Kissing Oscar Wilde Read online

  Copyright © Jade Sylvan 2013

  No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

  Sylvan, Jade.

  1st edition.ISBN: 978-1938912-32-0

  Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes

  Cover Design and Art by Lily Lin

  Author Photo by Caleb Cole

  Interior photos by Caleb Cole and Adélaïde Pornet

  Proofread by Alex Kryger

  Edited by Abigail Marshall and Derrick Brown

  French translations by Lucie Monroe

  Type set in Bergamo from www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com

  Printed in Tennessee, USA

  Write Bloody Publishing

  Austin, TX

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  To contact the author, send an email to [email protected]

  MADE IN THE USA

  KISSING OSCAR WILDE

  Table of Contents

  Précis

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  Chapter One

  Graves

  Chapter Two

  Memento

  Chapter Three

  Halloween 2011, Boston

  Chapter Four

  The Poem I Read at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester, Massachusetts

  Chapter Five

  Une Saison en Enfer

  Chapter Six

  An Epically-Abridged Catalogue of the Author’s Major Romances, Revealing the Young Midwestern Author’s Odyssey

  Through Fluid Sexuality

  Chapter Seven

  Abstinence

  Chapter Eight

  The Poem I Wrote for Louis and Would Later Give to Adélaïde

  Chapter Nine

  Gare de Lyon

  Chapter Ten

  An Ideal Husband

  Chapter Eleven

  Poetesse Dijonaise

  Chapter Twelve

  Portraits

  Chapter Thirteen

  Poseurs

  Chapter Fourteen

  Other People’s Clothes

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nom de Scène

  Chapter Sixteen

  Le Corps Exquis

  Chapter Seventeen

  What We Wrote

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jade is a Jade is a Jade is a Jade

  Chapter Nineteen

  Illuminations

  Chapter Twenty

  La Chambre du Champagne

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Poem I Performed in Reims and Louis Remembered from the Cantab

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Gertrude Stein

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  La Fée Verte

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Truth of Masks

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Paris est une Fête

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Montmartre

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sacré-Cœur

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  De Profundis

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Les Deux Mondes

  Chapter Thirty

  Charles de Gaulle

  Photos

  Jade et Adélaïde by Caleb Cole

  Jade performs in Dijon by Caleb Cole

  Dijon Street by Caleb Cole

  Kissing the Glass by Caleb Cole

  Writing by Caleb Cole

  Jade and Caleb by Adélaïde Pornet

  All beautiful things belong to the same age.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Précis

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  Caleb and I met Adélaïde just before we made it to Paris. Adélaïde wore a Humphrey Bogart hat and cowboy boots and showed me and Caleb around Dijon, cobblestone and gargoyles dressed in dusky mist. Adélaïde loved Patti Smith and so did I and so did Caleb. Caleb and I had gone to see Patti Smith sing in Providence years before because I was a poet and Caleb was a photographer and we had always joked that I was Patti Smith and he was Robert Mapplethorpe. When I read Patti Smith’s book, Just Kids, I cried and texted Caleb from Tucson to make sure he knew that I loved him. I asked Adélaïde if she had read Just Kids, but she hadn’t because it was too hard to find in French.

  Adélaïde was a poet and an actor. Later, on the internet, I saw a piece a French news station had done about poetry and performance. Adélaïde talked to the camera about self-expression, and they wrote under her name, poetesse Dijoinaise.

  She blew her nose constantly.

  She gave me a paper notebook.

  I’m writing in it right now.

  It’s 2012. I don’t believe in gender, I’m perpetually in love with around fifteen separate people at any given time, and I haven’t written in a paper notebook for four years. I spend too much time on the internet looking at faces of people I used to know. I blow my nose constantly. I think sometimes how we’re all separate and all lonely in our skins surrounded by empty space, and how everyone wants to break their skins and become soup with everyone else and that’s why “the internet,” and then I don’t feel so bad about all the time I spend on it.

  When Adélaïde came to meet me in Paris, I gave her a copy of a poem I had written for a man named Louis. The poem was about Paris and Arthur Rimbaud and a man I was in love with a long time before I was in love with Louis. Louis had dark, wild hair and loved Arthur Rimbaud. I was in love with Louis because his name was Leaf and mine was Sylvan and when we met he said, I could be a Leaf in your forest, and I said, This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship because Casablanca was my favorite movie, and then forever afterward, he called me Rick and I called him Louis. We talked about loving Arthur Rimbaud. I went to Paris, in part, because I was hoping to impress Louis, who loved Paris, or at least loved a woman (who was not me) who loved Paris.

  When I met Adélaïde, I said, This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship, because Adélaïde was as beautiful as Louis. She said Casablanca was her favorite movie. She’d seen it in French on the internet.

  Louis is not on the internet because he believes in paper love. I see Adélaïde on the internet. I carry the notebook she gave me everywhere.

  I get the feeling sometimes that these people I love are all the same person. This is chauvinistic, I know.

