Sputterpub's Blog

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…”

Lesley has always been gay, but Sam, who describes herself as bisexual, had only been with one other woman before Lesley. And she’s been with men ever since they broke up: three different relationships in ten months. Lesley now considers Sam a tourist.

Among other things. It has been nearly a year, but she continues to think of Sam when she rises in the morning and before she goes to sleep at night. She fantasizes about Sam’s clean blonde hair; she agonizes about the sweet spot where her long neck meets the angle of her shoulders. Her mind cycles through nouns: bitch, beloved, fool, friend, freak. She still can’t believe that Sam would throw away all their potential, their shared planned cat-cozy home and bicoastal future, and offer up no explanation other than exasperation.

When pushed, Sam resisted using words about it. She kept saying sentences were useless, and that only time would provide the perspective they both needed to understand. But Lesley was gently relentless. She left voicemail invitations to coffee and e-mail notes about talk. She forwarded jokes and sent candy. She even had me intercede. Finally Sam agreed to meet at the Starbucks closest to her apartment.

She told Lesley she couldn’t handle the way Lesley never directly answered any question. She said that because Lesley never said what she wanted, the full burden of their emotional relationship fell on Sam. Lesley listened intently (I can imagine her, leaning forward above the table and drumming the fingers of her right hand on her denim-clad knee). She said she could change and she probably sat back with that look of uncertainty in her eyes. Then Sam told her not to bother; it wouldn’t matter. She just didn’t love Lesley any more. That was eight months ago.

Lesley told me all that, but she said she isn’t accepting it. As passive as she can be, she insists that she and Sam just need more time.

She saw Sam yesterday. We took a walk today and she told me about it.

She’d been having a shitty day. She spoke to her sister in the morning and learned that her brother Ben was back in rehab. Then she accidentally broke her favorite coffee mug while talking to Ellie on the phone, which experience made their regular Saturday chat even less satisfying than usual for Lesley. Finally, when she started to make the chowder she’d agreed to bring to the book group pot luck, she found she was missing two vital ingredients, and she had to venture out, in the rain, to Safeway on a weekend afternoon.

She says she should have known she was headed for no fun. She’d certainly had enough karmic clues.

She rounded the aisle to the baking goods and was shocked to see Sam. The love of her life was about 30 feet ahead of her and coming her way, but she was with someone. Lesley turned and made for the adjacent aisle before Sam recognized her, but she took the vision with her like it was etched in her brain. Sam in jeans and a V-necked shirt, hair down, pushing a cart with a tall, dark-haired man, twining her arm in his and looking full up at him the way Lesley remembered.

It became Lesley’s mission to get out of that store without being noticed. She fetched the needed items like a gumshoe on someone’s tail and she selected the checkout line farthest from the area where she’d seen Sam. Her one break all day was that the line moved quickly.

She admits she was nervous and agitated when she got to the cashier. Her total came to $5.61 and she handed over a ten without thinking. Then she realized she’d reduce the currency in her pocket if she gave the cashier a single, and the cashier exhibited a little attitude about having to re-address the change drawer. Maybe the cashier wasn’t having a good day either. The fact is, instead of putting the five dollar bill and the change in Lesley’s hand, she laid the currency on the counter between them and dropped the coins – 3 dimes, a nickel, and 4 pennies – on and around the bill.

Lesley has well-trimmed nails. It was difficult for her to pry those coins off the smooth surface. She says she doesn’t know what came over her. She was conscious but it was almost like a momentary blackout. She picked up the coins with her right hand and the bill with her left, and then she hurled the change at the cashier.

She grabbed her bag and stomped out of the Safeway. The cashier voiced a “Hey!” behind her but did nothing else. Lesley was quite upset going home.

That was her report. I couldn’t not do anything. Once again, there was a necessary task before me and no one else around to do it. And maybe I’m the appropriate choice anyway. Lesley’s issues go back to the accident, and since my older brother Bill was the driver, I certainly understand all that. And of course I know Sam. I introduced them. Sam and I were together in college and for three years after. I can speak with authority about her. Gently.