I tried to fight my way back toward Sallie, tried to regain contact. “I haven’t figured everything out yet. I can’t figure out why I hate myself more than anyone else in the world. It doesn’t make sense to me. Even if Mom and Dad were monsters, I should have come out of it with some kind of respect for myself as a survivor, if nothing else. I should have at least come out of it honest, but I’m the most dishonest person I’ve ever met. I never know exactly how I feel about something. There’s always something secret hidden from me.”
“You don’t need to know the absolute truth. No one does. You only need to know enough to get along.”
“No, Sallie,” I said, stopping in the water suddenly and turning her toward me, my hands on her shoulders. “That’s what I did before. I got along with my part of the truth and it caught up with me. Let’s leave South Carolina. Let’s get out of here. I’ll never get a job in this state again. Too many people know the name Wingo and they don’t like what it stands for.”
Sallie lowered her eyes and tucked my hands into hers. But she looked directly at me when she said, “I don’t want to leave Charleston, Tom. I have a wonderful job and I love our house and our friends. Why do you want to throw even the good things away?”
“Because they aren’t so good to me anymore, because I don’t believe in my life here anymore.”
“But I believe in mine.”
“And you make the money,” I said, embarrassed at how bitter I sounded, how preening, how male.
“You said that, not me, Tom.”
“I’m sorry. Truly I am. I don’t want to go to New York. I don’t even want to see Savannah. I’m furious, absolutely furious at her that she tried it again. I’m angry that she’s crazy and is allowed to be as crazy as she needs to be. I envy her craziness. But I know she expects me to be there when she starts slicing herself. It’s the old dance and I know all the steps.”
“Then don’t go,” Sallie said, slipping away from me again.
“I have to go. You know that. It’s the only role I really play well. The hero of the hour. The gallant knight. The jobless Galahad. It’s the fatal flaw of all Wingos. Except Mom. She gives dinner parties planned for months and can’t be bothered with suicide attempts by her children.”
“You blame your parents for so much, Tom. When does it start becoming your own responsibility? When do you take your life into your own hands? When do you start accepting the blame or credit for your own actions?”
“I don’t know, Sallie. I can’t figure it out. I can’t make anything whole out of it. I don’t know what it all means.”
She turned away from me and resumed walking up the beach again, slightly ahead of me.
“It’s hurting us, Tom.”
“I know,” I admitted, trying to catch up to her. I took her hand and squeezed it, but there was no return pressure. “To my surprise, I’m not a good husband. I once thought I’d be a great one. Charming, sensitive, loving, and attentive to my wife’s every need. I’m sorry, Sallie. I haven’t been good for you in such a long time. It’s a source of great pain. I want to be better. I’m so cold, so secretive. I swear I’ll do better once we leave this state.”
“I’m not going to leave this state,” she said definitively. “I’m perfectly happy living here. This is my home, where I belong.”
“What are you saying, Sallie?”
“I’m saying that what makes you happy doesn’t necessarily make me happy. I’m saying that I’m thinking things over, too. I’m trying to figure things out, too. I’m trying to figure things out between us. It doesn’t seem so good anymore.”
“Sallie, this is a bad time to be saying this.”
“It hasn’t been the same between us since Luke,” she said.
“Nothing’s been the same,” I said.
“There’s something you forgot to do about Luke, Tom,” she said.
“What was that?” I said.
“You forgot to cry,” Sallie said.
I looked up the beach toward the lighthouse. Then back across the harbor at the lights on James Island.
Sallie continued, “There’s no statute of limitations on your sadness. It’s impenetrable. You’ve cut me out of your life completely.”
“Do you mind if we change the subject?” I asked, and there was a mean edge to my voice.
Sallie said, “The subject is us. The subject is whether you’ve stopped loving me, Tom.”
“I just learned that my sister tried to kill herself,” I shouted.
She answered firmly, “No, you just learned that your wife doesn’t think you love her anymore.”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked, but I felt her urgency, her need to reach an untouchable place in me.
She was close to tears when she said, “The words are easy. Try this: I love you, Sallie, and I don’t think I could live for a single day without you.”
But there was something in her eyes and voice trying to deliver a far darker message, and I said, “There’s something else.”
Sallie began to weep gently and there was both despair and betrayal in her voice. “Not something else, Tom,” she said, “someone else.”
“Jesus Christ,” I screamed at the lights of the Isle of Palms. “First Savannah and now this!”
But Sallie said behind me, “This is the first time you’ve even looked at me in months. I have to say I’m having an affair just so my goddamn husband’ll notice I’m alive.”
“Oh, Jesus, Sallie. Oh, no, please,” I whispered, staggering backward, away from her.
“I was going to tell you when the time was right. I hate to tell you now. But you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I won’t leave. I can’t leave like this.”
“I want you to leave, Tom. I want to find out how serious I am about this. If it’s real or not. I might even be doing this to hurt you. I’m not sure.”
“May I ask you who it is?”
“No. Not yet.”
“I promise not to do anything untoward or barbaric. At least until I get back from New York. I’d like to know.”
“It’s Dr. Cleveland.”
