Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

  I met Louis three days before the end of 2010. I first ran up to him, grabbed his arm, and said You’re going to be my friend, because he’d just gone onstage, black shock-tangle of hair and black button-up against ghost-white skin, and read a rollicking suicide-watch bus ride manifesto in a quagmire of self-conscious post-post-modern reflections on college life, a flicker-eyed oration causing every throat and jaw in the whole urine-soaked basement of the Cantab Lounge to constrict and gape with since-outmoded early-20th century ecstasies. As he finished a page he’d fling it above him, each leaf flashing in the stagelights before floating to the floor, until finally he threw up his hands and walked straight into the crowd and directly to the bar. The audience stood, stomped, and cheered. Now that was a poet. I rose and followed him through the break in the bodies.

  When I declared we would be friends, he suggested we smoke. I didn’t smoke but made exceptions for shared moments with the exceptionally talented, intelligent and/or beautiful. I followed him outside and took one of his Winstons. I was wearing the dashing grey pea coat I’d bought in Germany four years earlier, but it wasn’t warm enough for Boston’s December and I was shivering. I asked him who his favorite poets were, and he said Allen Ginsberg and Arthur Rimbaud. I told him that the Halloween before, I performed an abridged version of A Season in Hell as Arthur Rimbaud4 in the Dead Poets Show at the Cantab Lounge. I asked what Louis did when he wasn’t cracking open dank poetry basements in Cambridge. He was a playwright, just graduated from Harvard. He was currently living part-time with an introverted Francophile polyamorous girlfriend and part-time as a caretaker for a cantankerous nonagenarian, who every evening told him the same tragic story concerning the death of Vaudeville.

  Katabasis, he said. That’s the word that describes my current situation.

  I didn’t know it.

  It’s descent. It’s Oscar Wilde dying an outcast in the gutter as his fop friends clink champagne glasses in a restaurant across the street.

  As he talked, I smoked. I taught myself how to smoke holding the cigarette between my thumb and first two fingers like a joint, because that’s how Bob Dylan smoked in Don’t Look Back. I remembered reading in Just Kids how Patti Smith used to try to move like Bob Dylan moved in Don’t Look Back when she walked away from someone she was trying to impress. I wasn’t sure if I was imitating Bob Dylan, or Patti Smith imitating Bob Dylan, or Patti Smith imitating Bob Dylan imitating Arthur Rimbaud.

  As soon as he finished his first cigarette, Louis lit another. His eyes sparked when he smiled. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint who it was. I could, however, feel my lungs turning blacker with every breath. Then I remembered reading a quote from Patti Smith in the 1990s about herself as a young woman. I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud, she said. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.

  I grounded out my cigarette with the heel of my cowboy boot and turned to go back downstairs. I couldn’t manage Don’t Look Back. My left leg is oddly assembled and makes me limp even when I try to be impressive, even when I try my hardest just to walk away.

  Chapter Six

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

  Marissa

  A conflation of a series of close female friends of the teenaged author’s who she was totally attracted to and who, in retrospect, were totally attracted to her, but who she never did anything with other than write them cute, rhyming poems, drive them to The Taming of the Shrew rehearsal or Rocky Horror or Bible Study, and sometimes share the same bed with them during sleepovers and let her pinky finger slip over their pinky finger or her thigh rest into their thigh.

  Will

  The author’s first “relationship.” Dated the author for six months, from author’s age 18 to just past 19. A tech geek who enjoyed gaming LANs and performing cunnilingus and who, excitingly to the author’s parents, had a penis and a future. During a defining conversation at Mother Bear’s Pizza which eventually led to their breakup, he told the author that aspiring to be a poet was essentially aspiring to be a crack whore on the street, which did not set her down her current life-path but certainly hardened her resolve. At the current time of writing, he is an investment banker on Wall Street. He invited the author to his wedding in 2011, but she was busy.

