably try to bounce her on that board and break her hip.”

“Leave the board out of this!”

Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, was housed in what had formerly been an automobile repair shop, the dark ground floor of an otherwise unoccupied commercial building on Poydras Street. The garage doors were usually open, giving the passerby an acrid nostrilful of boiling hot dogs and mustard and also of cement soaked over many years by automobile lubricants and motor oils that had dripped and drained from Harmons and Hupmobiles. The powerful stench of Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, sometimes led the overwhelmed and perplexed stroller to glance through the open door into the darkness of the garage. There his eye fell upon a fleet of large tin hot dogs mounted on bicycle tires. It was hardly an imposing vehicular collection. Several of the mobile hot dogs were badly dented. One crumpled frankfurter lay on its side, its one wheel horizontally above it, a traffic fatality.

Among the afternoon pedestrians who hurried past Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, one formidable figure waddled slowly along. It was Ignatius. Stopping before the narrow garage, he sniffed the fumes from Paradise with great sensory pleasure, the protruding hairs in his nostrils analyzing, cataloging, categorizing, and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog, mustard, and lubricant. Breathing deeply, he wondered whether he also detected the more delicate odor, the fragile scent of hot dog buns. He looked at the white-gloved hands of his Mickey Mouse wristwatch and noticed that he had eaten lunch only an hour before. Still the intriguing aromas were making him salivate actively.

He stepped into the garage and looked around. In a corner an old man was boiling hot dogs in a large institutional pot whose size dwarfed the gas range upon which it rested.

“Pardon me, sir,” Ignatius called. “Do you retail here?”

The man’s watering eyes turned toward the large visitor.

“What do you want?”

“I would like to buy one of your hot dogs. They smell rather tasty. I was wondering if I could buy just one.”

“Sure.”

“May I select my own?” Ignatius asked, peering down over the top of the pot. In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. “I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.”

“Here, take this fork,” the man said, handing Ignatius a bent and corroded semblance of a spear. “Try to keep your hands out of the water. It’s like acid. Look what it’s done to the fork.”

“My,” Ignatius said to the old man after having taken his first bite. “These are rather strong. What are the ingredients in these?”

“Rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn’t touch one of them myself.”

“They’re curiously appealing,” Ignatius said, clearing his throat. “I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.”

Ignatius chewed with a blissful savagery, studying the scar on the man’s nose and listening to his whistling.

“Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?” Ignatius asked finally.

“I thought I was whistling ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

“I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti’s work. He was the last of the musicians,” Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog. “With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile.”