MEMORY CONSTRUCTS AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

There existed a box of high school memorabilia, I had long since forgotten, put away in my parent’s attic when I went into the Navy.

I had joined the service for many reasons, one being a young woman, whom I immediately and completely loved the moment I saw her seated on a sofa across the comfortably furnished living room of an upper west side apartment. It was a warm night in May, the windows were raised, the end of the school year was near and almost everyone gathered there to party was college bound. She and the guy sitting with her didn’t seem to be speaking.

The lightning bolt had struck me and, ignoring her date (turned out it was her older brother,) I crossed the room and, with a melodramatic flourish, kissed her hand and announced to all that she was the most stunning girl I had ever seen and that she was not surrounded by dozens of courtiers I could not fathom, (stunning yes, and beautiful to me from that moment on.)

That she was, “Maggie,” and that she went to one of the progressive schools down in the Village was all I got out of her. They soon left the party– fled the scene actually, her brother leading the way before I could get a last name or phone number. My swashbuckling approach had failed. Still I was truly and extravagantly smitten and not to be put off.

I got her last name and number from a friend whose mother taught French at the ‘progressive’ school and whose student roster listed but one, “Maggie”.

I have always known that my exuberance was more than just the result of Springtime and Youthfulness. Although she seemed to catch a bit of it too, she also seemed astonished that another could find such delight in someone such as she saw herself and that I was probably nuts. But I was too far gone to temper my enthusiasms. I didn’t want to. I took incredible pleasure in everything we did: just walking around Washington Square, me making jokes and showing off for her at every chance; holding hands as we took in the latest avante garde film: wondering about Camus et les autres; kids trying to act intellectually hip as we sat in “The Fat Black Pussycat” over espressos and ashtrays full of the butts of Gitanes and Gauloises; and finally, those fragrant embraces on her doorstep at the end of the evening. She chose not to indulge the freedom that came from the recent introduction of the birth control pill, and I was unsure of my prowess at pleasuring maidens in bohemian beds. So we teetered on the point of a delicious sexual tension without the sex.

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But even that delicious tension couldn’t sustain this relationship and, eventually, my enthusiasm crowded her sense of self in ways I couldn’t realize at the time… So, she eventually went off to college after I joined the Navy. Before leaving in May of  ’63 I filled a trunk with my young artistic and literary endeavors, which I rightly assumed would be of no use where I was bound, and left the trunk in my parent’s attic.

During my time taking code in Pensacola and editing films about Viet Nam from the

safety of Washington D.C. we sporadically exchanged letters. Mine weren’t very persuasive and eventually I heard from others that she had married and was growing a family.

More than a few years later I was pleased to learn she was divorced and living in the Hamptons. I approached her once again, and after a tearful reunion we went out for a seashore dinner. Although she remained tentative, that old feeling of joy and pleasure came back and I again hoped that, in our maturity, we might find what I had in youth so extravagantly assumed was to be my lot in life and had somehow frittered away.

It was at this time that I found and opened the long forgotten chest whose contents lay waiting in my parent’s attic for thirty years. Among the writings, letters, drawings, poems, sketches, and other ephemera were copies of high school literary magazines and newspapers published by private schools in the City. It was almost as if I were seeing them for the first tie. As I browsed, some student’s names I remembered- most I didn’t. Among these publications was a curiosity: An inter-scholastic issue. It was filled with art and fiction chosen by student editors of these various private school publications and put into this single issue. Perhaps it was only a one-shot– a single experiment, killed off by politics, apathy or something else. Suddenly, my eye was caught in a moment of instant recognition: Maggie’s signature boldly scrawled across the bottom of a drawing. Though looking more like a preliminary sketch, it illustrated a poem written by another student.

The drawing was of a young androgyne seated in profile on what appears to be a promontory or hilltop, arms hugging drawn-up shins, chin on knees. The figure looks to the left, away toward an unseen horizon, as if to visualize a fog bound future.

I was stunned and excited to find this treasure and couldn’t wait to send it off to her and receive back her surprised effusions of delight and joy at his artifact from the past.

Instead, I wouldn’t hear from her for almost twenty years.

For weeks I wondered at this capricious cruelty. What could have happened? I had done nothing but send her the magazine with a few loving words in an enclosed note.

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Then, one night I woke from a fretful sleep and, in a moment of incandescent revelation, the curtains of memory and willful forgetfulness parted and the real story appeared apparent… Back then Maggie had had a chance to illustrate the poem but was having trouble finding a visually appropriate metaphor. Always looking for ways to show-off and show love, I sketched my idea for an illustration that she could develop and embellish. Now, I recognized my treatment in a different light: That androgynous figure I had rendered was that of the crop haired Jean Seberg in her role of, “the, New York Herald Tribune, girl,” (Luc Godard’s Breathless had come to one of the Village art houses. Maggie and I were too cool not to be impressed.)

Besotted as I was back then, It had meant nothing to me that she had taken my sketch, signed and submitted as her own in a bit of petty plagiarism. Better still, I would have seen it as the collaboration of two young, struggling artists… facilitator, enabler, creator, muse- what did it matter? My mind wouldn’t have waited an instant to paper-over the details of the whole episode and leave my memory to fabricate a convenient construct to explain it.

So, when years later I hurried to the post office with a large envelope containing the fateful issue and some loving words, instead of cementing our relationship with good news and kindness, I had, by accident, just revived her guilt and embarrassment from this episode in her past and had cynically sealed loving words into the envelope with the evidence. After something like that happens, one can’t just write and say, “I didn’t remember the how and the why of what happened back then.” No one would believe that anyone could forget something like THAT! But, conveniently or not, I had.

Yet today, I still sometimes wonder if mind and memory create constructs that make existence bearable? And I was afraid to go to her to learn if this midnight revelation of mine was just my own attempt to rationalize and explain her turning away and fomenting cruelty, despair and the inexplicable disappointment that comes to each life.