Arbitrage

One afternoon in 1973, during the Indian summer days of my first semester of graduate school, I went to visit a girl who had invited me to her studio after a seminar. She had invited me for tea, but I assumed that it was really for something else, only to find, when we sat down on her sofa, that I’d actually been invited to help her write an overdue paper on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Seeing that I showed signs of reluctance, her features became flustered, and, without warning, she burst out sobbing. I felt sorry for her and held her in my arms until the crying subsided. When I finally agreed to help, she got up swiftly, disappeared into the kitchen, took out an old-fashioned kettle, and put some water on to boil. Then she led me to a gnarled wooden table that stood against a wall, pulled out two chairs, and, after lighting a cigarette, which made me think that we would be working on this together for quite some time, suddenly stubbed it out, remembering that she had plans to see someone else that evening. Would I mind terribly helping with the paper while she was gone? Sullenly I said I didn’t mind. An uncomfortable moment of silence passed between us. I was welcome to wait for her if I wanted, she offered as she hastily slipped on her coat. A few seconds later the large glass panel on the front door downstairs gave a loud, resounding clank.

Still dazed by the speed with which one thing had led to another, I thought about how she had folded a baby-blue paper napkin and set it ever so gently under my teaspoon, saying, with goading irony, before rushing to the door, For the sugar, for the tea, for the writer, as if to suggest with this tiny gesture of solicitude that she wasn’t the inconsiderate sort. I lit a cigarette and let my eyes roam around the tiny studio she had frequently mentioned on our walks but which corresponded to nothing I had expected. From her table, I looked out onto the corner of Mount Auburn and Linden Streets, as the approaching late-summer evening was slowly settling on the adjoining rooftops, and a crowd of students was straggling back from the libraries, some headed for an early dinner. The studio, small, cluttered, and overheated despite the open windows, seemed strangely trusting, candid, and, like a child who’s been told to entertain a stranger while Mother’s getting dressed upstairs, it dutifully reminded me to help myself to anything I pleased: make more tea, look for treats—there were bound to be things, she’d said, indicating the icebox and a tiny kitchen cabinet, which she had flung open both to encourage me to do likewise when she was gone and to indicate, with feigned absentmindedness, that its contents were as unfamiliar to her as they’d be to anyone who happened to drop by. It took me a while to realize that her exaggerated ignorance of her kitchen was simply her way of showing that she was casual about everything else in her life.

Everything she owned was on show: her notebooks, her sweaters, Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion clumsily splayed on the floor, a striped ironing board standing next to her bed, a Greek icon, and a domed photo enlarger relegated to the periphery of the room like a demoted hanger-on. Among this scatter of objects was the teapot, over which she had placed a quilted tea cozy. In the cloying comfort of the hot room, the presence of that unusual piece of quilting suddenly thrust me back a decade earlier to the languid fin d’été world of my childhood in Alexandria, where my aging after-school tutors, who began wearing wool early in the fall each year, had sipped tea at my desk. The tiny studio now felt so familiar, so welcoming in its Old World warmth, that I almost forgot it belonged to a flamboyant jet-setter with whom every man in our class claimed to have had the same adventure.

And so, as I poured the tea the way my tutors had done, I began to feel not happy but exceptionally sheltered and snug in this studio. I wanted to be there for a long time and neglected even to take myself to task for not having seized the moment when I’d held her in my arms, knowing that she’d have kissed me passionately if only I’d been bolder. I liked this room. I knew this room. Perhaps a tiny part of me was already lodged here and wished to come back again and again in the days to come, in search of that moment just after sunset when, switching on the first light and letting the windows turn to mirrors against the darkening sky, I’d watch Cambridge disappear and Alexandria rise suddenly upon the windowpanes.