  The word “chauvinism” comes from Napoleon’s soldier Nicholas Chauvin, who blindly loved the Empire long after it fell. The word “romance” originally referred to the vernacular language of France. I wouldn’t know any of this without the internet.

  I wouldn’t be able to see the news story about Adélaïde without the internet. I would know almost nothing about her.

  I love Caleb when we take pictures or talk about taking pictures. In real life, he’s neurotic and difficult to touch.

  I love Louis when I write six evenly-measured, six-lined stanzas about him. In real life, his slouch annoys me and he smokes too much.

  I don’t know if I love these people or if I just love to write about them.

  Or maybe I just love Paris.

  I don’t know if I really know Paris. It’s been written about too many times.

  But I love Patti Smith.

  Patti Smith loved Arthur Rimbaud. In Just Kids, she writes about flying to Paris just to write about him. Adélaïde is back in Dijon now. When I got back to the States, I bought her a copy of Just Kids in French on the internet. She says she carries the book, and the poem I gave her, everywhere.

  I get the feeling sometimes that we are, all of us, the same person, across time and space, loving ourselves from afar, star-crossed and lonely.

  Maybe that part of us that’s the same in everyone is a moth, drawn to the light of computer s
creens and cities.

  Maybe that part of us is a messenger, sending ourselves desperate love notes inked on rustic paper, flawed and organic, unreadable in the dark.

  Maybe that’s why we always go looking for ourselves in the cities with the most light.

  Chapter One

  Graves

  I spent a good portion of my late teens and early twenties making pilgrimages to my favorite authors’ graves. By the time I officially met Caleb, I had already started to gather an impromptu mental catalogue of the physical tokens of these mass-conceptions. In Oxford, Mississippi, admirers leave William Faulkner cigarettes and bourbon. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave is piled with pinecones. Rainer Maria Rilke is buried in a tiny churchyard at the very top of a tall, goat-dotted hill in the Swiss Alps, where panting young poets ascend to leave single, intentional roses. My favorite was Oscar Wilde, who lies in a relatively serene, tree-lined corner of Paris’s labyrinthine celebrity cemetery, Père Lachaise. In the 1990s, fans started leaving lipstick kisses on the large rectangular stone sculpture that serves as his grave marker and headstone. The brighter the color, the better. There were hundreds of them. Hundreds on hundreds. Sometimes when everything was dark and I felt abandoned by everyone and couldn’t stop thinking about lonely, diabetic women sitting in front of their televisions feeding on corn syrup and Paxil and nuggets made from mutant, drugged-up chickens who lived their whole lives force-fed in tiny cages, I would shut my eyes and picture those kisses, all red and pink against the grey, and a thumbprint-sized place in my chest would open to a warm, peaceful glow. If that many people could love the idea of this person, who died an outcast, so much so that they were independently and collectively moved to kiss the very symbol of death, then there was hope for everyone who had ever been shamed or excluded or ridiculed. There was even hope for me.

  Chapter Two

  Memento

  Before the pan-romantic exploits, the buzzing poetry bars, and the foggy draw of Paris, I grew up stagnant and strange in Indianapolis, Indiana. Nothing about me seemed to make sense in/to my surroundings. Kids called me a “freak” at school for reasons I never understood. To my conservative parents, I was confusingly artistic at the best of times and embarrassingly perverse at the worst. I felt placeless, so books became my home and their authors and characters became my closest friends for years until I went to college in Bloomington and found/ed a small group of queer artists, including1 Caleb.

  After I graduated, I knew I had to leave the Midwest. I decided on Boston for three reasons: one, Indiana was no place to be a writer, and Boston’s literary scene seemed the closest to the 1920s Parisian Lost Generation or the 1950s San Francisco Beat world that I could imagine at the end of 2006; two, The Sound and the Fury was my favorite book at the time, and I thought Quentin’s chapter was the most beautiful thing ever written in English, and Quentin was at Harvard2 when, in 20-year-old Rimbaud-esque mania, he broke his pocket watch to escape time and walked into the Charles River to drown; three, Caleb was moving to Boston for photography school.

  My last few months in Bloomington, I would walk over to Caleb’s house in the cruel heat of southern Indiana’s August after teaching poetry to kids. It was the summer after I graduated college and the summer after his mother died. His forearms had two new tattoos in his mother’s handwriting that were two of her favorite Latin phrases3. One said, memento mori, and the other said, carpe diem.

  We would climb down the rocky bank of the stream by his house to take pictures under the graffitied bridge and talk about love, death, social constructs, and most of all, art. We talked about moving away from the utterly unbearable, all-pervading flatness of Indiana, its fields of corn and soybeans interrupted by dismal strip malls and monstrous chain restaurants. We talked about going to some city, some real city, and becoming a photographer and a writer, respectively, and how one day, when we were old (meaning like 40) and successful and ready to sell out, we would get some grants or whatever and use the money to travel around the world to different famous people’s graves, and he would take pictures and I would write some bullshit something for each picture about what the items people leave there mean about what the person—or the idea of the person—meant to people. Then we would use all the money we would make to ensure we would never have to work at regular jobs again. Maybe we’d buy a warehouse or a farm that came with its own electricity and goats. Then we’d sprawl across hours and days shooting and writing and collage-ing and creating other brand-new modes of expression that we were sure it would one day be our responsibility to invent, because we knew we couldn’t spend half our waking lives at sallow nine-to-fives. We vowed we would never. That would be worse than death.

