I’ve been cleaning out my files and my bookshelves. It is long past time for me to do this. I’ve allowed old age piles to accumulate untended. My stepdaughter, who does not know how to self-edit, told me I had to clean my shit out. She was/is right. Although I have not finished, I have a lot of donating and throwing out yet to accomplish, I’ve discovered some mostly forgotten memories in the files I’ve chosen to discard.
Simultaneous to this task, I have been alerted to an article (Past Imperfect) in the April 5, 2021 New Yorker about Elizabeth Loftus, a research psychologist who has testified in the trials of some pretty famous bad guys like Harvey Weinstein, Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson as a critic of recovered memories. She’s not so sure that all of the #metoo-ers have actually recovered accurate memories of Weinstein’s harassment and abuse toward them. She’s not sure that recovered memories are real at all. A co-researcher of Loftus says of her, “she obliterated the idea that there is a permanent, stable memory capacity in humans.” They might be (and Loftus is careful to equivocate as she herself cannot be sure of the accuracy of others’ memories or her own) the result of suggestion on the part of advisors or attorneys. They might be the result of an assured opinion by someone with power over a child or other vulnerable person. I’ve been both troubled by this article and reassured. It has made me much more curious and unsure about my own memories.
There is a particular subject about which I am curious. Loftus lost her mother at age 14 to suicide or accidental drowning. No one has ever been able to be sure about the cause of her death. What was on her mother’s mind? Was it intentional suicide? Was it something else? Loftus has never been able to make up her own mind and, while the article suggests a direct link between this unsureness and Loftus’ work, she does not make that link. My own unsureness is about a person, a man whom I loved, who had a recurring place in my life through my early 40s and still sometimes haunts my dreams. His and my story is not tragic. He lives, as he has for many years, in a western state with a wife and a step-child. He was my boyfriend, never an exclusive one, in high school and the first year of college. He loved me, of this I’m sure, more than I cared for him during those years. It was the years after that that I’m not sure sure about. Thank you Elizabeth Loftus.
The story I’ve told is this. Elliott (I’ll call him Elliott for his own privacy) called me when he learned I was to marry someone else my sophomore year in college. He tried to talk me out of it. He said that he loved me. I was not dissuaded. According to my brothers, he came to my wedding drunk. I never saw Elliott drunk. I never saw him take a drink. So, this is already hearsay. They, my brothers, would not let him into the church, because he was drunk. Again, according to them, he climbed a tree and moaned to himself throughout the ceremony. I did not see him when my new husband and I emerged from the church and did not hear the story until sometime later. Did I make up this story from my brothers? Did Elliott, in fact, appear, or is this something I wish had happened?
As the story continues I rely on an essay published in 1989 in Minneapolis Magazine that I wrote about this boyfriend. According to the essay, Elliott wrote or called me frequently for the first few years of my marriage and then gradually faded from my life. This seems plausible, but is gone from my memory. What I do remember is that he did not fade from my psyche. With each hurt imposed by an unfaithful husband, I would recall how much Elliott loved me. He didn’t marry. He lived in my heart as the person I should have chosen.
When my husband and I divorced after 18 years of marriage, I wanted to find Elliott. The essay says my brother Nick helped me. I remember that he did. He’d seen Elliott somewhere on his own business travels and thought he lived in California. I knew that Elliott’s younger brother worked as an environmental lobbyist in Washington D.C. and I called him. The brother told me (again, I think this is true) that Elliott was in the same western city where he had lived for years, and gave me his number.
I called him. We reconnected by telephone. There was no Facebook to see a current picture, or Facetime or Zoom. Within a month we were pledging our love and planning to be together. I had a business trip to his city perhaps three months later and we were to meet before that conference. We met at the airport. We had a lovely dinner in a fancy restaurant and went back to my motel room for a fumbling first attempt at intimacy. It was awkward and unromantic.
After the conference, I went to Elliott’s house for a few days. What I remember about those few days was that nothing about me pleased him. I was too thin. I didn’t move in bed in a way that worked for him. I didn’t eat the proper food. When I got on the plane back to Minneapolis, I felt sad and abused. It should have ended there but it didn’t.
We met perhaps four more times, all at my apartment in Minneapolis. Then he disappeared. I think I was finally ready to give up, to have him disappear when he did so. Still he haunted my dreams for years afterward, and still has. Recently I dreamed that I was looking for him on an island that flooded while I was there. My real-life swimming skills saved me in the torrential rain and waves of the flood. Finally reaching dry ground, I saw him at a distance. He saw me but made no response. Later in the dream I was taken to some venue to hear him give a lecture. He never showed. When I awoke I was relieved and peaceful. He didn’t show up in my post-marriage life in any positive, nurturing way. Good riddance.
I talked to him one more time about a year after he disappeared. He called to ask me a question about my experience with a period of heavy drinking. A friend of his was in the same situation. He said he’d been afraid to call, but now that he was talking to me he was glad he had called. I said “Now that I am talking to you I have one thing to say — Go fuck yourself.”
That part of my memory is clear, and even if it is an inaccurate, recovered memory, I’m OK with it.
