SLSL: Flange and Cindy

[The Great Quail]

Jbor writes,

> I think the implication is that it's Flange who manipulates the situation so
> that Cindy will throw him out. He thus doesn't have to take responsibility
> for going AWOL from the marriage, his job etc, which is what he does
> actually want to do.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Though Cindy isn't exactly the warmest gal
on the planet, and she's surely harsh on my good buddy Flange, I see Flange
as a passive-aggressive figure, a melancholy romantic who is just beginning
to sour, to lose himself, to drift. While not quite a "Peter Pan," he is
definitely stalled in a state of adolescence, his internal views on marriage
and parenthood as murky and undefined as the ocean he so dearly loves.

When Pig Bodine shows up, Flange greets him with open arms, immediately
introducing him to Rocco -- there's no thought at all to how this will
affect Cindy, and he shows little remorse regarding his sabotaged honeymoon.
It's a passive-aggressive challenge to his wife, and she finally responds in
the way his secret heart has probably been desiring: she cuts the umbilical
cord. Although he dispassionately wonders if this is indeed the final straw,
he takes his leave willingly, almost with a sense of relief. He has finally
provoked Cindy into action, freeing him from responsibility and making the
decision for him: a self-made victim, is expelled from the damp and
still-possibly-fertile womb, his alibi intact: the cold, austere, rational
Cindy did it. Though Rob says he goes AWOL, the spirit of that is more true
than the letter: first he manipulates the situation into providing him with
a "leave" of sorts, then he deserts.

Indeed, there's little to justify believing that Flange is willing to take
responsibility for much of anything. When he muses, "Maybe if we had had
kids...." there's no real weight to the thought, as if children were
additional counters to measure their adult relationship, like stereos,
gainful employment, and famous paintings. The heat is gone from their
marriage, which is natural after seven years, but it has failed to move to
the next level of commitment. There's a definite poignancy in the passages
where he recalls their younger days of love; back in the day when their new
home was exciting and fecund, and they sang Noel Coward songs to each other.
But one gets the impression Cindy was navigating towards something greater,
whereas Flange was just dropping anchor for awhile.

In the end, after seven years, Flange's "womb with a view" has failed to
gestate whatever it was he thought it would. Perhaps he thought something
"rare and strange" would spring automatically from the moist ground, from
his imagination? But not children: that's a level of commitment that would
tear him away from his half-formed dreams forever, converting lover to
mother and rover to provider.

Home, job, wife: why did he even do it to begin with? After all, Pig
maintained his freedom, why not Flange? Was he just acting out what was
expected of him? Or does he really want it, somewhere embryonic, and is just
not ready to give up his dreams?

And so Flange grows old, approaching middle age, with nothing tangible to
show for it except memories of youthful freedom, floating in the perpetually
erotic womb of the Protean sea....

--Quail