Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [131]
He rattled his cutlass loudly against the side of his seat. An old usherette came down the aisle and tried to grab the cutlass from him, but Ignatius wrestled with her, and she slid to the carpet. She got up and hobbled away.
The heroine, believing her honor to be in question, had a series of paranoid fantasies in which she was lying on a bed with her libertine. The bed was pulled through the streets and floated across a swimming pool at the resort hotel.
“Good grief. Is this smut supposed to be comedy?” Ignatius demanded in the darkness. “I have not laughed once. My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage. That woman must be lashed until she drops. She is undermining our civilization. She is a Chinese Communist agent sent over to destroy us. Please! Someone with some decency get to the fuse box. Hundreds of people in this theater are being demoralized. If we’re all lucky, the Orpheum may have forgotten to pay its electric bill.”
As the film ended Ignatius cried, “Under her All-American face she is really Tokyo Rose!”
He wanted to stay for another showing, but he remembered the waif. Ignatius didn’t want to ruin a good thing. He needed that boy. Weakly he climbed over the four empty popcorn boxes that had accumulated before his seat during the movie. He was completely enervated. His emotions were spent. Gasping, he staggered up the aisle and out onto the sunlit street. There, by the cab stand at the Roosevelt Hotel, George was keeping a surly watch over the wagon.
“Jesus,” he sneered. “I thought you was never coming outta there. What kinda appointment you had? You just went to see a movie.”
“Please,” Ignatius sighed. “I’ve just been through trauma. Run along. I’ll meet you at one sharp tomorrow at Canal and Royal.”
“Okay, prof.” George took his packages and started to slouch away. “Keep your mouth shut, huh?”
“We shall see,” Ignatius said sternly.
He ate a hot dog with trembling hands and peeked down into his pocket at the photograph. From above the woman’s figure looked even more matronly and reassuring. Some broken professor of Roman history? A ruined medievalist? If only she had shown her face. There was an air of solitude, of detachment, of solitary sensual and scholarly pleasure that appealed to him greatly. He looked at the scrap of wrapping paper, at the crude, tiny address. Bourbon Street. The undone woman was in the hands of commercial exploiters. What a challenging character for the Journal. That particular work, Ignatius thought, was rather lacking in the sensual department. It needed a good injection of lip-smacking innuendo. Perhaps the confessions of this woman would perk it up a bit.
Ignatius rolled down in to the Quarter and, for a wild and very fleeting moment, pondered an affair. How Myrna would gnaw at her espresso cup rim in envy. He would describe every lush moment with this scholarly woman. With her background and Boethian worldview, she would take a very stoic and fatalistic view of whatever sexual gaucheries and blunders he committed. She would be understanding. “Be kind,” Ignatius would sigh to her. Myrna probably attacked sex with the vehemence and seriousness that she brought to social protest. How anguished she would be when Ignatius described his tender pleasures.
“Do I dare?” Ignatius asked himself, bumping the wagon absentmindedly into a parked car. The handle sank into his stomach and he belched. He would not tell the woman how he came across her. First, he would discuss Boethius. She would be overwhelmed.
Ignatius found the address and said, “Oh, my God! The poor woman is in the hands of fiends.” He studied the façade of the Night of Joy and lumbered up to the poster in the glass case. He read:
ROBERTA E. LEE
presents
Harlett O’Hara
The Virgin-ny Belle
(and pet!)
Who was Harlett O’Hara? Even more important, what kind of pet? Ignatius was intrigued. Afraid of attracting the wrath of the Nazi proprietress, he sat down uncomfortably on the curb and decided to