A Confederacy of Dunces (25 page)

Busily, Ignatius

Eight

"Let her alone," Mr. Levy said. "Look, she's trying to sleep."

"Let her alone?" Mrs. Levy propped up Miss Trixie on the yellow nylon couch. "Do you realize, Gus, that this is the tragedy of this poor woman's life. She's always been alone.

She needs someone. She needs love."

"Ugh."

Mrs. Levy was a woman of interests and ideals. Over the years she had given herself freely to bridge, African violets, Susan and Sandra, golf, Miami, Fannie Hurst and Hemingway, correspondence courses, hairdressers, the sun, gourmet foods, ballroom dancing, and, in recent years, Miss Trixie. She had always had to settle for Miss Trixie at a distance, an unsatisfactory arrangement for carrying out the program outlined in the psychology correspondence course, the final examination of which she had failed resoundingly. The correspondence school had even refused to give her an F. But now that Mrs. Levy had played her card correctly in the game dealing with the firing of the young idealist, she had Miss Trixie in the wrinkled flesh, visor, sneakers, and all. Mr.

Gonzalez had gladly given the assistant accountant an indefinite vacation.

"Miss Trixie," Mrs. Levy said sweetly. "Wake up."

Miss Trixie opened her eyes and wheezed, "Am I retired?"

"No, darling."

"What?" Miss Trixie snarled. "I thought I was retired!"

"Miss Trixie, you think that you're old and tired. This is very bad."

"Who?"

"You."

"Oh. I am. I am very tired."

"Don't you see?" Mrs. Levy asked. "It's all in your mind. You have this age psychosis. You're still a very attractive woman.

You must say to yourself, 'I am still attractive. I am a very attractive woman.' "

Miss Trixie exhaled a grunting snore into Mrs. Levy's lacquered hair.

"Will you please let her alone, Dr. Freud?" Mr. Levy said angrily, looking up from a Sports Illustrated. "I almost wish Susan and Sandra were home so you could play with them.

Whatever happened to your canasta circle?"

"Don't talk to me, you failure. How can I play canasta when there's a psycho in distress?"

"Psycho? The woman's senile. We had to stop at about thirty gas stations on the way over here. Finally I got tired of getting out of the car and showing her which was the Men's and which was the Women's so I let her pick them herself. I worked out a system. The law of averages. I laid money on her and she came out about fifty-fifty."

"Don't tell me any more," Mrs. Levy cautioned. "Not another word. It's too typical. Permitting this anal compulsive to flounder like that."

"Isn't Lawrence Welk on?" Miss Trixie asked suddenly.

"No, dear. Relax."

"It is Saturday."

"He'll be on. Don't worry. Now tell me, what do you dream about?"

"I can't remember at the moment."

"Try," Mrs. Levy said, making some sort of note on her date book with a rhinestoned automatic pencil. "You must try, Miss Trixie. Darling, your mind is warped. You're like a cripple."

"I may be old, but I'm not crippled," Miss Trixie said wildly.

"Look, you're exciting her, Florence Nightingale," Mr. Levy said. "With all you know about psychoanalysis, you're going to ruin whatever's left in that head of hers. AH she wants is to retire and sleep."

"You've already wrecked your life. Don't do the same to hers.

This case can't be retired. She must be made to feel wanted and needed and loved . . ."

"Turn on your goddam exercising board and let her take a nap!"

"I thought we agreed to let the board out of this."

"Let her alone. Let her alone. Go ride your exercycle."

"Quiet, please!" Miss Trixie croaked and rubbed her eyes.

"We must talk pleasantly in front of her," Mrs. Levy whispered. "Loud voices, arguing, will only make her more insecure."

"I'll buy that. Keep quiet. And get that senile bag out of my rumpus room."

"That's right. Think about yourself as usual. If your father could only see you today." Mrs. Levy's aqua lids rose in horror. "A motheaten playboy looking for kicks."

"Kicks?"

"Now you people shut up," Miss Trixie warned. "I must say it was a dark day when I was brought out here. It was much nicer in there with Gomez. Nice and quiet. If this is some sort of an April Fool, I don't think it's funny." She looked at Mr.

Levy through rheumy eyes. "You're the bird that fired my friend Gloria. Poor Gloria. The kindest person ever worked in that office."

"Oh, no!" Mrs. Levy sighed. Then she turned on her husband.