  Thade

  Practically married to the author for five years, from author’s age 19-24. A classical composer and poet. Loved Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Cage, the Beat Generation, etc. Accompanied the author on her first trip to Europe in 2006 and shared her kiss on Oscar Wilde’s tomb. All of the author’s friends and family thought he was gay, but his womanishness with the author’s mannishness worked. The author was also allowed to make out with girls during this romance, which was a big plus for the author. He and the author thought they were soulmates. They would’ve gotten tattoos of the two face-halves from Hedwig and the Angry Inch if he hadn’t been too much of a wuss to get tattooed.

  Leigh

  A conflation of four to five inconsiderately-pretty, pixyish young women with Borderline Personality Disorder with whom the author would attend Tori Amos concerts, make out in movie theaters as she wiped away their tears during screenings of The Hours, and exchange cunnilingus after hits of nitrous oxide while their boyfriends discussed critical theory in the next room.

  Dawn

  The reason the author started getting tattooed. A gamine, freckled, menthol-smoking high-school dropout with green eyes that no-joke sparkled, expansive dreams, and an even more expansive theory of her global importance. Her arms were covered in fairy tattoos that represented the four elements and scars from years working the hot ovens in pizza kitchens. She was one of those Leos who’s really into being a Leo. She was always falling out, getting fired, and raging against various establishments. This romance led the author to lose a great deal of sleep and weight.

  Owen

  A conflation of several brilliant, sensitive, romantically-unavailable males with whom the author shared artistically collaborative relationships with obvious romantic overtones. All of these men smoked Winstons. The invariable zenith of each of these relationships was a night spent sharing past-relationship fucked-upness, splitting an entire bottle of bourbon, and listening to Jeff Buckley’s album, Grace, from start to finish lying on separate sofas in the dark.

  Luke

  An average man of average intelligence with average drinking and anger-management problems. He wrote average poetry and held down average day jobs. All of the author’s friends hated him, and she knew it but almost loved that they hated him. For the first time since dating Will, the author could imagine filling a sitcom-suitable, hetero-normative female role, complete with drunken verbal abuse, emotional neglect, and repeated devaluation of all of the author’s endeavors. The fact that the author associates these characteristics with the heteronormative female role, the author admits, says a lot about her relationship to heteronormative culture.

  Chapter Seven

  Abstinence

  Louis and I never actually slept together, even though we met at the height of the period in my life I refer to as my “sexual terrorist” phase. Luke and I had officially broken up in the fall of 2010 after he downed eight shots of Jack Daniel’s during one of my shows, jumped onstage during the middle of a skit, and announced, from his chest voice, that I was “an ungrateful bitch.” After a few weeks of female-empowerment beach trips, long back-porch heart-to-hearts that ended with me crashing wine-drunk on friends’ couches, countless reassurances from Caleb, and lots of yoga, I decided, at 28, it was time to figure out how to be a proper slut.

  I spent six months sleeping with everyone—friends of friends on pull-out couches after dinner parties, poetry groupies at out-of-town shows. I found my way into boudoir-lit burlesque cast parties and glitter-strewn pan-gender sex clubs. Yes, I made poems out of all of it. Sometimes I told the people in the poems an
d sometimes I didn’t. Once I carried a case of scabies from Owen’s bed5 to the bed of his platonic roommate, Leigh6. Neither one of them thought the situation was as funny as I did7. That became a poem too. I told one of them.

  I meant to be mindful of everyone’s feelings. A couple of times, however, I’d get a text from someone I’d slept with asking me to come with them when they got their Lasik surgery, or to meet their sister in from Baltimore, and I finally knew how guys feel when they accidentally hurt girls out of sheer ignorant self-absorption. The way I knew when I’d fucked up was my stomach would hurt.

  A drinking buddy of mine said once that sex without an emotional connection is masturbation with a friend. I was amazed at how easily I acted out the physical. I was aware of how every one of my actions was received, even through an orgasm. I watched myself make every scratch, every bite and moan. This must be enlightenment, I’d tell myself: bright and shiny bodily sex without the dark egoic weight of romance.

