Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

  Outside, a small crowd had gathered to meet me and talk about the performance. I sold the last of my books. We left in a shower of bisous.

  Agnès led us back to her apartment. She offered several compliments about my set as we walked, but I didn’t have the energy to answer with anything more than, Thank you. Thank you so much.

  I started undressing as soon as the door to our guest room was closed, peeling off the vest and freeing my neck from the tie before dropping my pants, shirt, and bra to the floor. Caleb put on his pajamas in the corner of the room, his back turned toward me as he changed shirts. I slipped into my soft purple Barcelona Poetry Slam t-shirt and boxers, and Caleb and I set to making sure everything was packed and ready for the flight in the morning.

  It wasn’t just my left leg. My whole body was sore and exhausted. No bed had ever felt so good.

  Oh my god, I said as I slid under the sheets. I’m so fucking tired. I curled my body into a careful fetal position, my back to Caleb. Why did I want to be an artist? I said. It’s so exhausting.

  Everything else is exhausting, too, he said. It’s just not rewarding.

  If I said anything after that, I don’t remember. When Caleb was settled in, I turned out the light and we lay there, our backs to one another, the warmth of our bodies and the quiet movement of our breaths all that let each other know the other was there.

  Chapter Thirty

  Charles de Gaulle

  It was just a few minutes past 07:00h, and from the way sun was negotiating the silver gossamer of the clouds, it looked as though it might turn into a blue-sky day. I ate a fat, café-frosted phallus of an éclair, and Caleb ate a flaky croissant au beurre from a Menilmontant patisserie before we got on the Metro that would take us to the train that would take us to the airport. I stood and looked at the just-waking streets before we went underground. All around us, black-coated Parisians walked to work or the café or the Metro, several with tiny dogs, many smoking cigarettes, many eating breakfast pastries wrapped in butter-splotched paper. I knew I could live a whole life here. I could let my body melt into the tall boots and the sleek silhouettes of dark French fashion. Learn to play the accordion. Take up smoking. This fantasia played for few moments before Caleb and the chill of the air against my skin reminded me of where I was in time and space. We should go, said Caleb. I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for the second train.

  We rode through the graffittied parts of Paris above ground. Whenever I leave a city, I watch it for as long as I can, like it’s a person I love and may never see again. As we rode farther and farther away from the city’s center, the buildings became short, spaced-out, unremarkable. I watched them until there was no trace of anything I recognized, until they could have been any suburb of Boston or Indianapolis or New York. Then I looked at Caleb. He was slumped into his seat, his arms folded across his torso, his eyes closed.

  I said, It’s incredible how there are these currents running through human civilization all the time. That we can come to another country where they speak another language and meet these people, and connect through these, like, pre-established roles and understood relationships. The universe is vast and intricate and busy. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful.

  Caleb furrowed his brow and opened his eyes. Um, I’m not sure if I know what you mean. I mean, of course people would bond over what they had in common. You’re meeting a bunch of people through poetry, so they connect over poetry. In photography circles, people bond over photography. I’m sure in, like, football circles, people bond over football.

  No, I know. But, I mean… I trailed off and looked back out the window. I guess I’m just not explaining it well, then.

  A minute passed. Maybe a minute and a half. I took a deep breath and tried again. I mean, there seem to be these systems in place to hold these art forms—all of them, I’m not saying poetry’s special, or art’s special, or I’m special. I just mean it seems that there are these roles there to fill, and that people just kind of step into them in order to be them. Not just to play them, but to, like, be them. And it’s almost incidental who does it. It almost seems arbitrary. Like anyone could do it if they just, like, did.

  Like, the world knows how to interact with a poet. Everyone knows that character should be there, so when someone steps in and says ‘Hey, I’m a poet,’ the world knows what to do. It’s just no one ever thinks that they can be a poet. Almost since forever, people have thought poets were something that existed in some bygone era. Anyone who grew up saying they wanted to be a poet was told they were ‘chasing the past,’ or whatever. But we’re not chasing anything. We’re reliving the past, playing the same roles, and re-imagining them for our cultural contexts—our particular spots in time and space. And that’s anyone’s job as an artist. To retell the same stories people have always told for their particular context.

  Caleb shrugged. I don’t know, he said. I don’t know if I really see it that way. I thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He just closed his eyes again, and I looked back out the window.

  The soles of my cowboy boots slid along the slick tile of Charles de Gaulle as I dragged my suitcase behind me. My left leg was cramped, and I was looking forward to the eight-plus hours of sitting ahead of me.

  We each got our boarding passes and went through security together. Caleb was flying direct on Air France and I was taking Air Canada through Montreal. We walked down terminal 2 and stopped at the division between 2A and 2E, facing one another.

  Caleb shrugged and made that face. See you back at home, he said.

  Yeah, I said. Have a good flight.

  We crossed each other and walked down separate hallways. I was aware that this was the end of something. A story Caleb and I had begun together years earlier was drawing to its natural close. Not all love needs to be physical to be creative. Somehow I knew we had made something whole and complete together, and, from this moment forward, however our friendship would look, it would be different. Suddenly, I didn’t feel as though I needed him to help carry so many parts of me. I was ready to try to hold myself on my own.

  I bought a café americaine from a chain café next to my gate before boarding. The plane was only about half-sold, and I had a whole row of three seats to myself. I sat by the window.

  As the plane took off, I looked at the people on the ground, each one moving through space, navigating and narrating a private universe of stor(y/ies). They grew tinier and tinier as we climbed until they were absorbed by the capillary web of streets that composed the city. I watched the buildings, then the neighborhoods, and then the city itself as it shrank and curved with perspective. I saw Paris, then France, then Europe, then (E/e)arth. Eventually the land dropped into a dark blue ocean that bent heavily along the bright sky. I saw the whole world. It was very beautiful and very far away.

