Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

  J’aime ton chapeau, I said, putting the bottle back on the shelf.

  Oh, thank you, she said, pulling down the rim of the black felt fedora. Do you think it makes me look like Humphrey Bogart?

  Um, do you want to look like Humphrey Bogart?

  I would be glad to look like him if it means I can act like him.

  Oh, you’re an actor?

  Yes.

  And a poet?

  Yes.

  Are you going to read at the show tonight?

  I think so. You have made a choice?

  Oh, yeah. I looked back at the wall of red wine. Caleb was standing to my right, clutching his large camera bag to his hip.

  Thank you so much for bringing us here, I said, but I actually don’t think there’s any way for me to bring this back with me. When I told Dareka I loved Burgundy, I was thinking more of just drinking a glass of wine somewhere.

  She nodded with a pronounced frown and shrug that meant Je comprends, and said, Well, let’s go then.

  She said au revoir to the clerk and we were back outside. The road was blocked off for pedestrian use, so we lingered in the middle of the street. It was night completely now. The only lights came from the shops’ windows and signs and the streetlamps. The first thing she did when we stopped walking was pull a tissue out of her coat pocket and blow her nose.

  So you want to go to a bar? she said while digging out the insides of both nostrils.

  I looked at Caleb and he made that face.

  Actually, would you like to just show us around the town? We’re only going to be here tonight, and I’ve never been to Dijon before. Maybe Caleb can take some pictures.

  A tour?

  Yes! I looked at Caleb. What do you think?

  He made that face again and looked down. Um, I’m fine doing whatever.

  Adélaïde smiled and rose up on her toes. Okay, yes. Let’s go. She turned and started walking down a small cobblestone alley. As we followed her silhouette—fedora to trench coat to slender knees to boots—I looked at Caleb, clutched both hands in front of my sternum, and mouthed, Oh. My. God. He shook his head and took his camera out of its bag.

  Okay, she said as we stepped out of the alley and onto another main street. I’m going to show you the places in Dijon I love. Sounds good?

  Sure! Et, alors. Tu peux parler en français, s’il te plait, I said. Je dois m’entraîner.

  She nodded. Okay. Je vais faire le guide en français, si c’est bon.

  Oué.

  The four wooden heels of Adélaïde’s and my cowboy boots clopped like horse hooves on the flat stone streets. The air was crisp but much more inviting than that of New England’s icy January. My suede coat and leather gloves kept me comfortable, and the rain, which cycled rhythmically from haze to drizzle to spray, was refreshing after spending five hours on a train. She led us down twisting roads and alleys, injecting odd facts and comments about the shops and cafés we passed. I understood about one-third of what she said but nodded and said oué and intéressant frequently. We walked past a freestanding gate that looked like a miniature Arc de Triomphe, and she took another tissue out of her coat pocket and blew her nose again.

  Est-ce que tu es malade? I asked.

  She shook her head and touched her nose. Toujours.

  I heard Caleb chuckle, then I heard his camera’s shutter click.

  We walked into an ovular courtyard in front of a sweeping, alighted building that looked like, and was, a palace. Adélaïde told us that, like the Louvre and many other architectural relics of outdated royalty, it had been turned into an art museum.

  Mais à Dijon, nous sommes surtout célèbres pour nos églises. On y va.

  She started walking briskly again, pointing to dark structure looming over the other rooftops. C’est là que nous allons. Notre Dame.

  We walked. Caleb lingered behind us to take photos of me and Adélaïde in our cowboy boots shrouded in the mist between the mythic structures, and I tried not to think of fairytales. These buildings were real. Practical. Designed and built by human beings for human needs. The Gothic and Renaissance architecture had seen generations through war and disease and invention. Our breathing and eating in these walls was living palimpsest. We were writing our stories over the stories of the past.

  I tried to keep pace with Adélaïde without limping or stopping. My left leg was starting to cramp, but I wouldn’t ask her to slow down. When we reached the church she’d pointed out, we stopped in front of an ominous, locked gate. Mounted next to the gate, just high enough so that Caleb would need to stand on his tiptoes to reach it, was a Chihuahua-sized statue of an owl.

