Slow Learner (7 page)

Besides his analyst Flange had only one other consolation: the sea. Or Long Island Sound, which at times was close enough to the brawling gray image he remembered. He had read or heard somewhere in his pre-adolescence that the sea was a woman, and the metaphor had enslaved him and largely determined what he became from that moment. It had meant, for one thing, communications officer for three years on a destroyer which did nothing for the duration but run hourglass-shaped barrier patrols, day and night and for everybody but Flange too long, off the Korean coast. It had meant, when he finally got out and dragged Cindy from her mother's flat in Jackson Heights to find a home near the sea, this large half-earthen mass at the top of a cliff. Geronimo had pointed out, rather pedantically, that since all life had started from protozoa who lived in the sea, and since, as life forms had grown more complicated, sea water had begun to serve the function of blood until eventually corpuscles and a lot of other junk were added to produce the red stuff we know today; since this was true, the sea was quite literally in our blood, and more important, the sea — rather than, as is popularly held, the earth — is the true mother image for us all. At this point Flange had attempted to brain his psychiatrist with the Stradivarius. "But you said yourself the sea was a woman," protested Geronimo, leaping up on the desk.
"Chinga tu madre"
roared Flange, enraged. "Aha," Geronimo beamed, "you see."

So that whether it crashed, moaned or merely slopped around down there a hundred feet below his bedroom window, the sea was with Flange in his hours of need, which were getting to be more and more frequent; a repetition in miniature of that Pacific whose unimaginable heavings kept his memory at a constant 30º list. If the goddess Fortune controls everything this side of the moon then there must be, he felt, a curious and tender dominion or swing about the Pacific, which some say is the chasm the moon left when it tore loose from the earth. A peculiar double of his was sole inhabitant in this tilt of memory: Fortune's elf child and disinherited darling, young and randy and more a Jolly Jack Tar than anyone human could conceivably be; thews and chin taut against a sixty-knot gale with a well-broken-in briar clenched in the bright defiant teeth; standing OOD on the bridge through the midwatch with only a dozing quartermaster and a faithful helmsman and a sewer-mouthed radar crew and a red-dog game in the sonar shack, along with the ripped-off exile moon and its track on the ocean for company. Although what the moon would be doing out during a sixty-knot gale was open to question. But that was the way he remembered it: there he had been, Dennis Flange in his prime, without the current signs of incipient middle age; and, most important, as far away from Jackson Heights as anybody can get, though he wrote to Cindy every other night. That was when the marriage too had been in its prime; but now it was getting a slight beer belly and its hair was beginning to fall out, and Flange was still wondering vaguely why this ever should have happened even as Vivaldi discoursed on pleasure and Rocco Squarcione gargled his muscatel.

The doorbell rang in the middle of the second movement and Cindy came suddenly roaring downstairs like a small blond terrier to answer it, managing to scowl at Flange and Rocco before she opened the door. Standing there when she opened it was what looked like an ape in a naval uniform, squat and leering. She stared level at him, aghast. "No," she wailed. "You ugly bastard."

"Who is it," Flange said.

"It's Pig Bodine, is who it is," Cindy said, appalled. "After seven years your big gaping idiot buddy Pig Bodine."

"Hi babe," Pig Bodine said.

"Old goodbuddy," Flange yelled, leaping up. "Come in and drink some wine. Rocco, it's Pig Bodine. I told you about Pig."

"Oh no," Cindy said, barring the door. Flange, afflicted by marriage, had personal warning signals like those afflicted by epilepsy. He sensed one now. "No," his wife growled. "Out. Go. Get out. You. Move."

"Me," Flange said.

"You," Cindy said. "You, Rocco and Pig. The three musketeers. Get out."

"Wha," Flange said. They had been through this before. It ended up the same way every time: out in the yard was this abandoned police booth which the Nassau County cops had used once upon a time to check on speeders, out on Route 25A. It had so captivated Cindy that she had finally had it carted home, and planted ivy around it and hung Mondrians inside and this was where Flange slept whenever they had a fight. The funny thing was it made little difference to his sense of snugness: the booth was womblike as could be and Mondrian and Cindy, he suspected, were brother and sister under the skin, both austere and logical.