  Acknowledgements

  Several pieces of this book have been previously published in earlier forms. “We’ll Always Have Paris,” “Halloween,” “An Epically Abridged Catalogue of the Author’s Major Romances…,” and the poem, “On Breathing,” were all featured in DigBoston. “Jade is a Jade is a Jade is a Jade” appeared in BuzzFeed LGBT under the title, “I Hate Labels So Much I Decided to Change My Name.” The poem, “Kissing Oscar Wilde” won the 2011 Bayou Poetry Prize, and was published in Bayou Magazine. The poetry tour this book is based on was partially funded by a travel grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and I wrote the first half of the first draft of this book in an apartment loaned to me by Amethyst Arsenic’s Somerhouse program. To everyone in each of these organizations who has believed in this project, I cannot thank you enough.

  I would also like to pile heaps and heaps of love and thank yous on the following people:

  Sam Cha for being a brain brother and the best writer I know. Dawn Gabriel for being the big sister I never knew I wanted. Ada and Alice for being tiny giant inspiration turbines. Samantha Milowsky for being one of the first people to make me
feel legitimate. Simone Beaubien for having the space in Boston ready for my poetic fantasies to land. Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein for all the fun, artistic distractions while I was egomaniacally laboring over the earliest drafts of this thing. Eowyn for mitigating my panic while I was egomaniacally laboring over the latest drafts of this thing. Meff for getting it. My brother John for talking to me about physics on Google Chat when we’re both up at 3AM. My parents for agreeing with me on almost nothing and loving me anyway. Leyna and Caleb for setting this wild story in motion and continuing to author it with me. Everyone above for all the meals and drinks and late-night conversations. Everyone I’ve ever loved for this.

  About the Author

  Jade Sylvan is the author of the poetry collection, The Spark Singer, and the fiction novels TEN and Backstage at the Caribou. Many of Jade’s stories, essays, and poems have been published in places such as PANK, Word Riot, BuzzFeed, DigBoston, and others. Jade is also a performing artist, and regularly causes queer feminist performative trouble in the Northeast region of the United States, especially in the neighborhoods of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. Jade lives and works in Cambridge among a rotating cast of geniuses, fairies, magicians, and kings.

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  Notes

  1.Caleb and I actually met each other at least once before college, though he says he doesn’t remember it. See the chapter: “An Ideal Husband.”

  2.I had no idea that later Louis and I would go, late one night, to the Harvard footbridge and find three tiny portraits of Quentin glued to the stone rail by an anonymous art student. We’d sit on the rail for some time looking at the moon reflect down the black river and tell each other about our respective experiences in Psych Wards.

  3.“Favorite Latin phrases” is a thing some Catholics have.

  4.Caleb helped me bind my chest with a back brace and an ace bandage and showed me how to strengthen my jaw with a line of brown eye shadow under my chin and speak from my chest voice— though Rimbaud was around 16 at the time and so probably sounded a lot like my normal speaking voice.

  5.This was the only Owen I ever actually slept with.

  6.This is slightly poeticized. Technically, Leigh and I were in my bed

  7.In fact, Leigh kind of lost it for a while and started burning her clothes and scrubbing her skin until it bled. I definitely felt bad about that.

  8.I was nine when I started to write poetry.

  9.My name at the time.

  10.Julian was convinced for most of the tour that he was cursed, as in, literally, and that everything was going right for me and wrong for him. When an automatic door closed on his suitcase, he’d tried to yank it free, which wound up twisting his wrist when the doors finally released. This always happens! he screamed at me, throwing his suitcase so it spun across the smooth floor of the train station. I’m fucking sick of it, Jade! This always happens to me because of my fucking curse! I’m fucking done!

  11.In fact, Orestis would be my brother’s best man the following spring.

  12.The art critic oligarchy had decided in 2010 to take every opportunity to describe him as moon faced, which made me laugh every time.

  13.I got absurdly drunk at my brother’s wedding, made out with Orestis, and then passed out in my bridesmaid dress on top of the comforter in my hotel room. Caleb found me there, face pressed into an allergy-inducing feather pillow, and called down to the front desk
to bring me something hypoallergenic, which he then placed beneath my makeup-smeared and likely drooling head. In the morning, he said he was sorry he didn’t put me in my pajamas, but even though he’d seen me naked dozens of times, he wasn’t sure if our friendship was at the place where it was okay for him to undress and then redress my unconscious body. In retrospect, I appreciate his respect for my consent. At the time, I was hurt that he didn’t think he had it.

  14.This is a coincidence and is not meant to suggest a relationship between Carrie/ Caleb and the Owen composite character from the author’s romantic history.

  15.I didn’t know this term when I was there. I didn’t even know if the architecture was Gothic, Renaissance, or what. I only saw old, romantic stone and multicolored tile roofs reflecting streetlights through the mist.

  16.I even brought some with me on my first trip to Europe in 2006. As far as I saw, none of them survived to 2012.

  17.I don’t know if Patti Smith has ever self-identified as queer. That didn’t matter so much to me in 2006, since I wasn’t always certain if I did either.

  18.Patti Smith didn’t smoke either. There’s a famous photo of her by Mapplethorpe holding a lit cigarette. For this, Mapplethorpe reportedly called her a “poseur.”

  19.Thade performed that ceremony too, and I performed a poem which I’d written for Luke (of all people) and modified to be about Leyna and Caleb. It had been about a year and a half since Thade and I’d broken up. We did not speak.

  20.Because it rhymed with Thade and because I knew I would want to bring some part of him and me with me was the least important of the excessive number of reasons why I later chose the name Jade. More important reasons will be explored in the chapter: “Jade is a Jade is a Jade is a Jade.”