The paper on “Tintern Abbey” was not difficult to write. I had written my own paper a week before and had already said all I could think of saying about the poem, so this was to be done more in the spirit of an evening ramble, something I didn’t really have to write and wouldn’t be graded on. Part of me didn’t much care how good it was, especially since I was feeling a tad spiteful. And yet there was a moment of inspiration, though I hadn’t quite registered it yet—something in Wordsworth and me and this girl and this studio and the act of recognizing all too readily now, years after leaving Egypt, years after reading Proust and Leopardi, the unmistakable signals that a memory was about to blossom there.

While I was writing, I’d get up every once in a while, to drink some water, go to the bathroom, or snoop around the studio. I remember how scant the light was and how startling it seemed to me, even at the time, that this strange, dark, quiet room and this girl and the student I was then were in many more ways than I realized tied together by a poem by Wordsworth entitled “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.”

On the eve of Bastille Day, July 13, 1798, the twenty-eight-year-old Wordsworth went with his sister to Tintern Abbey, on the Wye River, a place that he had already visited five years before. That same evening, Wordsworth sat down to write a poem celebrating his return:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion …

The poem he writes, however, celebrates not only the present moment but also his previous visit in 1793, as well as the future memory of both visits.

While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years …

Wordsworth fears losing that future memory, and at the end of the poem he tells his sister, if he dies, she should remember their visit for him.

Nor, perchance—

If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service …

Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, it occurred to me, was doing more or less what I was doing in this girl’s room: firming up the present by experiencing it as a memory, by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past. What Wordsworth remembers at Tintern Abbey is not the past but himself in the past imagining the future; and what he looks forward to is not even the future but himself, in the future, retrieving the bone he buried in the past. He purchases at the Exchange of Time what he sells at the Exchange of Place, knowing that, at the end of the transaction, he’ll borrow from Place to purchase from Time to sell back to Place all over again.

This, in the world of finance, is called “arbitrage”: the purchase of securities in one market for resale in another. As soon as a profit is made, the cycle starts again, with subsequent purchases sometimes paid for with unrealized credit drawn from previous sales. In such transactions, one never really sells a commodity, much less takes delivery of anything. One merely speculates, and seldom does any of it have anything to do with the real world. Arbitrageurs have seats on not one but two exchanges, the way the very wealthy have homes not in one but two time zones, or exiles two homes in the wrong places. One always longs for the other home, but home, as one learns soon enough, is a place where one imagines or remembers other homes.

Wordsworth was quite given to such mnemonic arbitrage. He builds on air, the way futures traders speculate on margin; he grounds the present on the past, and the future on the past recaptured. His system is elliptical: to use focus A you need to establish focus B, but to establish B you need A. The very act of anticipating an epiphany becomes the epiphany itself.

In some cases, Wordsworth even layered the anticipation of that epiphany with the recollection of similar anticipations, and hence similar epiphanies, in the past. When Wordsworth went to Tintern Abbey in 1793, he was probably already remembering a trip he’d made to Wales in 1791. This, in turn, suggests that in 1798, when he finally composed “Tintern Abbey,” he was echoing an earlier mnemonic experience. He was not just remembering. He was remembering remembering. His final visit to Tintern Abbey, incidentally, was to take place in 1841. In that year Wordsworth did not write a poem. What we have instead are these words from a letter he sent to his friend Robinson:

Thence we came along the Wye the banks of which noble river I was truly glad to revisit—to Tintern Abbey where last Tuesday we had the great pleasure of meeting Miss Fenwick and Dora.

From the man who wrote what is arguably the most moving poem in English Romantic literature, and probably the most eloquent poem on memory ever written, this sounds almost intentionally flat. Perhaps it was not intentional at all. Perhaps this is simply how an aging and bewildered Wordsworth responded to a situation that had become far too gnarled for his poetic imagination. Wordsworth had already written his elegy on returning to Tintern Abbey. To write about Tintern Abbey again in 1841 he would have had to write a poem invoking not only his present visit but also his 1793 and 1798 visits (and possibly his 1791 visit). And Wordsworth, as his Yarrow tryptich shows, was incapable of seeing the elaborate implications of his poems beyond a certain point.