  Adélaïde gestured to the owl and said something in French, then touched the statue with her left hand while gazing pensively at another church spire that rose over the rooftops. After a few moments, she inhaled deeply and withdrew her hand, then she walked a few steps and turned away from us as if she were waiting politely for us to change clothes.

  I think we’re supposed to make a wish, I said to Caleb.

  Caleb looked at the statue and bit his bottom lip. He moved his camera over to his right hip, stood on his toes, and reverently touched the stone bird. His eyes found the same church spire Adélaïde’s had, and for a moment, we both held our breath and everything became still. Caleb almost looked like a statue himself.

  Then he exhaled back onto his heels and brought his left hand back to the camera at his hip. He stepped back and waited for me to make my wish.

  I looked at the owl, which, because of its cuteness, I was pretty sure wasn’t technically a gargoyle. I’d made hundreds of wishes in my life over fetishes of magical thinking—birthday candles, Virgin Mary apparitions, penny-filled fountains, Mardi Gras beads blessed by Voodoo priestesses, etc. Most of these wishes after age thirteen had been variations on Please [God, Abyss, Shiva, Avalokiteshvara, St. Teresa of Avila, Thoth, Orpheus, Pallas Athena, Ghost of William Faulkner, Bar Where Ernest Hemmingway Drank Once, Other Symbolic Deity], let me be a writer. This time, though, that standby didn’t feel appropriate. I was on tour in Europe being paid to perform my poetry. Just because my being a writer looked more like reading in dive bars and cafés than schmoozing with Oprah didn’t mean my wish hadn’t come true. Any symbolic deity hearing me wish, at this point, to be a writer, would, I expected, determine me ungrateful.

  I took a deep breath, touched the owl with my left hand, looked at the spire, and said, in my head, I wish that both Caleb and I have a good year. (I’d found that for me, when it came to things like prayer and New Year’s Resolutions, vagueness was more effective than specificity.)

  We rejoined Adélaïde.

  I have a thought, she said, touching her bottom lip with her index finger. Do you like to go to a restaurant where you can eat eggs poached in red wine?

  I looked at Caleb. He shrugged and made a face that said, I’m incredibly hungry, and I’ll go anywhere you want.

  Oué, fantastique, I said. On a beaucoup de faim.

  Great! I am taking you to my favorite restaurant in Dijon. Not too expensive. Fifteen euro perhaps and that is with wine.

  That sounds amazing. I mean, fantastique.

  If it pleases you, we can speak English now. It’s good to practice English for me, too.

  D’accord. I mean, okay.

  We followed her through a large square in front of another imposing Gothic church. Do you know Patti Smith? Adélaïde said.

  Caleb looked at me and let out a single, quiet chuckle that was more of a statement than a laugh.

  Yeah, I said. She’s one of our all-time favorites.

  Adélaïde pointed at the church. She play here two years ago, and I saw. She held her right hand over her heart in a loose fist. She is my mother. I mean, my mother who I didn’t know. You understand?

  Yes, je comprends. She’s one of my heroes. Caleb and I saw her a couple of years ago in Providence. She wore cowboy boots just like yours. That’s why I bought my cowboy boots.

  She stopped i
n the middle of the street and looked down at both of our footwear as though she only just noticed the coincidence. Oh, so we two are sisters, after all. She smiled at me. Her eyes were warm brown and looking at them for too long embarrassed me, so I glanced up at her hat.

  This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship, I said.

  Oh! she said. You quote Mr. Bogart from one of my favorite movie. It’s terrible how unknown is Casablanca in France. That’s such a pity! So I’m glad you did so because no one else here would do.

  I heard the click of Caleb’s camera. I looked back at him and his camera looked at me and clicked again.

  Chapter Twelve

  Portraits

  For six years, Caleb and I have collaborated on an extended portrait project. It started in Bloomington the summer of 2006, right before he moved to Boston and I went to Europe with Thade.