  While all this was happening, Louis and I began our weird, sexless romance. The day after we met, he emailed me the poem I first saw him read, and I sent him my poem, “Plates.” He wrote back on New Year’s Eve:

  Dear Rick,

  Something like a year or two ago in one of my rants about the general guarded dross of academic+confessional poetry, I said to one of my friends that I had just heard some girl at the Cantab read something about dirty dishes and Tibetan burial that was so much better than all that shit, and was not so much “the next thing,” but was in fact just, “the thing”; that she was better than everything I’d heard at any readings at Harvard or in any spoken word society; and that this girl had some seriously hot blood that gave me hope. I thought that it might have been you, but now I know it obviously is and that it all makes sense now. So thank you. I’ll write back more in full later and send you another.

  See you in the decade fresh.

  Louis

  We went on a couple of unspoken pseudo-dates, but after this email, his relationship with his girlfriend deteriorated and he moved back to his parents’ house in Ann Arbor. We continued to email poems back and forth. We called each other “friend” and managed to shackle the word with innuendo.

  Late in the spring of 2011, he moved to Connecticut to work at a theatre in New Haven. He would call me whenever he came through town, and no matter how tired I was, we would stay up late-late, talking and laughing and looking over each other’s poetry. When were in the same room, everything became funny—sentence structure and words and breathing and being bodies—all of it just absurd.

  One night at the beginning of the summer, we processed down to Jamaica Pond post-house show with a small group of poets. When we reached the black water, shrouded by trees from the urban commercial street, some of us began to peel off our clothes. We waded into the water, one by one, gorgeous, sinking silhouettes between different shades of dark—pond, trees, sky. When I was in up to my ribs, I lay down and floated. It was the middle of the city but I could only see stars. I was everything, and everything was silent and weightless.

  Louis stayed clothed on the bank with the two body-shy college girls. He told me later it was because he had jock-itch, not because he was not fun-loving and star-gazing.

  Louis and I only ever kissed once, smoking his Winstons outside Redbones Barbeque late in September. I told him I was tired of struggling and being poor and how I’d just sold out and taken a real job. He told me I was a poet, that I couldn’t help but be a poet, and that someone else can do the PR for the biggest yoga studio in Cambridge. It was clear at that moment that Louis should not be another Owen, and this was so evidently that turning point in every romantic movie when the only correct action was to kiss this man. I leaned over and kissed him, and it ruined our friendship. That was when I decided I didn’t know a thing about romance.

  I read an article in The New Yorker that said we Americans don’t know how to deal with love that isn’t either sexual or familial. My polyamorous friends gave me books that said attraction is attraction, that it’s just situational, imposed limits that keep us, sometimes, from fucking those with whom we share push/pull eye-contact or Beatrice/ Bene-diction. I read a lot that fall.

  Just before I left, I read an article about how they cleaned all the kisses off Oscar Wilde’s grave. It made my stomach hurt the way it hurt when I was nine and I learned about global warming and the atomic bomb8. I texted Louis about it from some bar with an anachronistic, overwrought tone of despair. He responded with a deeply poetic blow-off. That night I wrote a poem called “Kissing Oscar Wilde.”

  When I told Caleb about the kisses and the grave, we were in his living room about to watch a Woody Allen movie about Paris. We were eating sea salt brownies. I think I must have been almost crying, or else my voice must have sounded dead. Caleb has always wanted to make things better for me. He said immediately that he would come meet me in Paris while I was on tour and that we could go back to Oscar Wilde’s grave and replace my kiss, or do something else in response—a statement, a happening—and he would take pictures.

  I also read how some unmarried born-again Christians become abstinent when they convert—a second virginity, they call it. I thought that maybe I’d learned how to love all wrong and that maybe if I recreated the circumstances of my adolescence, I could reprogram that part of my brain. When I arrived in Paris, I’d been abstinent for six months.

  In case you were wondering, Caleb and I have never kissed.

