Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

  When I told my mom I called myself Jade and that the government now called me Jade, she was quiet, as though I’d rejected a much-pondered Christmas present. It took her a while, but she calls me Jade to my face now. To my dad or my Grandma, she calls me Jen(ny/i) still, but this is for them and not for her. She writes Jade on my Christmas presents. She gives me jade necklaces and earrings.

  When I’ve talked to Caleb about transitioning, he’s never said he felt like he was a man “trapped in a woman’s body.” He just said this body felt more right.

  When I was young and called myself Jenny, it didn’t feel right. I picked Jade not because it felt right, but because it meant what it meant. When I call myself Jade or someone else calls me Jade, it still doesn’t feel right.

  When I was with Thade, I called myself Jeni and I mostly called myself queer or bi. Sometimes when we’d go out, he would dress up like a woman, shaved legs and all, and I would dress up like a man, bound chest and all. Sometimes I would sleep with women while we were dating. Sometimes he was okay with this, and sometimes he pretended to be okay. Sometimes during and after I was with Thade I called myself straight just because I’d mostly had relationships with men. When I called myself straight and had sex with women, I felt like a bad person.

  When I was with Luke, I called myself Jade and I mostly called myself straight. Luke was tall and played baseball, and when we met, he pursued me like I’d read about guys doing in my friends’ issues of Cosmo at middle school slumber parties. He even grilled me a steak. When we went out, he always wore the suit jacket and I always wore the little black dress. For a long time after we broke up, I had sex with both men and women but it was a long time before I called myself queer again. When I started calling myself queer again, I’d still had way more penises against my bare skin than vaginas.

  When I called myself queer and had had more penises than vaginas against my skin, I felt like a bad person.

  When I’ve had to write about myself and call myself she or her, it doesn’t feel right—in my head I hear a genderless voice, somewhere between and/or outside of she and he and her and him.

  When I write about myself in France, I feel like I’m creating a character from nothing. I’m doing it because I have to in order to tell a story. These words are gobs of paint I’m lobbing at some invisible creature, trying to give it form.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Illuminations

  The grey-green winter pasturelands of Eastern France glided past us on the train to Champagne. None of us was fully awake or asleep, but there was a woman in front of me and Julian who appeared to be napping. I blew my nose as quietly as I could.

  Our parting with Adélaïde had been hazy and brief. After the corpse the night before, she went back to her apartment and I crawled into bed beside a fetal Caleb. When I woke up, Julian was asleep on the couch in the living room. He woke up smiling and stretched like a languorous cat. Dareka and Lucile wandered out of Lucile’s room. Lucile had to go to work, so Adélaïde came back to drive us to our 9:35h train to Champagne. Dareka was going back to Paris on a 9:50h train to audition drummers for his band. He would meet us in Reims that evening for the show. He assured us that someone would pick us up from the station in Champagne. He said we should call him if we had any problems.

  He bought us a large bag full of croissants and pains au chocolat before we left, and we sat in the living room of Lucile’s apartment quietly drinking instant coffee and eating pastry. We rode to the station in near silence. The sky was still overcast and the air was damp. Thank you for our tour, was all I could think to say to Adélaïde as we groggily bisou’d goodbye. Even at this hour, she was wearing her Casablanca hat.

  Caleb was three rows back on the train propped against the window with a t-shirt covering his face as Julian told me with manic post-hook-up aphasia about he and Scott’s many eerie synchronicities. I was sitting by the window. As we talked he looked just past me to his reflection, occasionally shifting his gaze for brief touchstones of eye contact. I wasn’t sure if he knew (or cared) if I noticed this or not.

  I just feel like I deserve to have a young, beautiful lover, he said. I never had that. I was raised in Virginia where the only other gay kid in my school got beat up in a parking lot and almost killed. I was fucking terrified to be gay, and I wound up being practically celibate from the time I was seventeen till I was twenty-four. That was my sexual peak, and I missed it. I missed out on the entire experience of young romance. I feel completely, utterly cheated.

  Yeah, I said. I feel like I might be too old to really experience romance now too. I feel like you have to, like, believe in stuff to go in for that. You have to believe that someone else can complete you. I remember feeling like that, but I don’t feel that way now. I don’t think you can ever go back.