  Caleb and I spent a lot of time that summer at each other’s houses developing high-concept art pieces with varying success rates. One involved handwritten letters by fictional people expressing their loneliness and need for human connection, signed with pleas for any sort of written response. Each envelope contained another envelope stamped and addressed to a PO box we’d rented. We would leave the letters in strategic places, like coffee shops and libraries, and we always disguised our handwriting. We checked the PO box once a week, but no responses ever came.

  Other projects were more successful, such as shellacking collages of fashion magazines and pornography. We came up with the mantra EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY and wrote it in sharpie in every bathroom stall we visited in Bloomington. I also came up with the slogan ART SAVES, inspired by the many Christian billboards and bumper stickers in Southern Indiana. We had ART SAVES stickers printed up and stuck them everywhere16.

  We talked a lot about artists we loved, especially Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Even more than their work, we loved their story. How Patti Smith moved to New York from New Jersey to become an artist. How their working relationship carried them through a young romance that evolved to a mature romantic friendship. How much they loved each other. How they were so, so queer17.

  As far as the portraits, we never decided to do it. It just happened and kept happening. Caleb decided he wanted to become a photographer, and he started shooting me. He didn’t know what he was doing yet. He was learning and I was his test subject.

  One of my favorite pictures of me ever is me in Bloomington’s old, Southern-feeling graveyard. I’m leaning against a headstone that’s a large crucifix with an eroding Jesus, looking out past the viewer. I’m 23 and have short, dyed-black hair. There’s a lit cigarette in my mouth, but I didn’t smoke18.

  A portrait is really a picture of the relationship between the artist and the model. That’s why the Mapplethorpe photos of Patti Smith are so striking. No one knew her like him and no one knew him like her and the real picture is that knowing.

  At the end of the summer Caleb knew he was moving to Boston and I didn’t know for sure what I was going to do, so we had an Art Marriage ceremony at the anarchist co-op bookstore to profess our profound Art commitment and also our real, nonphysical undying Love. It was a Friday evening event. We flyered and advertised and invited everyone we knew. About sixty people came to see exhibits of all the work we’d created over the summer, hear me read some poems, and watch us get married. We wrote our own vows and exchanged vials of fake blood. Thade performed the ceremony and Caleb’s girlfriend, Leyna, was the vial-bearer.

  Caleb and Leyna had been together for three years and Thade and I had been together for four years. Caleb had asked Leyna if it was okay with her that we got Art Married because he and Leyna knew they were going to get married for real in the next couple of years19. She said it was. I didn’t ask Thade if it was okay with him, but I’m almost positive he would have said it was if I had.

  Thade and I knew we weren’t going to get married for real. Thade wanted to stay in Indiana near his family and live a simple life teaching piano and probably eventually go to grad school. I wanted to go to a real city on a coast and be an artist. Thade20 said I could be an artist in Bloomington, and I said not the kind of artist I wanted to be.

  I passed out on Leyna and Caleb’s couch after pints of whiskey and hours of repetitive dialogue about what I should do romance- and moving-wise more than a few nights that summer. In the end, I moved to Boston and that was the end of me and Thade.

  In Boston, I was Caleb’s model throughout his stay at photography school. When I started performing, he took all of my pictures. Over the next five years, the portraits continued, trudging through the snow against an eye-blue sky; under streetlights in knee-high boots, push-up bra, and lip-liner; makeupless in a grey polo-dress with an electro-shock hair tangle; giddily nude in hungover, post-sex, bedroom languor; autumn afternoon in a collared shirt, vest, and cowboy boots; drinking whiskey or eating ice cream sandwiches or doing absentminded yoga poses in cut-offs in the back yard. We don’t talk about why we do the portraits. It’s just what we do.

  When I post photos we’ve taken together on Facebook I usually tag Caleb. There are a lot more photos of me than of him on his page. There are a lot more of me than of anyone else.

  Caleb uses a lot of our photos in the photography classes he teaches. He said recently he wonders if people wonder who I am. My students know I’m married, he said. But then I’ve got all these pictures of this other woman. I told him it was good for an artist to have intriguing interpersonal relationships.