"All right," he said, "I'll take a blanket and go out and sleep in the booth, hey."

"No," Cindy said. "Out is what I said and out is where you are going. Of my life, is what I mean. Booze all day with the garbage man is pretty bad but Pig Bodine is

enough and enough is too much."

"Jeez babe," Pig put in, "I figured you'd forgotten about all that. Look at your husband. He's glad to see me." Pig had hit the Manhasset station some time between five and six, in the middle of the commuter rush. He was swept out of the train, propelled by briefcases and folded copies of the
Times
, and up to the parking lot, where he stole a '51 MG and set out to find Flange, who had been his division officer during the Korean conflict. He was nine days AWOL from the minesweeper
Immaculate
, docked in Norfolk, and wanted to see how his old buddy was making out. The last time Cindy had seen him was in Norfolk, on the night of her wedding. Just before his ship had been reassigned to the Seventh Fleet, Flange had managed to swing thirty days' leave, which he and Cindy were going to use for a honeymoon. Only Pig, upset because the enlisted men had not had a chance to give Flange a bachelor party, descended with five or six friends on the reception at the NOB officers' club, disguised as boot ensigns, and dragged Flange off to East Main Street to have a few beers. This "few beers" was sort of a rough estimate. Two weeks later Cindy received a telegram from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was from Flange and he was broke and horribly hung over. Cindy thought about this for two days and finally wired him bus fare home, with the stipulation that she never set eyes on Pig again. She had not. Not until now. But her feeling that Pig was the most loathsome creature in the world had continued unabated for seven years, and now she was ready to prove it. "Out that door," she said, pointing, "over the hill and far away. Or over the cliff, I don't care. You and your wino friend and that foul ape in the sailor suit. Begone."

Flange scratched his head and blinked at her for a minute or so. No. He figured not. Maybe if they had had kids.. . . He considered it a fine and lovely irony that the navy had made him a competent communications officer. "Well," he said slowly, "all right, I reckon."

"You can have the Volkswagen," Cindy said, "and take some shaving gear and a clean shirt."

"No," Flange said, opening the door for Rocco, who had been hulking in the background with the wine bottle, "no, I'll ride with Rocco in the truck." Cindy shrugged. "And grow a beard," he added vaguely. They left the house — Pig bewildered, Rocco singing to himself and Flange beginning to feel the first faint tendrils of nausea creeping up to surround his stomach-and piled into the truck and roared off. Flange, looking back, could see his wife standing in the doorway watching them. They pulled out of the drive and on to a narrow macadam road. "Where to," Rocco said.

"I don't know," Flange said. "Maybe I'll go into New York and find a hotel or something. You might as well drop me off at the station. You got any place to stay, hey Pig?"

"I could of slept in the MG," Pig said, "but the fuzz probably know about it by now."

"I tell you what," Rocco said. "I got to go to the dump anyway and get rid of this load. I got this buddy there who's sort of a watchman. He lives there. He has all kinds of room. You could stay there."

"Sure," Flange said. "Why not." It suited his mood. They headed south, into that part of the Island which is nothing but housing developments and shopping centers and various small, light-industrial factories and after half an hour they pulled in to the town dump. "It's closed," Rocco said, "but he'll open up." He turned down a dirt road running behind an incinerator with adobe walls and a tiled roof, which had been designed and built back in the '30's by some mad WPA architect, and which looked like a Mexican hacienda with smokestacks. They jolted along for about a hundred yards and came to a gate. "Bolingbroke," Rocco yelled. "Let me in. I got wine."

"All right man," a voice answered out of the dusk. A minute later a fat Negro with a pork-pie hat appeared in the headlight beams, unlocked the gate and hopped on the running board. They started down a long spiraling road into the dump. "This here is Bolingbroke," Rocco said. "He'll put you up." They were descending in a long wide curve. It seemed to Flange that they must be heading for the center of the spiral, the low point. "These guys need some place to sleep?" Bolingbroke said. Rocco explained the problem. Bolingbroke nodded sympathetically. "Wife is a nuisance sometimes," he said. "I got three or four scattered around the country and glad to be rid of them all. Somehow you never seem to learn."

