Sputterpub's Blog

The kids, both boys, were in good care. The younger was rather mellow but her first-born was hyperactive. The name on his birth certificate was Wayne (for Bill’s dad), but the family called him Sudden. He was always getting into trouble. And Virginia’s office was a perpetual challenge. She was in charge of six women who all worked for a property management company, and the problems raised by the tenants, as well as some from her own employees, would have challenged Solomon.

The office. She never would have picked her career. She always thought she’d write novels or teach (at college level). She fell into the financial district, temporarily of course, when she came out of Cal at 21. She meant to move on. She even tried half a year of doctoral work. But she was too old, then, for college speed. She soon discovered that a student only gets one shot at being an undergrad. And the ivory tower simply didn’t pack the punch of her deadline-driven, where-did-the-time-go, can-you-believe-that-asshole place of business.

Even after she quit smoking cigarettes (and admitted, grudgingly, that the prohibitions about indoor smoking worked, and made that terrible withdrawal possible for her), even after the benign little darts of breast pain made her cut back the coffee to three mugs a morning, still Virginia loved the rush of the office. They called her Vee there, and she was always in motion when around, moving from desk to desk with comments and answers, almost never in her own chair.

She made a point of not raising her voice. No matter how frustrated she became, she tried to speak calmly, in questions instead of declarations. But privately Vee judged her co-workers. In fact, she sorted, ranked, and graded them, like eggs.

Vee imagined a busyness meter. It was based on a simple accomplishments-divided-by-time formula. She had herself in mind as the standard, and she put only two of her colleagues near her level. Her gauge for the others ran from 35% to 80%.

No one knew about the gauge, but her co-workers intervened anyway. They ganged up on Vee one Wednesday at lunch, and they told her she had to slow down. They managed to describe her presence as so agitating to them that Vee understood. She agreed to the yoga classes.

They call her Virginia now. She’s calmer in the office. She drinks even less coffee. But she sleeps less too. She’s down to about five hours a night. Even without speed she has to watch herself or she cows the others. She’s only her own busy fast-living self now when she’s all alone.

And she’s not done yet. She had an epiphany recently (or, as she puts it, a penetrating glimpse into the obvious). She was remembering her undergraduate days and she thought of all the games of Hearts she played with friends: how addictive that was, how often she tried to run the cards… She remembered her refusal to learn Bridge, because she reasoned at the time that if Hearts were a problem distraction, Bridge would probably become a degree-killing obsession.

What the heck? she then wondered. Was that avoidance necessary? Isn’t she old enough, now, beyond breeding or nursing or operating heavy machinery, to risk eating tuna even if it’s loaded with mercury? And what about the market? She thought of all the years she avoided researching and trading stocks because she’d already concluded it would take too much of the stamina and attention she wanted to put to other tasks.

Virginia will soon decide to stop restricting herself. She already knows that she’s at her best in the morning. That’s when the markets open, when she can indulge in bursts of almost impulsive deeds, even if they are as sedentary as placing her fingertip on the computer screen.

Virginia will evolve into a solitary day trader (“dawn trader,” will be her phrase), and she’ll succeed at it. She’s even going to meet a few people through her enterprise. She doesn’t want to get ahead of herself, but she suspects that unrestricted she’ll be fine.

Adoring speed Virginia had to watch herself.

She first encountered it in late high school: sweetened milky coffee and stolen cigarettes. She loved the buzz. She quick-addicted.

A year later, in college, she swallowed her first beans. Little white tabs of benzedrine that made her hum with energy. She felt like she could write an encyclopedia overnight.

She diversified into dexedrine and sometimes methedrine and finally, expensively, cocaine. She went from swallowing the pills at night, in study sessions with her friends (where she found she just couldn’t waste the buzz on schoolwork), to ingesting them in the morning, with ice-cold tomato juice and searing black coffee, to start herself spinning into a full full day.

Once she really went into it. She strung herself out for four days and nights, until she exhausted a big stash of bennies. She didn’t sleep and she rarely stopped moving. Her lower legs itched with a fishnet rash of poor circulation. She ate almost nothing. She produced reams of rushed writing and ragged speech. When she came down, she cried nonstop for 12 hours and then slept for 18. After that she moderated her consumption.

