In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

21: What Causes One to Forget a Thousand—And Remember One?

21: 7ftal Causes ()ne 10 :lr'lelaXusanJ71nJ1lememher ()ne?«Thanks be to God, the world is wide, And I amgoing far from home! And I forgot in Camelot The man I loved in Rome. )) - Edna St. Vincent Millay ~writer is concerned with time and memory, wondering what encounter with another was gossamer, what remains. Who was the person who became important and why so? Was the relationship one offriendship? Love? Sex? The writer Gore Vidal said he experienced one thousand sexual encounters by the age of twenty-five. He also indicated he had known true love with only one. Why would this be so? What makes one encounter forever fresh in memory and others like negatives exposed to the sun, the subjects no longer visible? In my relationship with women, my friendship with Jo has been the longest and most significant. Petite, blond, of Dutch parents, she started work at age fifteen in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Like me, she worked afternoons while attending morning high-school classes. By eighteen she was secretary to a colonel in the Pentagon. She was 221 222 In Their Shoes nineteen when she moved to New York and we became roommates. From New York, she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a travel agent and later bought FitzPatrick Travel from the well-known maker of travel documentaries, James A. FitzPatrick. Highly successful in her work, she bought a home in Bel Aire, near the Ronald Reagans. She and I, for most of our lives geographically separated, went through marriages and social and economic changes but we always managed to meet at least once a year, in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Lima, Mexico City or at her place or mine. Her friendship has been a ballast to me. Since we have been supportive of one another, knowing her has been like being on a ship sailing smooth seas. On the other hand, my relationships with men often provided pain and shocks of recognition. They thus became learning experiences. From my years with Andy, I learned that what I thought I would surely remember, I do not. I presumed I would always keep in my mind the moments of our sexual togetherness. What about those thousand or so nights we put our bodies down beside one another and those moments I presumed, at the time, were made in Heaven? Why did they all evaporate? And what remains? Once I suffered fourth-degree burns. A doctor came to our house and instructed Andy how to apply a medication. Andy then gingerly, tenderly touched my skin and in those moments I felt intimate with him. Perhaps intimacy comes when one feels most vulnerable. It comes as an unexpected gift. It is like a poem. You undergo an experience and later there is the poem of the intimacy, fully revealed. When the Mexican smuggler and I were fleeing from police across a crime-infested area from Tijuana into San Diego neither of us had our minds on sex and yet when we lay hidden from police, each of us afraid and vulnerable, I felt intimate with him. In 1995 I went alone to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and early one morning I lay on a bed outside What Causes One to Fot;get a Thousand-And Remember One? 223 an operating room. "Hello," said a voice beside me. It was Dr. Raymond Lee, whom I had met the previous day. Aware of my great love of travel, he talked to me about Italy. "The Renaissance-wasn't that marvelous?" He was more than a surgeon trained to cut and sew. He gave me the wonderful sensation of our embarking-togetheron a journey. Casually he said, "Are you ready? I will roll you in." In that moment I felt intimate with him. In Seoul, I learned how I as a woman tried to ride a vehicle called love to give my life meaning. As to why I devised this scenario, I credit the Alabama general who spoke so pejoratively about Koreans, saying they were "hardly off their all-fours." He termed them "gooks" and inferior "because they are members of the colored race." At that time Bill Shinn was no more than a name on a slip ofpaper given to me by an Associated Press friend in New York. "Call our Korean stringer there," he had suggested. After returning from the 38th Parallel to Seoul...