“Oh, no!” I screamed. “Not that pompous, intolerable asshole. For christsakes, Sallie, he rides a motorcycle and smokes a meerschaum pipe, a goddamn meerschaum pipe.”
“He’s better than that second-rate cheerleader you had a fling with,” she answered furiously.
“I knew you’d say that. I knew that seductive jackass with the big tits would come back to haunt me for the rest of my life. I’m sorry for that, Sallie. I’m so sorry. I was stupid. Stupid, stupid.”
“That hurt me more than you’ll ever know.”
“I begged you to forgive me, Sallie. I’m begging you now. I did it, and God knows, I’ve suffered for it and I promised on my knees I’d never do it again.”
“You don’t have to keep that promise now, Tom. Dr. Cleveland is in love with me, too.”
“Well, bully for Doctor Cleveland. Has Doctor Cleveland told Mrs. Cleveland, that sad, bovine pillar of the community?”
“No, not yet. He’s waiting for the right time. Both of us want to make sure. We don’t want to hurt people needlessly.”
“Grand-spirited people. Let me ask you something, Sal-lie. When your little beeper goes off at night and you’re called off to the hospital for one of those innumerable little emergencies, are you sometimes driving over to inspect the good doctor’s meerschaum?”
“That’s disgusting, Tom, and you know it.”
“I want to know if you both abuse the magic beeper, that holiest, most obnoxious symbol of the doctor as asshole in America.”
“Yes!” she shouted at me. “I’ve done it a couple of times. When there was no other way. And I’d do it again if there was no other way.”
I felt an irresistible desire to strike her, felt the ghost of a violent father assume dominion over the blood, felt his surge into power around the heart; my fists clenched, and for a moment I fought with all my strength against the man
it was my birthright to be. I controlled myself and sent my father into exile again. I loosened my fists. I breathed and cried, “Is it because I’m getting fat, Sallie? Please tell me it’s that. Or because I’m losing my hair? Or maybe it’s because I’ve told you I’ve got a little dick. You know, I’m one of the few men in America who’ll admit he’s got a little pecker. I only told you that because you always felt so bad about having small breasts.”
“My breasts are not that small.”
“Neither is my poor slandered penis.”
It surprised me when Sallie laughed. There was something pure in her sense of humor that she could not control even in the most serious moments in her life. Her laughter was intimately related to her generosity and could not be suppressed.
“See, there’s hope, Sallie. You still think I’m funny. And I happen to know for a fact that the last time Cleveland laughed was right after Woodrow Wilson was elected president.”
“He’s only eleven years older than we are.”
“Hah! A different generation. I hate old men who ride motorcycles. I hate young men who ride motorcycles.”
Sallie sniffed the air defensively. “He’s an aficionado. He only collects British motorcycles.”
“Please spare me the details. Don’t tell me you’re leaving me for a guy who collects meerschaum pipes and British motorcycles. I’d feel better if you left me for a tattoo man at the circus, a waterbaby, or a dwarf on a unicycle.”
“I didn’t say I was leaving you, Tom. I said I was thinking about it. I’ve found somebody who thinks I’m wonderful.”
“You are wonderful,” I whined.
“Let’s not discuss it any more tonight, Tom. It was hard enough to tell you, and I certainly didn’t want to add to your troubles.”
“Hah!” I laughed bitterly, kicking a wave. “A mere trifle, my dear.”
We said nothing for a long while. Then Sallie said, “I’m going to go back to the house to kiss the girls good night. Do you want to come?”
“I’ll come up to kiss’ them good night later. I’ll stay out here a little while. I need to think about everything.”
Sallie said to me in a tender voice, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened to the fighter I married.”
“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Luke happened.”
She hugged me suddenly, fiercely, and kissed me on the throat, but in the full flower of righteousness, I was both patriot and helot of the male ego; with the patriarchal rectitude of the scorned male, I could not return that kiss or retrieve any value for that moment of grace. Sallie turned unkissed and walked down the beach toward our house.
I began to run down the beach. At first it was controlled, patient, but then I started to push myself, letting it out, until I was sprinting, breaking into a sweat, and gasping for air. If I could hurt the body, I would not notice the coming apart of the soul.
As I ran, I considered the sad decline of flesh. I struggled to increase the speed and remembered how once I was the fastest quarterback in South Carolina. Blond and swift, I would come out of backfields with linemen thundering toward me in slow-footed ecstasy as I turned the corner and stepped toward the amazing noise of crowds, then lowered my head and dazzled myself with instinctive moves that lived in some fast, sweet place within me. But I never wept when I ran in high school games. Now I ran heavily, desperately, away from the wife who had taken a lover because I had failed her as lover, away from the sister too quick with blades, away from the mother who did not understand the awful history of mothers and sons. I was running away from that history, I thought—that bitter, outrageous slice of Americana that was my own failed life—or toward a new phase of that history. I slowed down, sweating, exhausted. I began walking toward the house.
