Low-lands, part 1: summary

[The Great Quail]

"Low-lands" -- Summary

"Low-lands" tells the story of Dennis Flange, an ex-navy communications
officer who lives with Cindy, his wife of seven years, in a sprawling home
atop Long Island Sound. The choice is his -- he feels the need to be near
the sea, which has numerous associations for him. It is a universal mother,
a young lover, a catalyst for messianic thoughts, a symbol for infinite
possibilities, and the medium through which fantasies may attain a certain
degree of reality. He feels the sea as an intimate part of himself,
internalizes it naturally as his bloodstream, and shares a personal bond
with it that surpasses even other sailors -- not only did he never tire of
"patrol," but he cannot bring himself to tell  sea stories, as that would
disturb the "truth of a true lie."

The Flange home is as unusual as its owner: build atop a mossy cavern
against the surf, it is riddled with numerous passages, and easily acquires
the symbolism of the womb.

Flange is also seeing an expensive analyst named Geronimo Diaz. A hopeless
drunk who is infinitely more crazy than Flange, he continues to see Diaz
because his analyst's "lunacy" was the only thing keeping him going beyond
the "relentless rationality of that womb and that wife."

The story begins with an aging Flange in a melancholy mood, calling off from
work, listening to Vivaldi, and getting drunk with a surprisingly cultured
garbage-man named Rocco Squarcione. He is soon visited by his old shipmate
Pig Bodine, whom he hasn't seen since his marriage, when Pig shanghaied him
from his young bride for a two-week excursion of drunken recklessness.
Making a promise never to see Pig Bodine again, Flange was forgiven, and his
marriage proceeded apace. However, upon again seeing Pig Bodine, Cindy
throws Flange and his friends out the door.

It is not the first time Flange has been thrown out, usually spending the
evening in an adjacent shack, an abandoned police booth that Cindy has hung
with Mondrians, as "austere and logical" as herself. But this time she's
serious, and claims to be kicking Flange out for good.

Flange and Pig depart with Rocco, who takes them to the dump. They pass to
the center of the dump along a concave spiral. This causes Flange to muse
about the "Low-lands," a line from an old sea shanty:

"A ship have I got in the North Country
And she goes by the name of 'Golden Vanity,'
O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,
As she sails by the Low-lands low."

The Scottish low-lands have always held a symbolic value to Flange, who
likens them to the ocean itself: "that immense clouded-glass plain was kind
of a low-land which almost demanded a single human figure striding across it
for completeness." The center of the dump's spiral is another kind of
low-land, the "dead center, the single point which implied an entire low
country." This triggers a recurring notion, one he has "Whenever he was away
from Cindy and could think," wherein he imagines 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 tint sphere."

Leaving them more muscatel, Rocco departs, entrusting them to a Negro named
Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lives inside a tar shack, itself situated inside a
labyrinth of tires. The maze is booby trapped, to keep away the "gypsies."
Inside the shack, the three men get drunk and tell sea stories, tales of
high jinks, mayhem, and reckless irresponsibility. Oddly, Flange cannot tell
an actual "sea story," and confines himself to a land-bound tale involving
the stolen corpse of a woman.

The three fall asleep, but Flange "awakes" to the sound of a woman calling
for him. Unable to rouse his companions, he goes outside, where he discovers
a beautiful gypsy named Nerissa -- who also happens to be a midget. Like a
siren, she easily seduces him to her lair, a chamber deep underneath the
junkyard and surrounded by broken appliances. There she introduces him to
Hyacinth, her pet rat, and Flange remarks that Nerissa looks like a child,
and the rat her own child. Suddenly he wonders why he and Cindy never had a
child, then thinks, "a child makes it all right. Let the world shrink to a
boccie ball."

Nerissa asks him to stay, and he agrees: "For awhile, at least, he thought.
She looked up gravely. Whitecaps danced across her eyes; sea creatures, he
knew, would be cruising about in the submarine green of her heart."