I finished the essay on Wordsworth and, after tearing off the striped yellow sheets of paper and stapling them neatly on the girl’s table, I proceeded to the next page of the notebook. Without giving the matter any thought, I began to write a story about going back to a place that was my own Tintern Abbey: Alexandria.

In the story, a young man returns to Alexandria. This, however, is by no means a momentous return journey. He is back in Alexandria because the ship on which he was sailing to Greece has made an unscheduled stop for repairs. While minor work is being done to the vessel, he decides to take advantage of the fortuitous layover and proceeds to stroll about a city he knew a decade before. He is wearing dark flannel trousers and a rumpled white shirt. For lack of anywhere else to go, he finds himself drawn to the city’s Jewish cemetery, where he decides to visit his grandfather’s grave. The road is very dusty, as all unpaved Mediterranean roads are.

Standing outside the Jewish cemetery, he taps at the gate, hears no answer, and taps again, harder. Finally, the warden grumbles behind the door and opens it. The place looks exactly as he remembered it: a row of trees, a gravel path, a pebbled alleyway between the graves, and serene morning silence within. He glances around at the old tombstones and then—perhaps to make conversation—asks the aging caretaker how he makes ends meet, given that there are no visitors or Jewish “clients” left in Alexandria. The warden points to an old Coca-Cola icebox. Students heading to and from the university sometimes come in for a Coke. This is Alexandria’s cemetery row, and people stop by. As they talk, the young man hears the cackle of a brood of chickens picking their way between the graves. Like many Bedouins in Egypt, the warden also earns a living by selling fresh eggs.

The young man and the warden proceed to look for the grandfather’s grave. Neither of them has any idea where to find it. On impulse, the man thinks back to the last time he went to the cemetery—with his father, ten years before—and, as if by a miracle, he finds himself threading between the odd-shaped tombstones suddenly locating the one he is looking for. It occurs to him as he stares at the inscription on the marble that, unless he makes an effort to remember where it is, he’ll never be able to find this grave again, should he return in years to come. The notion amuses him, because he doubts he’ll ever come back again.

The warden, who had gone back into his hut, returns with a bucket of water to clean the marble slab. The young man pours the water slowly, going at the task with unexpected zeal, perhaps in order to avoid asking himself why he’s come here at all or what he expected to find. He gives the warden’s son some change and asks him to get a Coca-Cola. The boy rushes behind the hut and comes back, holding a bottle awkwardly in both hands, as though he were carrying a struggling hen by the neck. Once the young man is in possession of the bottle, he does something he remembers his father telling him he should never do: he places it on the gleaming flat marble, heaves himself up, and sits on the warm slab. It is a beautiful sunny day. He is sweating. He knows it will only get hotter. He lights a cigarette. His feet are dangling from his perch. He could just as easily be sitting on the edge of a swimming pool.

And as the young man sits on the slab under the scant shade offered by a palm tree, his thoughts turn to the beach, to the beaches of Egypt especially, and to how he has remembered them over the last ten years, first from Italy and then from New York. He realizes suddenly, in a sort of delayed double take, that if he looks over the cemetery wall he will see his favorite body of water in the world, lying scarcely two minutes away.

The last time he stood by this marble slab, he remembers, he was thinking about Italy, a country he feared and had never seen. His father had already purchased their tickets on an Italian liner, and an uncle had promised to meet them in Naples. Now, thinking about Egypt’s beaches makes him long for the fountains of Rome, especially on those dry, scorching Italian summer days when a fountain is all the beach an impoverished exile can get.

