It could be said that Carolyn is overly into cause and effect. That woman doesn’t believe in correlation; as far as she is concerned, if Action A is followed by Situation B, then A caused it.

That’s at the root of her refusal to seek relief from common discomforts. If Carolyn gets heartburn, then obviously she deserves it, and the last thing she’ll do is duck her consequence by taking an antacid. If she gets a headache, then she tries to determine whether it’s due to low light, or stress, or hunger or thirst, rather than taking an aspirin.

So it really didn’t surprise those around her, when she sought a cause for the mental decay that befell Pam and Duane. And it didn’t surprise us that we had to listen to her theories.

“It all starts in their separate but similar childhoods,” Carolyn stated. “They both grew up poor in New York City in the 1940s, in emotionally barren crowded apartments, and they seem to have made the same decisions about how to get through it. They each decided to shut off any aspect of life that was spiritual, or emotional, or creative. They became super-rationalists.”

When Carolyn talked like that, she was speaking to people who were acquainted with Pam and Duane. We were all members of a professional/financial district networking crowd; there must have been a hundred of us running into one another at cultural functions or conferences or corporate retreats. Pam and Duane weren’t a couple – they didn’t even like one another enough to take the few steps that might have made them friends – but they associated with the same other people. They met peripherally and often.

“So these super rational controlled human beings,” Carolyn continued in her analysis, “worked hard and denied emotion and became professionals and put their noses to the grindstone, if that’s the correct expression, and to all appearances and by their individual descriptions, each succeeded.” We smiled and nodded; some of us even hummed. She took it as encouragement, and added, “Pam became a partner as a CPA and Duane was a lawyer, self-employed or well-compensated by a firm. They married adequately if not well, bought nice houses, nice cars, season tickets to nice events. But there was always this brusqueness about them. I swear: the social space around them just seemed thin and cold, and although I looked forward to time with each of them, really I did, after a few minutes in their presence I always wanted to get away.”

“I’ll bet part of that was the name dropping,” somebody said then, and it’s true that Pam’s social climbing was so obvious it was mockable, while Duane could put you to sleep with his uninvited reviews of operas and dinner wines. But Carolyn maintained that the creepiness around each of them was owing to the spiritual dearth.

“We’ve all been there when Duane waxed sardonic, with his ‘You’ve heard about how many Catholics have a love/hate relationship with the church? Well mine is a hate/hate relationship.’ Haven’t we?” Nods all around. “And I’m telling you: Pam is the only proselytizing atheist I’ve ever known.”

Then there would be murmurs of agreement, but Carolyn wasn’t finished. She was on a roll, and some think she overstepped into girl betrayal when she added inside information, like “Pam is so oblivious about feelings that she won’t allow a boyfriend to break up with her unless he presents salient reasons.” Of course she had to back up a statement like that, and it was probably unkind the way she led us to laughter when she described the time Pam made a man – the odious Irwin – think it over and call her back later before he was allowed to end their relationship.

“I swear,” she concluded the point, “Pam out-and-out rejected anything that didn’t make sense to her. She’d flip that blonde hair and flash those fake jewels and assert that it just couldn’t be so. And Duane kept himself so busy categorizing and planning and organizing that he never had time to feel anything. He didn’t flip his hair but he sure contained himself.” With those words we all visualized the way Duane sat, arms and legs crossed so that his already-slight form was pulled even narrower, the way he suppressed a laugh, a sneeze.

“They had policies instead of passions.”

“Yeah that may be true, but that still doesn’t explain…”