  But you’ve had romance. I mean, you were with Luke.

  That’s one of the reasons I worry I can’t do it anymore. That was romantic, yes, but it was completely fucked up and manipulative and kind of abusive. I realized after that how many stories I told myself to keep myself in it. It scares me to think about what we can get ourselves to do if we can make up a story we believe to support it.

  Julian shrugged. Well, I’m sure you’ll find someone. You’re beautiful and talented. It’s easier for women, anyway. Your sexual peak is later. He heaved a windy sigh. Plus, you’re bi, so your pool is way wider than mine. You’ll be fine. I’m fucked.

  Julian put in his earbuds33, leaned back, and closed his eyes. I followed suit and nodded off to Patti Smith’s voice (shout/sing)ing about (G/g)od, freedom, and being so goddamn young.

  We were picked up at the Champagne train station by a tall, bearded man in his mid-to-late thirties named Martin who spoke almost no English.

  Nous voudrions aller à la Cathédrale… er… avec Joan D’Arc, I said.

  La Cathédrale? said Martin. Ouais, on peut la visiter.

  He stood there eagerly. I was ruined for tour guides. I could almost hear Adélaïde’s smoky voice assuring us the Cathedral would be “inspirating.”

  Julian wanted to go to the Reims Cathedral because he had a thing for Joan of Arc, but he never really told me much about it. The structure was immense. Mythical. The sculpted scenes and characters over the doorways. The gargoyles and buttresses. The taupe grey of the stone. Caleb took out his camera and began to shoot me and Julian as we gaped beneath it.

  Nothing is quiet like a medieval Cathedral is quiet. We were the only people inside, and the hall echoed back to us our steps, breaths, and the clicks of Caleb’s camera, each lingering noise underlining the silence. When I blew my nose, the whole cavern vibrated.

  Caleb was an atheist. It was one of the first things we’d talked about. He’d been raised Catholic and was almost confirmed. He told me how he remembered trying to picture heaven around that time. How the way his mother would describe it, being the same thing forever and ever, sounded nightmarish to him. When he tried to imagine “forever,” he couldn’t, not any more than he could imagine “nothingness.” This idea of Forever terrified him as much as the idea of annihilation.

  He stopped going to church when he was thirteen, but he attended Catholic school through high school. His mother was still Catholic when she died. It was harder for her to accept Caleb’s renunciation of Catholicism than his decision to become a man.

  He still loved the ritual, the symbol, and the artifacts. He created collages from Catholic imagery and icons and made found art from various Catholic paraphernalia. He photographed priests and churches and especially Catholic gravestones. We had this in common in Bloomington, when I was into William Blake, John Milton, and Catholic mysticism. I had a Mary Magdalene medal I bought from a thrift store in San Francisco that I wore on a leather cord around my neck for three years. I saw Eden/Fall metaphors everywhere. In Boston, I got into yoga and a more Buddhist/Hindu brand of mystical agnosticism. Caleb never stopped collecting Catholic fetishes.

  We each lit a candle in front of the Virg
in. These places really do feel holy, I whispered to Caleb as he photographed the seafoam and silver stained glass. He nodded and kept shooting.

  Chapter Twenty

  La Chambre du Champagne

  Jade! Julian! Welcome! I’m so glad you are here. Dareka bisou’d me and Julian but not Caleb. The whole café was probably not more than three square meters. There was a refrigerator on one side, a large bookshelf on the other, and a small kitchen area with a bar and stools along the back. The front wall of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window, so anything going on inside glowed like a silent film from the street. They have a bottle of nice champagne for you, said Dareka. I lied. I told them, ‘These Americans, it is very sad. They have never had champagne,’ so they bought you some.

  Sébast, the host of the venue, brought us a chilled bottle and three glasses. Sébast, like Bernard and Martin, was pale with short dark hair and a short, dark beard. Unlike Bernard and Martin, he was shorter than me. An attractive, ponytailed Eastern European man in an apron set out a carafe of white wine and a carafe of red wine on the bar in the back. Then he took out a cutting board and a large chef’s knife and began slicing hard sausage and cheese.