  Chapter Eight

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

  Kissing Oscar Wilde

  Two beers in I text you about Oscar Wilde and how I left my kiss on his tomb at Père Lachaise when I was young like Rimbaud and how I’d just read how They’d washed off all the lipstick, all those loving kisses, because the grease was eroding the work of modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein, and how They’d erected a glass barrier to protect the stone angel from irreparable damage.

  I tell you about my ex-boyfriend and how we slathered our lips a shimmering mauve shade (all the proceeds went to fight AIDS), found a naked corner and planted our vandal worship, giggling naive ecstasies, took a picture with our camera (this was before phones were cameras), and kissed under the silver sky among the dead and the French (I still miss him sometimes—I don’t tell you that).

  Even Wilde’s own grandson Merlin said, about the glass, Maybe one day we can take it down when the memory of kissing Oscar is gone. How many times can They take his love away from him? I ask you (like you know). Haven’t They learned yet that love is never clean? You say sometimes the effort to preserve something is what renders it truly dead, and how They’re idiots and are always ruining things like this.

  When I was young I followed the proud poetic tradition of quarreling loudly in the inebriate streets of the Left Bank. Our kisses broke us down to elements and stained us with grease, sloppy and earnest. I tell you about lipstick on stone, how when the pigments fade the stains spread to ovals and they don’t even look like mouths anymore. You say he will be mourned by outcasts, and outcasts always mourn.

  I don’t tell you how I wish you’d seen me when I was skinny and angry, smoking cigarettes, taking shots, writing important, terrible poetry in leather notebooks, hungry for hunger itself, kissing in French graveyards, still romantic enough to be cynical. Rimbaud’d be dead by now. Morrison, too. I worry I’ve outlived the romantics. Thousands of kisses have worn me down.

  I’m in a bar full of acquaintances and I text you about Oscar Wilde because no one here is getting out alive, and we’re both writers, so we know what not to say—how we’ve ruined everything and hell is seasonal (tourists are kissing trees), how the cleansing of the oldest stains leaves us covered in glass till the memory of kissing is gone, and how there’s something underneath all this and we dare not speak its name.

  Chapter Nine

  Gare de Lyon

  Near the end of 2006, I’d taken four months to chase history and couch-surf through the o
ld cobblestone continent. I feared the trip might just be a played-out American, white-kid postponement of adulthood—a last grasp at adolescence before moving to Boston and scrounging to afford shared housing in the rat-colonized part of town. I figured, though, that Patti Smith did it when she was young, and if it was good enough for twenty-four-year-old Patti Smith, it was good enough for twenty-four-year-old Jeni Schaibley9. Plus, I wanted to be a poet.

  Whatever my motivations, I placed my barely-adult body in lamp-lit Dublin pubs and stained-glass-lit Barcelona Cathedrals and tiny, candle-lit Parisian cafés, where I scrawled free verse rants and iambic villanelles detailing the import of it all in sticker-covered Moleskines and Mead Composition Notebooks, dragging Thade along with me even though our relationship had already started to fall apart.

  Near the beginning of 2012, Julian and I carried our bags up to the train station. Julian was a poet I knew from the Boston scene a few years earlier who had moved to New York City to woo some guy and to “make it” as a poet, had since moved out of New York City when neither the guy nor the “making it” aligned with his expectations, and was now on an indefinite world tour which happened to coincide with my European tour for about a week and a half. When we realized this coincidence, we decided to combine forces and tour together.

  Julian was very blond, very pretty, and, when he chose to be, extremely charming. He was currently dragging my suitcase on its rollers in addition to hoisting two heavy bags of his own. He was doing this partly because dragging things was hard on my bad left leg and partly because he was trying to make amends after losing his temper and shouting10 at me in the train station in Amsterdam, which he did because he’d had a lousy show the night before involving some drunk old Dutch townie heckling anti-gay slurs while he was onstage. He’d apologized and I’d accepted, but we still weren’t really talking.