During our three years in Italy immediately following our expulsion from Egypt, my parents had so little money that my mother had to alter my father’s old clothes for me. The task kept her busy for weeks. He owned several pairs of flannel trousers, and these were the easiest to spare. Thus, I found myself, like the young man of my story, wearing thick gray wool trousers into late spring each year, and I came to dread their unbearable prickly nap, especially when it grew hot, learning to read in my discomfort the first, unmistakable hints of summer. One day, years later, wearing wool trousers in New York, I felt a flush of almost sexual pleasure course along my thighs: it was not that I liked the heat but that it suddenly brought me back to those days in Rome when the pall of wool would send me in search of a fountain, where I could entertain the illusion that I was one step closer to the beach in Egypt and—if the illusion lasted—to our summer house, to my friends and my relatives, and to an entire world I longed to recover: the city I had known as a child, the smells, the heat, the cast of light, the taste of ripe fruit on summer mornings, the sound of a car rolling on gravel with its engine turned off, even the sounds of the flies and of itinerant vendors, or of the city on crowded squares after Sunday Mass. All I needed during those years in Italy was a mild sense of thirst, wool pants, and a quiet, watery spot that muffled the sound of the city and gave the impression that if the day were clearer, a luminous Alexandria would surface suddenly, like the wide expanse of sea facing Xenophon’s soldiers on their desperate journey back through Asia Minor. I learned to love Rome the roundabout way, by investing in it the nostalgia I felt for my first home, and the wool, the heat, and the sweat were as welcome a price to pay as is the foul odor of horse dung around Claremont Stable on West Eighty-ninth Street to a new city dweller who spent his childhood on a farm.

This is mnemonic arbitrage. Not only did I discover in a girl’s studio in Cambridge a sensation I had experienced in Rome that evoked Alexandria but, in writing about Egypt in New York City years after that, I found myself remembering impressions that took me back not to Alexandria but to Rome, and ultimately to Cambridge.

Reverse arbitrage is no less unwieldy: when I eventually returned to Egypt in 1995, I caught myself looking at my beloved Mediterranean through tiny side streets and felt a sudden yearning for West End Avenue, looking toward the Hudson River through 106th Street—which had become my dearest spot on earth precisely because it reminded me of Alexandria. I was, in Alexandria, homesick for a place from which I had learned to re-create Alexandria, the way the rabbis, in exile, were forced to reinvent their homeland on paper, only to find, perhaps, that they worshipped the paper more than the homeland or the way that prisoners who express their love for the free world by painting its portrait on their cell wall come to worship the wall and not the world.

In my story at the cemetery, when the sun grows too oppressive, the young man gets down from his perch and heads toward the warden’s hut. Guessing that the warden hasn’t been tipped in recent years, he puts his hand in his pocket and gives the man a twenty-dollar bill—probably more than a month’s salary for the warden, who accepts it reluctantly and offers the young man another Coke in return. The young man is reminded of the unfair exchange of armor between Glaucus and Diomedes and accepts the Coke.

But then the warden goes back into the hut and comes out with a tiny object, wrapped in what looks like an old kerchief. It’s an antique silver cigarette lighter, with an inscription. Probably left behind by a Jewish mourner years before. Perhaps that mourner had come back in the same way, dawdled about for a while, smoked a cigarette, and then left, forgetting the lighter To the young man’s surprise, the inscription on the lighter bears all three of his initials He knows that the lighter isn’t his. He has never owned such a lighter. Had the other gentleman left it for him? The young man had come to the cemetery in search of something; this is what he found.

Campy, to be sure, but this is the mystery, or the epiphany, my imagination concocted on that Indian-summer night in Cambridge. It would take me years to understand the meaning of the gift I had invented. The lighter could only have belonged to the young man—who was, of course, me. He/I had returned to the cemetery before though we hadn’t realized it. We had been taking turns going back there every day for years, each time leaving our lighter in the Bedouin’s care to remind each other that part of us would be forever left behind in Egypt, that part of us had never and would never take the ship.

I never really finished the story. On another Indian-summer afternoon, four years later, I picked it up again, and looking at its faded canary sheets, I could recollect exactly where I’d been sitting in that studio on Linden Street. I remembered the cast of light, the heat, and my unsettling sense that I’d been had that day. I labored over the story for two months, before finally abandoning it. It had become too elaborate, clothed in too many memories as in the history of its own revisions.