  Julian, Caleb, and I toasted with our champagne. It tasted like sparkly velvet.

  They make their own pâté here, too, said Dareka. Usually interesting types. Duck and rabbit, things like that. Let one of us know when you are hungry, and we will make sure you get a plate.

  Before long, guests started to arrive. We were introduced to nearly everyone as they walked in, but it was starting to become difficult to remember names and faces. The room filled. People began drinking wine and ordering plates of pâté and cheese. Baskets of baguettes were passed around and ripped apart. A small woman of about sixty sat on a bench with her back to the window and began playing atmospheric accordion music.

  Sébast performed a poem to begin the evening, and then other members of the audience began to perform. I leaned over to Dareka and I asked if we could try something different here. I wanted to read a couple of my poems in English then have him read the French translations directly afterward. He agreed, and I gave him one of my chapbooks so he could familiarize himself with the words.

  Sébast brought us plates of pâté and cheese with large chunks of bread. Julian and I devoured the pâté while Caleb nibbled on the cheese. I finished my glass of champagne and started on Caleb’s barely-touched one. All around us, more poetry, more breath, more words.

  After we performed, the air in the room was charged. The crowd moved in immediately around us. Everyone wanted to talk to us, to touch us. They told me how much what I’d written had meant to them. They thanked me for coming to France. I sold ten books in fifteen minutes. One woman said I reminded her of Arthur Rimbaud. Another, of Bob Dylan.

  More cheese and baguettes were brought out from the back room. When Julian and I were out of champagne, someone brought us each a glass of wine. A few people began to spout poetry spontaneously, but most of the din was conversation. Eventually, the Eastern European man in the apron locked the front door, and a few people began smoking cigarettes and joints inside34. The front window grew too steamed up for Julian to see himself in it. The Eastern European man began to chat me up. He looked and spoke nothing like Adélaïde, and I was stupendously uninterested. Sébast paid Julian and me the one hundred euros he’d promised each of us. He told us how much he appreciated our coming through Reims and seemed to really mean it.

  Our host in Reims was Élodie, a pretty, slim blond woman with a preppy style and a nose stud. As soon as we got back to her place, Caleb went to bed on the chaise lounge on the landing. Julian and I stayed up with Élodie, her husband, and Sébast drinking desert wine and talking in broken English and broken French about the psychocultural reasons why Americans are so fat.

  Les personnes sont malheureuses, I said, sipping the last of the champagne Élodie had bought for us. Donc ils mangent et mangent parceque ils croyent que ce va… fill them up. Vous comprennez? En les Etats Unis, tout le monde sont… empty… vide. Tout le monde sont vide, et on veut… fill up avec quelquechose. Donc, on mange et mange, et on fait du shopping, et on bois et fume. Pas seulement un peu, mais TOUT le viande et TOUT les robes et TOUT le whiskey et TOUT les tabacs. Mais on ne peut pas être… full. On est toujours vide, et ce fait peur.

  When you’re talking to someone from another culture, finding common experience has to be much more intentional. When you’re talking to someone in your demographic in your neighborhood, it’s easy. You assume similar taste for farmer’s market arugula or The Daily Show. The further removed from superficial similarities you get, the more you have to dig to find common ground. Eventually, it becomes so simple. I want. You want. I love. You love. I’m afraid. You’re afraid. Etc.

  Not having the language to say what you mean makes you realize the difference between meaning and accuracy. You have to get creative, and your meaning has to be more important than your ego. You wind up using either very simple language or elaborate metaphors and images. It’s a little like poetry.

  After my second glass of dessert wine, I said, Caleb et moi, nous allons aller à Père Lachaise pour voir la tombe d’Oscar Wilde. Vous savez l’histoire?

  L’histoire d’Oscar Wilde? said Élodie.

  Oué, l’histoire d’Oscar Wilde, mais aussi l’histoire de la tombe? Comment dans le… nineteen nineties… beaucoup des personnes a elle embrassé avec rouge à lèvres. Ensuite, le gouvernement a elle nettoyé, et… put up a glass barrier.