"So you only fired one person, is that right? What about this Gloria? One person treats Miss Trixie like a human being. One person is her friend. Do you know this? Do you care? Oh, no.

Levy Pants might as well be on Mars for all you care. You walk in from the track one day and kick Gloria out."

"Gloria?" Mr. Levy asked. "I didn't fire any Gloria!"

"Yes, you did!" Miss Trixie piped. "I saw it with my very own eyes. Poor Gloria was the soul of kindness. I remember Gloria gave me socks and luncheon meat."

"Socks and luncheon meat?" Mr. Levy whistled through his teeth. "Oh, boy."

"That's right," Mrs. Levy shouted. "Make fun of this neglected creature. Just don't tell me whatever else you did at Levy Pants. I couldn't bear it. I won't tell the girls about Gloria.

They wouldn't understand a heart like yours. They're too innocent."

"No, you'd better not try to tell them about Gloria," Mr. Levy said angrily. "Any more of this foolishness and you'll be down on the beach in San Juan with your mother, laughing, and swimming and dancing."

"Are you threatening me?"

"Now quiet!" Miss Trixie snarled more loudly. "I want to go back to Levy Pants right this very minute."

"You see that?" Mrs. Levy asked her husband. "You hear that desire to work. And you want to crush her by retiring her. Gus, please. Get help. You're going to end badly."

Miss Trixie was reaching for the bag of scraps that she had brought as luggage.

"Okay, Miss Trixie," Mr. Levy said as if he were summoning a pet cat. "Let's go get in the car."

"Thank goodness," Miss Trixie sighed.

"Take your hands off her!" Mrs. Levy screamed.

"I haven't even gotten up from my chair," her husband answered.

Mrs. Levy shoved Miss Trixie down on the couch again and said, "Now stay there. You need help."

"Not from you people," Miss Trixie wheezed. "Let me up."

"Let her up."

"Please." Mrs. Levy held up a warning hand, plump and ringed. "Don't worry about this neglected creature I've taken under my wing. Don't worry about me either. Forget your little daughters. Get in your sports car and ride. There's a regatta this afternoon. Look. You can see the sails from the picture window I had installed with your father's hard-earned money."

"I'll get even with you people," Miss Trixie was snarling on the couch. "Don't worry. You'll find out."

She tried to rise, but Mrs. Levy had pinned her to the yellow nylon.

His cold was getting worse and worse, and each cough caused a vague pain in his lungs that lingered on for moments after the cough had seared his throat and chest. Patrolman Mancuso wiped his mouth clean of saliva and tried to clear the phlegm from his throat. One afternoon he had had such a bad case of claustrophobia that he almost fainted in the booth. Now it seemed that he was ready to faint from the dizziness that the cold had induced. He leaned his head against the side of the booth for a moment and closed his eyes. Red and blue clouds floated across his eyelids. He had to capture some character and get out of that rest room before his ague got so bad that the sergeant had to carry him to and from the booth every day.

He had always hoped to win honor on the force, but what honor was there in dying of pneumonia in a bus station rest room? Even his relatives would laugh. What would his children say to their friends at school?

Patrolman Mancuso looked at the tiles on the floor. They were out of focus. He felt panic. Then he stared at them more closely and saw that the haze was only the moisture that formed a gray film over almost every surface in the rest room.

He looked again at The Consolation of Philosophy, which was opened on his lap, and turned a limp, damp page. The book was making him more depressed. The guy who wrote it was going to be tortured by the king. The preface had said so. Now all this time the guy was writing this thing, he was going to end up with something driven down into his head. Patrolman Mancuso felt sorry for the guy and felt obliged to read what he had written. So far he had covered only about twenty pages and was beginning to wonder whether this Boethius was something of a gambler. He was always talking about fate and odds and the wheel of fortune. Anyway, it wasn't the kind of book that exactly made you look up to the brighter side.

After a few sentences Patrolman Mancuso's mind began to wander. He looked out through the crack in the door of the booth, which he always left open an inch or two so that he could see who was using the urinals, the lavatories, and the paper-towel box. There at the lavatories was the same boy that Patrolman Mancuso had been seeing every day, it seemed. He watched the delicate boots moving back and forth from the lavatory to the paper-towel dispenser. The boy leaned against a lavatory and began drawing on the back of his hands with a ball-point pen. There might be something in this, Patrolman Mancuso thought.