The dump was roughly square, half a mile on each side, sunk fifty feet below the streets of the sprawling housing development which surrounded it. All day long, Rocco said, two D-8 bulldozers would bury the refuse under fill which was brought in from the north shore, and which raised the level of that floor a tiny fraction of an inch every day. It was this peculiar quality of fatedness which struck Flange as he gazed off into the half-light while Rocco dumped the load: this thought that one day, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps more, there would no longer be any hole: the bottom would be level with the streets of die development, and houses would be built on it too. As if some maddeningly slow elevator were carrying you toward a known level to confer with some inevitable face on matters which had already been decided. But something else too: here at the end of the spiral he felt haunted by yet another correspondence, and could not place it until searching back he came to the music and words of a song. You would hardly think, in a modern-day navy of jet planes, missiles and nuclear submarines, that anyone still sang sea chanteys or ballads; but Flange remembered a Filipino steward named Delgado who used to come up to the radio shack late at night with a guitar and sit and sing them for hours. There are many ways of telling a sea story, but perhaps because of the music and because the words had nothing to do with personal legend, Delgado's way seemed tinged with truth of a special order. Despite even the traditional ballads' being lies or at best tall tales just as surely as the ones talked not sung over coffee in the boatswain's locker or during payday-stakes poker in the mess hall or while sitting on a depth charge out on the fantail waiting for the evening's movie to replace one yarn with another more palpable. But the steward preferred to sing and Flange respected that. And his favorite was a song which went:

A ship I have got in the North Country

And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity,

O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,

As she sails by the Low-lands low.

It is very easy to be pedantic and say that Low-lands refers to the southern and eastern parts of Scotland; the ballad was certainly of Scottish origin, but it always called up a weird irrational association for Flange. Anyone who has looked at the open sea under a special kind of illumination or in a mood conducive to metaphor will tell you of the curious illusion that the ocean, despite its movement, has a certain solidity; it becomes a gray or glaucous desert, a waste land which stretches away to the horizon, and all you would have to do would be to step over the lifelines to walk away over its surface; if you carried a tent and enough provisions you could journey from city to city that way. Geronimo regarded this as a bizarre variation on the Messiah complex, and advised Flange in a fatherly way not to try it, ever; but for Flange that immense clouded-glass plain was a kind of low-land which almost demanded a single human figure striding across it for completeness; any arrival at sea level was like finding a minimum and dimensionless point, a unique crossing of parallel and meridian, an assurance of perfect, passionless uniformity; just as in the spiraling descent of Rocco's truck he had felt that this spot at which they finally came to rest was the dead center, the single point which implied an entire low country. Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would picture his life as a surface in the process of change, much as the floor of the dump was in transition: from concavity or inclosure to perhaps a flatness like the one he stood in now. What he worried about was any eventual convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere.

Rocco left them with another gallon of muscatel which he had found under the seat and went bouncing and snarling away into the gathering darkness. Bolingbroke unscrewed the cap and drank. They passed the bottle around and Bolingbroke said, "Come on, we'll find mattresses." He led them up a slope, around a tall tower of bank run, past half an acre of abandoned refrigerators, bicycles, baby carriages, washing machines, sinks, toilets, bedsprings, TV sets, pots and pans and stoves and air-conditioners and finally over a dune to where the mattresses were. "Biggest bed in the world," Bolingbroke said. "Take your pick." There must have been thousands of mattresses. Flange found a three-quarter-width inner-spring and Pig, who would probably never get accustomed to civilian life, selected a pallet about two inches thick and three feet wide. "I wouldn't feel comfortable otherwise," Pig said.

"Hurry up," Bolingbroke called softly, nervously. He had climbed to the top of the dune and was looking back in the direction they had come. "Hurry. It's almost dark."