Cocaine arrived when she was almost done with college. Like royalty it seemed, appearing pure white on clean mirrors at parties, supplanting the cheaper raunchier stuff. Virginia never really “got” coke. She bought it, snorted it and rubbed her upper gums with it, and she acknowledged that it didn’t upset her stomach or mottle her legs. But it also never packed the buzz of good old bennies and dexies and meth. She eased away from coke before crack or crystal made the scene. She became a young adult. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

She liked to live fast. Tame but fast. She was in her element in the office, smoking a Marlboro while juggling two telephone lines, checking some papers, and nodding her guidance to a hovering underling. She made a game of her walk from office to train station: deliberately lengthening her stride, slaloming among the slower pedestrians. She talked fast and argued faster, sometimes so into it that she quivered.

She raced through days, she savored days, and the days passed. In time, she couldn’t drink coffee as a bedtime beverage. As an after-dinner quaff. Any time after 2 PM. And still she sped. People sometimes made the “T = time-out” gesture at her, or floated a hand in the air before her, palm down and patting, as if to quell her.

She tried to modulate herself. She even wrote the word on the pullout shelf in her office desk, where at first she saw it whenever she used her phone. But as often as she let others talk or made herself be quiet during meetings, that often she grew bored, restless, impatient, and went from liking her job to watching the clock. After a few weeks, MODULATE prompted no reaction from her at all.

She married a relatively patient, plodding man, thinking he was silently strong and that he’d provide a model of calm for her. That only worked as long as she and Bill were experiencing debut domesticity nonstop: the first ten years of their marriage brimmed with new jobs, the fixer-upper house, the pregnancies and babies and must-have cars and appliances. Virginia kept working throughout all that (the office may have been the only thing that saved her sanity during the hormonal storm), but in the final three years of their marriage she faced their complete incompatibility. Bill lived at about one-tenth the velocity she did. He could easily fill his day with a trip to the store for dinner ingredients. She juggled the job and the kids and the nonprofit and also some exercise and painting, while contemplating graduate school. Shortly before she divorced him she concluded that Bill actually processed life so differently that he constituted an alien, compared to her. She decided that compatibility in life velocity was even more important to a relationship than agreement about humor or money.

Divorced at 40, with rights to half a house and joint custody of two kids, Virginia had to admit that marriage had enriched her. She looked around a little for a man more her speed, but she thought she might actually be slowing down, because around then the job and the children were just about all she could take.

We noticed. What we’d tended to view as blonde dippiness morphed into blatant repetition and bizarre forgetfulness. Several of us experienced her failure to show up at planned lunches. There were reports of missed appointments at hairdressers and manicurists.’ Carolyn reported that on the last girlfriends’ trip to the spa (an almost annual long weekend after tax day), Pam forgot to pack toiletries and underwear. Maybe that could happen to any of us growing-oldsters, but the oddity was Pam’s reluctance (amounting nearly to refusal) to purchase a toothbrush once she discovered the omission. When a few of us brought the memory subject up to Pam (over what turned out to be the last reserved lunch for which she showed up), she giggled and tossed her hair from side to side so it kept grazing her jawline. “Oh, I talked to the doctor about my forgetfulness when I saw him last. He laughed and said it’s completely common, at our age.” Several of us also see Lou – no way would he field a question about cognition like that.

Meanwhile, Duane was sliding too. The man continued to review and sort his photographs, the operas he attended, the cuisines he prepared, the films he screened (proud to use his TV as a monitor only – no cable or dish for Duane – informing us regularly about how many dozens of movies he was watching every week). But he started to exhibit nervous confusion when he entertained, and then he stopped giving dinner parties. The man who had regularly invited a half dozen friends to his home for a six-course all-homemade meal began to go months between hospitality. And he started misplacing nouns. That was happening to all of us of course, and at first we thought his vocabulary loss was normal but bothering him so much that he complained about it and that made it seem more frequent. But after awhile it became obvious that his lapse wasn’t just a name here and there or a weird word. Carolyn was part of a small group that attended another performance of La Boheme with Duane, and when he lost the word “usher” (“you know, the person who, who seats people”), she says she knew it was serious.