I returned to it once more under different circumstances on yet another warm Indian-summer day in a different city. I was sitting on a terrace and had used writing about my return to a sunny day in Egypt as a way of re-creating an imaginary summer day in childhood. It was when I turned my chair away from the sun that I suddenly recalled that the sun’s glare in Egypt is so powerful that you are forced to squint or avoid looking directly at anything, which is why you can’t stare at the sea and why the act of not seeing the sea was the surest sign that there was in fact so vast a body of water nearby.

In the story as I rewrote it that day, the young man is reminded of the beaches of his childhood, not because his legs are dangling as they would at a swimming pool, but because the glare from the marble tombstone leaves him momentarily blinded.

It’s possible that my love for the splendid vistas of the sea began not, as I have always liked to think, on the beaches of Alexandria, but on that terrace, just as I learned to love the sun, not as a native, but as a tourist, not in June, but in October. I wanted to take this love, which had blossomed in Rome, in New York, and in Cambridge, and graft it back onto the city I had known as a child. I wanted to repatriate my memories, ship everything back home, including the history of my apprenticeship that Indian-summer evening, when, through the long and roundabout passageways of memory, I brought almost everything I had known and become into one room

I wrote around this story for two decades. Over the years, it was the one story I thought about whenever I thought of writing; it hovered over me like an unclaimed ghost begging for an honorable burial. More insidiously, that unfinished story gradually changed the meaning of writing for me. My inability to rewrite the story mirrored my inability to return to Egypt, and I began to feel that the acts of writing and returning were bound in such intricate ways that without returning I would never be able to write anything at all, but that returning would close the book on Egypt before I’d done so on paper.

Egypt itself had become a metaphor. Losing Egypt, reclaiming Egypt, or even trying to forget Egypt, was no less of a metaphor than writing about it I had invented another Egypt, a mirror Egypt, an Egypt meant to be speculated about, an Egypt that stood beyond time, because although it gave every indication of having been lost, there was scant evidence that it had ever existed, an Egypt I kept frozen, tucked, secret, cosseted, an Egypt “on margin,” an Egypt “on spec,” an Egypt I “castled” with every other place I might have called home, an Egypt from the past that kept intruding on the present to remind me, among so many other things, that if I loved summoning the past more than the past I summoned up, and if it was not really Egypt I loved but remembering Egypt, this was also because my trouble was no longer with Egypt but with life itself. Not knowing how to let go of things was nothing more than the mirror image of not knowing how to take them when they were offered, for my deepest fear of all, which came to me obliquely that evening in Cambridge as I thought of Wordsworth and of this girl whose life seemed so rooted in the present, was of living directly under the noonday sun, without the shadows of past or future.

Many years later, walking with my brother on the Upper West Side one Sunday afternoon, I tried to explain to him how standing on that spot on West End Avenue looking toward the Hudson reminded me so much of our childhood and how I felt closer to him there than I had in a long time, but I sensed that he had no patience for this and fell silent.

I wanted to tell my brother that this spot on West End Avenue would always be special to me, that in years to come I’d make a point of returning here, that if I failed to come back again he should remember it for me. I wanted to tell him that I had learned all this, not in Egypt, not in Italy, not in Cambridge, not in New York, but in Wordsworth, and that if I ever wrote my book about Egypt I already knew I would have to end it with Wordsworth, with my brother and me standing in Alexandria, looking out to sea, already thinking of that evening when, years hence, whether in Europe or in America, we’d think back on our last night in Alexandria and, if we could, catch our own gaze going out the other way.