  Chapter Three

  Halloween 2011, Boston

  So, because I’d just been fired from a job I never wanted, and because I’d just come to the realization that everyone in America from baristas to CEOs, from groundskeepers to lawyers, is one bum-stroke away from total material upheaval and all its subsequent blows to the Self, and that everyone, no matter how much money they make, is always walking around quietly quelling the hum of the belief that they will die alone and penniless in some lukewarm, miasmic gutter in an unfamiliar city, and because I’d woken up again sweating bourbon into unwashed sheets in my ten-foot by ten-foot occupation in a house rented to me dirt-cheap by an entrepreneurial acquaintance out of pity/patronage after driving back to Boston ill-advisedly from Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester, where poetry happens on Mondays and where, this Monday, uncostumed on Halloween for the first time in my life, I called Louis from the toilet and told him about my befiring and about my general failure as an adult and as an organism and my sudden stomachache and desire to die (because I’d always found calling those you wished would love you at the nadir of performative despondency produced a result, even if I’d never examined those results’ favorableness) before getting onstage beneath a menagerie of taxidermied, ungulate faces and reading a poem that changed the air in the room, made the young tatted-up Straight Edgers and the scotch-pickled English Leather Fogies halt their chitchat and stare, literally stare at me with jaws agape, that made my buddy, Alex, take my arm oracularly and say, after two beers, You know that poem is important, right? and, after four beers, grab my shoulders and kiss me full on the mouth, and since Dareka, the French poet, had been assuring me that if I came to France in January I could count on bookings at all of the poetry venues and safe sofas to sleep on and all the pains au chocolat I could eat, and since even though it wasn’t a real job, or even a character with a place-card in the societyscape of the 21st century, I had never seen myself as or wanted to be anything other than a poet, I thought, fuck it, took 750 of my last $1500, and bought myself a ticket.

  Chapter Four

  The Poem I Read at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester, Massachusetts

  On Breathing

  When you learn that most of what you’ve read and studied for in school is a crude approximation or shrewd merchandizing tool,

  and your lungs will one day shrivel, and your heart will fizzle out when tricks of science peter and religion’s sick with doubt,

  and your rapist’s hands weren’t dirty, and forgiveness won’t clean deeds, and just cause something’s dirty doesn’t mean it seeds disease,

  and your safety net’s dispassion on this centripetal whirlwind, and without the lights and makeup movie stars look like your girlfriend,

  and your doctor’s a mechanic, and your therapist’s a nut, and your head and heart betray you till you only trust your gut,

  and Hitler was a vegan, and an artist, and a Jew, and Hussein was not a devil, and your father’s half of you,

  it can be hard to keep on going, but you do.

  When knees wake stiff, reminding you that death’s your only birthright, and there seems to be some script you lost to move across the earth right,

  and soil swallows all your clothes, books, houses, clocks, and letters, and credit scores and income are the first things in th
e shredder,

  and your synapses are labyrinths that coax desirous heat, and beneath their skins your enemies, like you, are only meat,

  and the pattern of his birthmarks and the odd bend of his hand are death when you recall them and Inferno when you can’t,

  and the upright slouch in alleyways while Rupert Murdoch thrives, and money is a symbol, and your children won’t survive,

  and vodka seems to work as well as any cheerful pill, and college girls and soldiers look so young, and younger still,

  it can be hard to keep on moving, but you will.

  When masturbation’s better than most lovers’ hunger pangs, and love produces chemicals, like chocolate and teen angst,

  and you only feel by bleeding, and Top Tens have made love cheesy, and all your pain’s cliché, but that still doesn’t make it easy,

  and once you struck a song while wrestling with an old piano and played it to an empty hall and hummed the sad soprano,

  and the moon will never care for you, the sun will make you blind, and there’re rooms locked in your body even you will never find,

  and her back is pressed against your chest, her scapula are wings, and sex is high and sacred, just like every other thing,

  and your belly’s slightly fat and gapped with stretch marks where it grew, and you know you’ll never meet someone who’ll love you more than you,

  and you wake up in some room alone, the sunlight cold as flan, your skin saran against the dawn, the door, a businessman,

  it can be hard keep on breathing, but you can.

  Chapter Five

  Une Saison en Enfer

  I started to work with the French poet Dareka to plan my tour almost immediately after buying my ticket to Paris. He had connections all over Europe, and gigs came through surprisingly easily. Within weeks, I had shows lined up in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dijon, and Reims. The tour would end with several days in Paris.

  As the dates fell into place, I started to feel as though it were possible that I wasn’t completely delusional after all, and, maybe, this really was what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I was a poet, wasn’t I? Poets are obsessed with Paris, aren’t they? The fact that Louis was also obsessed with Paris admittedly intensified the City of Light’s immediate allure.