There are facts and there are theories. The facts are grim. Less than five years after Duane lost “usher,” his aphasia is almost complete. The well-read wit is silent. And that’s not all. Duane has lost most of his intelligence too. The man who used to do the Times Sunday puzzle in ink now struggles to complete the crossword in TV Guide. His twin met recently with his closest friends. Carolyn wasn’t present but I was consulted before and after, because as far as any of us can tell, I drafted Duane’s last will, back when we were at the same firm, shortly after his wife died. The decision was made to take his car keys and move an attendant/housekeeper in with him; no one could bear to remove him from the house he has loved for so long.

Pam was houseproud too, but she is no longer at home. In the same five years her memory became so degraded that not even Al, besotted with Pam and experienced at nursing a declining spouse, could take living with her any more. He and her sons recently installed her in a memory care facility. When we learned that, a few of us visited her.

It was dreadful. Al had warned us in a semi-coherent, almost-manic way (I think he’s been alone with the situation for too long, and is desperate to talk, but Carolyn suspects him of something). “She may act like she recognizes you, but she won’t have any context for the relationship,” he said. And he told us Pam had been neglecting hygiene (“It’s been over six months since she had her hair cut or colored,” he said, triggering a conjecture that Al had an unhealthy obsession with the blondeness of his wife).

He understated. As our eyes adjusted to the dim light in Pam’s room,we were staggered at how she looked. Haggard doesn’t do the description justice. Her hair hung in lank dull grey clumps. Her nails were ragged and stained. But the worst aspect was the blankness of expression in her eyes. The only life they exhibited, besides moisture, were fleeting moments of obvious confusion…windows into a brain trying to find perspective for her location, her condition, and us.

The theories are still Carolyn’s. The rest of us shake our heads, murmur statements about doing something to help, and thank our fortunes, stars, God that it isn’t happening to us, yet. Carolyn considers their cases closed – even she thinks nothing can be done now – but she won’t let up on her idea that Duane and Pam brought their early mental demises on themselves. “If only they had been willing to reassess their lives and make fresh decisions,” Carolyn says, “Duane could have learned to use his body for exercise and his heart for love. And Pam could have dropped that ridiculous veneer of culture and allowed real thoughts and feelings into her life. I’ll bet neither would be as gone as they are if only they’d tended their souls…”

But that’s all from Carolyn’s perspective. She’s got her own warp. Carolyn doesn’t exactly blame cancer victims for their condition, but she does think that if one pays enough and correct attention to one’s immune system, then one probably won’t get it. She’s been heard to describe cancer as abnormal immortal cells that must occur all the time, but that usually get wiped out by the body’s own defenses.

Carolyn thought, along with other observers, that hormone replacement therapy would be heart- and brain-protective. She was as surprised as the scientists when the clinical tests proved the exact opposite, and were ended early. For those trials revealed that hormone replacement increased the risk of significant health problems, which connection had been masked in the observational studies by the fact that the women on HRT were better educated than average and more likely to eat well, exercise regularly, and otherwise care for themselves in a way that counteracted what are now known to be the side effects of Premarin.

Why, Carolyn even bought into the public service announcements about the benefits of preschool (most high school dropouts didn’t attend school before kindergarten). She probably believes that marijuana is a gateway drug.

Carolyn’s kind of crazy. She doesn’t seem to notice, but at this point, most of us are watching her.

Pam’s story started first, in the spring of 1944; Duane and his twin Diane didn’t make their appearance till late 1947. But by the time they came to our attention in the mid-1980s, their age difference was irrelevant. They’d both grown up and left their original families and New York. Each had succeeded to a better life than her or his parents and a more comfortable existence than the siblings. Carolyn says they had the same tragic flaw; Pam and Duane both refused to review the early childhood decision they must have made, the approach that enabled them to survive their first homes. But Carolyn may be trying to elevate their experiences from what seems mundane to us. Especially now, Carolyn sometimes talks about them like they’re doomed heroes.