But my brother had no use for Egypt as metaphor. That evening I looked at “Tintern Abbey” in an old Scott Foresman anthology of British literature I had purchased on my last day of school before leaving Egypt. I had used the same volume in my senior year in Rome, as well as in a freshman course in college, but for me the poem is forever locked in that one evening in Cambridge, where, after writing a paper for a girl and emptying my third cup of Earl Grey from an old teapot she had placed on the table for me, I looked out the window over that strange darkened side street, from which dun-colored tones of dusk had crept over everything in the room, and rather than put my pen away, perhaps because I wanted an excuse to stay a little longer, or perhaps because I had just seen a connection that came to me in the form of a parable, I began scribbling a tale which, over the years, evolved into a book not just about memories of Egypt but about all the times I had remembered Egypt once I had left Egypt. I wrote this story both to remember Egypt and to put Egypt behind me, but also to revisit all those times when I’d looked for Egypt in Italy or in Cambridge or in New York, in Wordsworth, in Dante, in Homer or Proust

In October 1995, after the publication of Out of Egypt, I finally did go back to Alexandria and decided to visit the Jewish cemetery, not just for my grandfather’s and my father’s sakes but also as a way of returning to a scene I had imagined in Cambridge almost twenty years earlier. Uncannily enough, everything I had invented in the short story was borne out by experience: the warden, my inability to locate the grave, the washing of the tombstone, the silence around me, the warden’s child, the dog, and the dusty, dusty road. When I did eventually find the tombstone, it was only because I remembered how I’d discovered it in the story. I had returned to fiction—or had, at least, stepped into a realm where memory and imagination traded places with the dizzying agility of an entrechat.

There were a few differences: there was no slab on which to sit and enjoy the warm autumnal light that afternoon. Nor was there anything to drink. I tried to think about the meaning of my visit and about the decades I’d spent waiting for it, and I tried to decide—as though such decisions meant anything—which of the many places I’d lived in felt more real to me now that I’d finally seen Egypt again. I didn’t know the answer. I thought of the lighter with my initials and of the Coca-Cola stand, of dark flannel trousers on warm sunny days, of Rome and of Linden Street, and of the girl in whose studio this tale was born more than a quarter of a century ago. I thought of Earl Grey tea, and of my tutors, and of the spoon she had placed so deftly to my right before saying goodbye. I had brought all these images with me, as if to free each one here, the way ornithologists, having studied and labeled various birds in their laboratories in North America, will travel all the way back to the Amazon to release them in their natural habitat. I had come to place each one like a tiny pebble at my grandfather’s grave, already sensing, as in “The Parable of the Talents,” that I had perhaps been a false steward for them, one “who has much received and renders nothing back” I had stood and waited too long. Was this all I had to show for the years? All I could think of were Wordsworth’s own words: Was it for this?

Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song …

I did not want to answer the question. I did not want to be with the dead. I suddenly wished I were elsewhere again.

When I had finished writing, that evening in Cambridge many years ago, and was about to head home, I went over to the girl’s kitchen sink to wash my mug, but stopped short of doing so, depositing the mug in the sink instead, after rinsing it somewhat, to show that I was civil but not servile.

I remember, in the adjoining room, her bed undone. I remember the scent of her crumpled sheets when I leaned over and touched them, as though they held deep secrets that I would never dare to ask about. And, as I surveyed her room, I thought to myself that it would take very little to persuade me to wait for her, especially since she had said I could, for I already knew not only that one day soon we would sleep together on this bed, between these very sheets, but that on the night when this did happen I’d look back on this moment when I stood up from the table, feeling quite pleased with myself and, stepping toward her bed, swore to remember that, while thinking about Tintern Abbey and Alexandria and this girl and this bed and these sheets and everything else I wished to write about, I had also committed an act of arbitrage. I had marked this moment as one of those to which I knew I’d return many times over, and not just on our first night together but in future years as well, and in other homes, perhaps with other women, and in other cities, or in Alexandria itself, who knows, because it was not even this moment, or this place, or this girl that mattered anymore but how I’d woven my desire to live and be happy with each, and that even if nothing were to happen in my life to make me happy, the very act of thinking back on things could, in the end, make me no less happy than an experienced Ulysses waking up in Ithaca still thinking of the journey home.