infrequent moments of tenderness he would sing Cindy the Noel Coward song, half as an attempt to recall the first few months they were together, half as a love song for the house:
"We'll be as happy and contented
As birds upon a tree,
High above the mountains and sea ..."
However Noel Coward songs often bear little relevance to reality — if Flange hadn't known this before he soon found it out - and if after seven years it turned out he was less a bird upon a tree than a mole within a burrow it was Cindy more than the house who was responsible. His analyst, a crazed and boozy wetback named Geronimo Diaz, had, of course, a great deal to say about this. For fifty minutes every week Flange would be screamed at over martinis about his mom. The fact that the money spent on these sessions could have bought every automobile, pedigreed dog and woman on the stretch of Park Avenue visible from the doctor's office window disturbed Flange less than the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and, Freud having been mother's milk for that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new. But he would occasionally be caught, nights when snow drove down out of Connecticut, across the Sound, to lash at the bedroom window and remind him that he was lying in the foetal position after all: he would be caught red-handed at Molemanship, which is less a behavior pattern than a state of mind in which one does not hear the snow at all, and the snorings of one's wife are as the drool and trickle of amniotic fluid somewhere outside the blankets, and even the secret cadences of one's pulse become mere echoes of the house's heartbeat.
Geronimo Diaz was clearly insane; but it was a wonderful, random sort of madness which conformed to no known model or pattern, an irresponsible plasma of delusion he floated in, utterly convinced, for example, that he was Paganini and had sold his soul to the devil. He kept a priceless Stradivarius in his desk, and to prove to Flange that this hallucination was fact he would saw away on the strings, producing horribly raucous noises, throw down the bow finally and say, "You see. Ever since I made that deal I haven't been able to play a note." And spend whole sessions reading aloud to himself out of random-number tables or the Ebbinghaus nonsense-syllable lists, ignoring everything that Flange would be trying to tell him. Those sessions were impossible: counterpointed against confessions of clumsy adolescent sex play would come this incessant "ZAP. MOG. FUD. NAF. VOB," and every once in a while the clink and gurgle of the martini shaker. But Flange went back again, he kept going back; realizing perhaps that if he were subjected for the rest of his life to nothing but the relentless rationality of that womb and that wife, he would never make it, and that Geronimo's lunacy was about all he had to keep him going. And the martinis were free.
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
"We'll be as happy and contented
As birds upon a tree,
High above the mountains and sea ..."
However Noel Coward songs often bear little relevance to reality — if Flange hadn't known this before he soon found it out - and if after seven years it turned out he was less a bird upon a tree than a mole within a burrow it was Cindy more than the house who was responsible. His analyst, a crazed and boozy wetback named Geronimo Diaz, had, of course, a great deal to say about this. For fifty minutes every week Flange would be screamed at over martinis about his mom. The fact that the money spent on these sessions could have bought every automobile, pedigreed dog and woman on the stretch of Park Avenue visible from the doctor's office window disturbed Flange less than the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and, Freud having been mother's milk for that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new. But he would occasionally be caught, nights when snow drove down out of Connecticut, across the Sound, to lash at the bedroom window and remind him that he was lying in the foetal position after all: he would be caught red-handed at Molemanship, which is less a behavior pattern than a state of mind in which one does not hear the snow at all, and the snorings of one's wife are as the drool and trickle of amniotic fluid somewhere outside the blankets, and even the secret cadences of one's pulse become mere echoes of the house's heartbeat.
Geronimo Diaz was clearly insane; but it was a wonderful, random sort of madness which conformed to no known model or pattern, an irresponsible plasma of delusion he floated in, utterly convinced, for example, that he was Paganini and had sold his soul to the devil. He kept a priceless Stradivarius in his desk, and to prove to Flange that this hallucination was fact he would saw away on the strings, producing horribly raucous noises, throw down the bow finally and say, "You see. Ever since I made that deal I haven't been able to play a note." And spend whole sessions reading aloud to himself out of random-number tables or the Ebbinghaus nonsense-syllable lists, ignoring everything that Flange would be trying to tell him. Those sessions were impossible: counterpointed against confessions of clumsy adolescent sex play would come this incessant "ZAP. MOG. FUD. NAF. VOB," and every once in a while the clink and gurgle of the martini shaker. But Flange went back again, he kept going back; realizing perhaps that if he were subjected for the rest of his life to nothing but the relentless rationality of that womb and that wife, he would never make it, and that Geronimo's lunacy was about all he had to keep him going. And the martinis were free.
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
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