Duane’s mother was a secretary before she advanced (in her opinion) to housewife. His father was a Navy pilot who probably would have made a career in the service if he hadn’t died in a horrendous crash two years after the birth of the twins. The widow remarried but for security and not love; that relationship endured with estrangement and bitterness many more years than Duane and Diane lived at home. The family was too poor to send both kids to college (even tuition-free CCNY); it was Duane’s privilege to receive advanced schooling, and he ran with it. He got out of the home apartment as soon as he could pay for a room, and he applied himself with strict unsmiling discipline. He acquired a PhD in literature and worked as a junior academic before attending law school and settling, dour as if doomed to the mood (per Carolyn’s litigator perspective), into the lucrative field of tax work and estate planning. He was heroic in his dedication to school. It was like he labored under some magic curse; he didn’t allow himself to laugh or love while he worked furiously at assigned tasks. And it was like he forgot how to love and laugh while he was conquering, for no one ever caught him in those activities. Although Duane eventually married the woman friend who selected him, although he and his wife became one another’s best friend and he truly mourned for her when he lost her to what started as treatable breast cancer, he always struck those who met him as a single man, a classic Britishy bachelor type of fellow: polite and polished, able to quote witticisms even though he couldn’t form one, asexual.

It was more of a challenge to find the heroism in Pam’s history, but Carolyn tried. Pam was the first-born of a depressed repressed mother; what the family then deemed vanity and fear of aging turned out to be a form of early dementia. Pam’s brother and sister were born two and three years after Pam, when the maternal condition was bad and probably spiked with post-partum depression, so Pam was barely beyond toddlerhood when she started caring for her sibs.

She never talked much about her childhood home. We didn’t learn about her mother’s mental problems until her own surfaced and her brother and sister met with some of us to discuss Pam’s move to a residential facility. A few of us, considered by Pam to be her closest friends (and close enough to know that Pam always confused friendly with friend, even about her clients), had heard reports about her father’s drinking rants and her mother’s somber silences, about how she had to use the livingroom couch as her bed (like Duane’s stepdad, but due to lack of space instead of spouse estrangement), about why she married so young (she had to get away from her parents, and Hunter College, the only free school a girl could attend, didn’t have dorms). Her marriage decision probably had something to do with sex, too. Pam was a stereotypical Catholic girl for her time and place, repressed but ready, and she said yes to Mark almost before he asked.

So she married at 19, had her first son at 20, and then two more boys while finishing her accounting degree and struggling in the frustrations of living with Mark (a nice horny ambitionless young man). Pam dedicated herself to improving her lot; she worked so diligently that she advanced quickly, first as an IRS employee and then in the private sector. She allowed herself almost no pleasure, filling her days with work, maternal, and spousal tasks (in that order of priority). When she finally blew off some of the gathering steam, it was in a tumultuous satisfying office affair that almost busted up her marriage.

Almost. But her lover (a guy she never forgot and sometimes mentioned, named Walt) decided not to leave his spouse, so Pam stayed with hers. But she’d gotten a taste of good sex and passive-aggressive husband-revenge (as she later described it). She continued to flirt at work and in a few years had a keeper relationship going. She divorced Mark.

(Decades later, Pam’s second son commented to Carolyn that, with regard to sex, his mother would follow any guy who offered her candy. Carolyn thought that was shockingly disloyal and probably true.)

Pam stayed with her second husband for almost 20 years. They tried just about everything to conceive a child (the daughter Pam thought was owed to her, the single child her Tom craved), and maybe they would have stayed together if they’d succeeded at that, but his sperm count was very low and her womb was exhausted. Eventually they tired of trying and Tom tired of Pam; he took up with his business partner, moved into her house and family, eventually divorced Pam and married Cindy, seemed happy ever after.

Pam wasn’t. She considered Tom the love of her life and resented his departure. She denied that she was bitter, although Carolyn and a few others saw a streak of anger in the way she tossed her blonde hair, a glint of mean in her pale blue eyes. Within a few months she was seeking a new beau with the dispassion of an executive recruiter. She enrolled in dating services. She got over her atheistic attitudes enough to frequent a Contra Costa church famed for its singles’ activities. And she found her third husband there, agnostic Jewish Al.

She was in her early 60s when they married. Al is almost 10 years older than Pam and was encouraging her to retire (or at least work less) so they could enjoy what time they had left. Soon after that, Pam began making so many mistakes at work that her partners noticed. One helped her with the long term disability claim while the others gently forced her out.

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…”