  Élodie and the two dark-haired men nodded. I continued.

  So, the thing is, le chose est, aside from being a huge role model/poster child for gay and queer culture for the past several decades, Oscar Wilde was also a martyr for art, romance, and for romantic art. What most people don’t know about his trials—meaning, the trials in which he was accused of being a sodomite, which led to his imprisonment, and which led to his death—what most people don’t know about them is that he was given the chance to flee, like, many times. He was a popular guy in London. A toast of the town. No one wanted to see him imprisoned. The authorities, everyone hoped he would go abroad, but he chose to stay. He didn’t admit to fucking men, but he publicly made a case for art and aesthetics and a confusing type of love more complex, subtle, and profound than prescribed Victorian courtship or modern so-called romantic comedies. He lost the trials, but his ideology would only lose if he didn’t walk his body through the tragedy, and he understood that.

  Most gender studies and queer theory-oriented people I know say that the concept of the homosexual started at the moment a court of law decided that Wilde, the aesthete, the poet, was the “type of person” who would commit sodomy. Before that, having sex with someone of the same gender was an act, not an identity.

  The thing is, identity was Wilde’s best medium, and his masterpiece was his own personality. To be honest, I never cared for Wilde’s poetry. I love his letters and essays and enjoy his plays, but his verse was too Victorian for me. The singsong rhyme scheme always seemed clunky, and a lot of his lines are just too cliché, even allowing for the time period.

  But Wilde was a poet if anyone has ever been a poet. His life was poetry and he lived poetry. He wrote about how he lived poetry, and referred to himself as a poet in his writing. The personality that he worked so hard to excavate from the silt of Victorian society and express to the full extent of its individuality was The Poet35, as it had to be contextualized in his specific time and place.

  When he was released finally, he fled London alone and in disgrace. In France, he wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” about his experience in prison. He repeats again and again the line, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves36.’

  Oscar Wilde died exiled. He wasn’t buried in Père Lachaise. He was buried in some random graveyard outside the Parisian city limits. He wasn’t moved to where he is now until years later. That was when they built the big monument.

  He died for art. He died for beauty. He died
for love. He died… I trailed off.

  Julian was horizontal and three-quarters-asleep clutching a pillow on his futon. I scanned the other faces in the room and could see most of my English was lost on Sébast, Élodie, and her husband. They nodded and fingered their glasses in a polite, sleepy show of attentiveness.

  I switched back to French feebly and tried to start a conversation about gay marriage legislation in France versus the U.S. Everyone was tired. I kept calling Élodie “vous,” and she corrected me and told me I should be using “tu,” since she was only a couple years older than me. That didn’t seem right. She was married with two daughters and a real career. I was still living in a room lit with Christmas lights and writing poems on my bed like a college student.

  Julian interrupted Sébast mid-sentence by started to snore. I yawned. My vision was getting hazy.

  Je dois me coucher, I said. Merci pour le vin et le conversation. Je suis trés fatiguée maintenant. Merci. Bonne nuit.

  I downed a full glass of water and curled up on the stiff cot. My heart was racing, and I knew I would be at least a little hungover the next morning. My left leg was cramped along the outside, ankle to knee to hip. I thought, as I often did, that I wish I’d started all of this younger. If I were twenty-one, instead of twenty-nine, the couch-crashing and the strange-town hangovers would seem much more romantic. Now, I could feel my body beginning to protest. My joints were at the brink of growing stiff and brittle.

  For a moment, I wished for a familiar, soft bed, with my own lamp and glass on the end table, a tired routine to wake up to, and partner so familiar I could be annoyed by their sleep-breathing and/ or their stealing the covers. I thought of Thade and our apartment in Bloomington, how I could have had one bed with one person my whole life. But I couldn’t do it, just as I could never hold a regular job for more than a few months at a time. No matter how much I convinced myself I wanted these things, my body rejected them like bad grafts. No ordinary life seemed worth living to me. Again and again, my choice was clear: either I kill myself, or I go for the impossible thing. There was nothing to lose, and I was curious about the stories of my idols. They’d had bodies, just like me. I had to know if it was possible to step my flesh into the mythical realm of poets and gods.