2
It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there. On every visit I find myself standing on the piers, watching the splendid Hudson River flooding by and the noise of the city to my back, and I know what no New Yorker I’ve ever met knows: that this island was once surrounded by deep, extraordinary marshes and estuaries, that an entire complex civilization of a salt marsh lies buried beneath the stone avenues. I do not like cities that dishonor their own marshes.
My sister, Savannah, of course, matches my contempt with her own heroic yet perverse allegiance to New York. Even the muggers, drug addicts, winos, and bag ladies, those wounded, limping souls navigating their cheerless passages through the teeming millions, are a major part of the city’s ineffable charm for her. It is these damaged birds of paradise, burnt out and sneaking past the mean alleys, that define the city’s most extreme limits for her. She finds beauty in these extremities. She carries in her breast an unshakable fealty to all these damaged veterans who survive New York on the fringes, lawless and without hope, gifted in the black arts. They are the city’s theater for her. She has written about them in her poetry; she has learned some of the black arts herself and knows well their ruined acreage.
Savannah knew she wanted to be a New Yorker long before she knew she wanted to write poetry. She was one of those southerners who were aware from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
At fifteen, she received a subscription to The New Yorker as a Christmas present from my grandmother. Each week, she waited breathlessly for her copy of the magazine to arrive, then would sit for hours laughing and giggling over the cartoons. Later, our brother, Luke, and I would stare incredulously at the same cartoons, waiting for the jokes to hit us. Things that had them whooping it up and knee slapping in New York were incomprehensible to me in Colleton, South Carolina. They were impenetrable, a kind of cuneiform of wit, and when I asked Savannah what in the hell she found so funny, she would sigh deeply and dismiss me with some withering phrase she had memorized from a previous cartoon. With Savannah as a sister, fancying herself an exiled Knickerbocker cut off from her native city by the humiliation of her birth in South Carolina, I hated New York long before I ever crossed its glorious rivers.
Savannah left South Carolina and lit out for the boroughs soon after we graduated from Colleton High School. She did it against our parents’ wishes, but she had asked for neither their permission nor their approval. She had a life to lead and an elaborate plan by which to live it, and she was seeking no advice from shrimpers or their wives who had chosen a life beside the inland waterway of South Carolina. Instinctively she knew she was a city girl and that she had learned everything about a small town she needed or wanted to know. In New York, she had chosen a city that would require a lifetime of vigilance and study, a city worthy of her gifts.
From the first day, she had loved it all: the pulse, the struggle, the unbridgeable flow of ideas and humanity, the rapture and majesty of the effort to master and tame the fabulous city into something personal and unforbidding. She took to the city on its own terms. She became a collector and archivist of genuine New York experiences. If it originated in New York, if it had the authenticity and stamp of Manhattan approval, then Savannah embraced it with the fervor of a catechist. From the very beginning she was lyrical in her advocacy of New York’s essential greatness, which she considered undeniable and beyond discussion. I denied it and discussed it obsessively.
“You’ve never lived here. You have no right to any opinion at all,” Savannah said cheerfully when Luke and I visited her in New Yo
rk for the first time.
“I’ve never lived in Peking, either,” I replied, “but I bet the city’s full of little yellow people.”
“It must be the exhaust from all these cars, Savannah,” Luke observed, watching the rush-hour traffic move toward the bridges. “It eats away the brain cells. Once the brain cells go, you start liking this shithole.”
“You’ve got to give it a chance, dimwits. Once you catch the New York fever, then nothing is ever good enough. Feel the energy of this city. Just close your eyes and let it take you.”
Luke and I both closed our eyes.
“That’s not energy,” Luke said, “that’s noise.”
“Your noise,” she answered, smiling, “my energy.”
In the early days she supported herself by working as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant in the West Village. She also enrolled at the New School, taking subjects that appealed to her, eschewing those that did not. She lived in a cheap rent-controlled apartment on Grove Street near Sheridan Square and had decorated it with great charm. There she contended alone with all the mysteries and delicacies of the language and began to write the poems that made her famous in a select circle before she was twenty-five. My parents had put her on the train north with reluctance and apocalyptic prophecies, allowing privately to their sons that Savannah would never last a month in the big city. But she had harmonized herself to the rhythms of New York. “Being in New York is just like living in a New Yorker cartoon,” she wrote in her first letter, and all of us opened back issues of Savannah’s favorite magazine and tried to glean some idea of what her life must be like by translating the inside jokes of the eight million to each other. From the cartoons we supposed that New Yorkers said many clever but arcane things to each other at intimate dinner parties. My father, ignoring the cartoons, studied the advertisements and said aloud to the family, “Who are these people anyway?”
When Savannah’s first book of poetry was published by Random House in 1972, Luke and I drove to New York to go to the parties and readings attendant to its publication. Savannah and I sat together beneath her hanging plants and beside her pretty desk and she signed a copy of The Shrimper’s Daughter for me while Luke tried to find a place to park safely through the night. She opened the dedicatory page and watched my face as I read, “To my brother, Tom Wingo, whose love and devotion has made the passage worthwhile. All praise to my fabulous twin.” Tears came to my eyes when I read that dedication and I wondered how any poetry at all could come from our childhood.