  I worked as an artist’s model for years in my mid-twenties when I was broke. I had thousands of photos of me taken by dozens of photographers. Caleb’s are the only ones I liked and still like. Caleb’s are the only ones I can look at and see someone that looks at all how I think I am.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Poseurs

  When we arrived at L’Epicerie & Cie, Adélaïde ordered a half-carafe of red wine, which the waiter brought out along with our menus and a basket of baguette. The restaurant was nearly empty and remarkably rustic with exposed stone walls, rounded, hut-like, ceilings, wooden tables and chairs, and an open kitchen. In Cambridge, I would have thought a restaurant like this was trying too hard, but here, it felt authentic. I was aware of the fact that I assumed its authenticity mostly because I was in France and wasn’t sure what that meant about me, France, or authenticity, if it meant anything at all.

  Moments after the wine and bread were on the table, we heard the obtrusive vibration of a cell phone, and Adélaïde reached into her bag. Excuse me, one moment, she said. She held her phone to her ear, covered the other ear with her finger, and said, Allô. Caleb took a picture of her like that, curled over her cell phone with dark hair falling over her eyes. In a moment, her face lit up and she started speaking rapidly in French. Then, she stood and looked at us apologetically. Just one moment, she said. Leaving her coat and bag on her chair across from us, she walked outside. I poured three glasses of wine (a very shallow one for Caleb) while he tore off a piece of bread and buttered it. He shoved two-thirds of the buttered piece into his mouth and started to chew as if he were in an instructional video for those wishing to maximize their bread consumption efficiency and minimize their entanglement with all things not consuming bread.

  How long do we have till the show? he said, covering his still-chewing mouth with his hand. I thought they said it started at nine, and it’s after eight-thirty. He swallowed and shoved the rest of the bread in his hand into his mouth, then tore off another piece and started buttering.

  She’s got it. She’s going to the show, so she knows when we need to get there.

  I just don’t want you to be late.

  I know. Thank you.

  I ripped my paper napkin in half, placed half on my lap, and used the other half to blow my nose. Caleb started in on his second piece of bread, and I sipped my wine. It tasted especially crisp and balanced, as I was aware I expected it to because I was in a rustic restaurant in Burgundy drinking Burgundy and not
on a back porch in Jamaica Plain drinking Trader Joe’s wine out of a souvenir coffee mug.

  So, I said. She’s ridiculous.

  Caleb covered his chewing mouth. Yeah, but how old is she though?

  Twenty-five. She said that, didn’t you hear? In French right before we got to that gargoyle thing we wished on.

  I guess I missed it.

  She said, ‘J’ai habité en Dijon depuis veingt-cinq ans, et je l’aime,’ or something like that.

  I believe you.

  Twenty-five is perfectly reasonable, isn’t it?

  Yeah, totally fine.

  And she’s ridiculous.

  No, she is. There are lots of people with great personalities, and there are lots of beautiful people21, and she, legitimately, is both.

  I sipped my wine and tore myself a small piece of baguette. For a moment, both Caleb and I were silent except for the quiet breath and saliva noises of eating. Adélaïde reentered smiling with her entire being. She told us she’d just gotten a job working on a movie set in Paris. It meant spending four days a week in Paris for three months, starting the following Monday. She had a friend with an extra room in the city where she could stay for free.

  It is not acting, but it is in the film industry, and I believe Paris will be inspirating for my writing.

  I’m sure it will be, I said. That’s what Paris does. Congratulations.

  I held up my wine glass, and we all toasted her new job. Adélaïde sipped the wine and made a face of discernment, as if she were assessing her choice, then nodded to herself and placed the glass back down. Caleb took the tiniest sip possible. I drank uncritically. Adélaïde took a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose.

  Three small plates of salad and toast arrived, along with three smooth burnt sienna earthenware pots holding poached eggs floating embryonically in deep ruby-purple broth. Caleb’s face dropped when he saw bits of ham floating in the sauce.

  Oh crap. You can’t eat that, can you? I said.