He opened the booth and went up to the boy. Coughing, he tried to say pleasantly, "What's that you're writing on your hand, pal?"

George looked at the monocle and the beard at his elbow and said, "Get the hell away from me before I lack your nuts in."

"Gawd the police," Patrolman Mancuso taunted.

"No," George answered. "Just get away. I ain't making trouble."

"You afred udda police?"

George wondered who this nut was. He was as bad as that hot dog vendor.

"Look, kookie, move it. I don't want no trouble with the cops."

"You dote?" Patrolman Mancuso asked happily.

"No, and neither does a screwball like you," George said, looking at the watering eye behind the monocle and the moistness at the mouth of the beard.

"You udder arrest," Patrolman Mancuso coughed.

"What? Boy, are you out of it."

"Patrodeman Madcuso. Uddercover." A badge flashed in front of George's pimples. "Cubb alogg wid

me.

"What the hell are you arresting me for? I'm just standing here," George protested nervously. "I ain't done nothing. What is this?"

"You udder suspiciudd."

"Suspicion of what?" George asked in panic.

"Aha!" Patrolman Mancuso slobbered. "You rilly afred."

He reached out to grab George by the arm and handcuff him, but George snatched The Consolation of Philosophy from under Patrolman Mancuso's arm and slammed it into the side of his head. Ignatius had bought a large, elegant, limited edition of the English translation, and all fifteen dollars of its price hit Patrolman Mancuso in the head with the force of a dictionary. Patrolman Mancuso bent over to pick up the monocle, which had fallen from his eye. When he straightened up again, he saw the boy scraping rapidly out of the door of the rest room with the book in his hand. He wanted to run after him, but his head was throbbing too badly. He returned to his booth to rest and grew even more depressed. What could he tell Mrs. Reilly about the book?

George opened the locker in the waiting room of the bus terminal as quickly as he could and took out the brown-paper packages he had stored. Without closing the locker door, he ran out onto Canal Street and jogged metallically toward the central business district, looking over his shoulder for the beard and monocle. There was no beard anywhere behind him.

This was really bad luck. That undercover agent would be prowling the bus station all afternoon looking for him. And what about tomorrow? The bus station was no longer safe; it was off-limits.

"Damn Miss Lee," George said aloud, still walking as fast as he could. If she weren't so tight, this wouldn't have happened.

She could have fired the jig, and he could have kept on picking up his packages at the old time, two o'clock. As it was, he had almost been arrested. And it was all because he had to go check the stuff in the bus station, all because he was stuck with the stuff now for two hours every afternoon. Where did you put stuff like that? You could get tired of carrying that stuff around all afternoon. Mother was home all the time, so you couldn't go around there with it.

"Tight bitch," George mumbled. He tucked the packages higher up under his arm and realized that he was also carrying the book he had taken from the undercover agent. Stealing from a cop. That was good, too. Miss Lee had asked him to bring her the book she needed. George looked at the title, The Consolation of Philosophy. Well, she had a book now.

Santa Battaglia tasted a spoonful of the potato salad, cleaned the spoon with her tongue, and placed the spoon neatly on a paper napkin next to the plate of salad. Sucking some pieces of parsley and onion from between her teeth, she said to the picture of her mother on the mantelpiece, "They gonna love that. Nobody makes a good potatis salad like Santa."

The parlor was almost ready for the party. On top of the old console radio there were two fifths of Early Times and a six-bottle, carton of Seven-Up. The phonograph she had borrowed from her niece sat on the mopped linoleum in the center of the room, the cord rising to the chandelier where it was plugged in. Two giant-sized bags of potato chips rested in either corner of the red plush sofa. A fork stuck out of the open bottle of olives that she had placed on a tin tray on top of the covered and folded rollaway bed.

Santa grabbed the picture on the mantelpiece, a photograph of an ancient and hostile-looking woman in a black dress and black stockings standing in a dark alley paved with oyster shells.

"Poor momma," Santa said feelingly, giving the picture a loud, wet kiss. The grease on the glass that covered the photograph showed the frequency of these affectionate onslaughts. "You sure had it hard, kid." The little black coals of Sicilian eyes glared almost animatedly at Santa from the snapshot. "The only picture of you I got, momma, and you standing in a alley.