Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

Sure. It’s up to you.

  I took a step forward. Crap. I don’t have any lipstick.

  I remembered packing and holding lipstick in my hand and choosing not to put it in. I remembered thinking I didn’t wear lipstick anymore, that lipstick, along with Chanel perfume and skin-tight mini-dresses, were things I wore when I was dating Luke. I then remembered remembering the Wilde grave-kissing plan and remembered thinking I’d buy lipstick in Paris if I needed it. I hadn’t bought any, and here we were. Without lipstick, the kiss would be useless.

  Before we could figure out another plan, we heard the anemic honk of a golf cart horn. A guard had pulled up behind us to let us know Père Lachaise was closing. The German tourists linked arms and walked toward the nearest exit. Caleb immediately shoved his camera into its bag.

  We should go, he said.

  Yeah, I know.

  Maybe we can come back another time. We can find some lipstick somewhere.

  Sure. Maybe.

  The golf cart honked again. Caleb and I followed after the German couple. I was hobbling. Every other step hurt.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  La Fée Verte

  It was Julian’s and my last show together before he left for Germany and then Denmark. The gig was in a tiny stone, dungeon-esque basement of a yuppie nightclub in Oberkampf. I wore a collared shirt with a skinny tie tied in a four-in-hand knot, black pants, and a vest. The humidity had curled my hair to tight, wild ringlets44. There were about twelve audience members. I sold three books and bought one drink and came away twenty euro in the black.

  After the show, we were all milling around outside the club as the city’s night chasers started to emerge from their glittered and perfumed burrows to grab their street crêpes pregnant with Nutella et coco et banane and get on their collective and respective drinks/ dances/smokes.

  So what’s the plan? said Julian, running his fingers through his hair and eyeing the clubgoers that slid past like quicksilver. Caleb and I shrugged.

  Dareka materialized out of the din of the bar. He put one hand on my shoulder and one hand on Julian’s shoulder. Guys, do you want to go to a bar with thirty different types of absinthe? he said45.

  I was absolutely exhausted, and Caleb looked like he was wilting around the weight of his camera, but it was Friday night and we were in Paris. I looked at Julian. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  Sure, I said. Is it close?

  Yes. It is on the way back to my place.

  The bar was a bar. It was dark and decorated with skeleton paraphernalia, oddly colored boudoir-esque lights, and a murder of pale, glammed-out goth kids in various states of lithe shirtlessness writhing around a makeshift dance floor in the back room’s backmost corner. The bar itself in the front room was stocked with bottles and bottles of green, white, and blue absinthe. When I walked up, the bartender handed me a menu.

  I’d had absinthe about eight times, all of which were when I was under twenty-five. Six of these times involved lighting a sugar cube on fire, five involved Dawn, and three involved me blacking out, vomiting out of other people’s cars, and time-traveling to some sweaty, unfamiliar bed, still wearing my clothes from the night before.

  But it was Paris on a Friday night, and I was a poet, so I was going to have a glass of absinthe. It was organized like a microbrewery’s beer menu. There were columns for price, alcohol content, and wormwood content, along with descriptions of the absinthe’s character that I could halfway decipher. I was too tired to care about choosing.

  Dareka’s American roommate Maureen had joined us after our gig, and she walked up next to me and asked to share the menu, scrunching up her nose like a bunny.

  Hey, can you pick something for me? I said.

  Sure! she said. She smiled and her shoulders shrugged up toward her ears. What are you looking for?

  Something not expensive and not terrible.

  She laughed. Okay! Fair enough. She took the menu and began to study it.

  She was wearing a baggy granny-chic cardigan, a flapper-style frock, and large plastic glasses. Even when she put down the menu, the oversized cardigan forced her to keep her arms bent at the elbow as if she were carrying a shawl.

  She ordered for both of us, and we watched as the bartender poured the drinks and placed a small silver spoon over the rim of each one, topped with a sugar cube. He then placed both glasses under its own stream of water flowing from a large glass canister with multiple spigots radiating from its basin like the legs of an octopus. I wasn’t sure which was more hypnotic: the thin, gentle stream of clear water cascading over the sugar and diffusing into the cloudy green liquid below or the gradual erosion of the cube as it dissolved under its flow.

  When the small ritual was complete, we each took our glasses and carried them back to the room with the dance floor. There, Julian was listening to Dareka describe, amongst highly animated hand gestures, the controversial schism that had recently occurred in Paris between the Grand Slam National and the Coupe de La Ligue Slam de France. Dareka was expressing a less than favorable opinion about the founder and organizer of the former. He gripped his small bottle of Coca-Cola tightly in his left hand.

  Caleb was hovering in the corner behind them and in front of an open casket mounted to the wall that displayed a plastic human skeleton. I walked over to him, and we stood with our backs to the corner watching the patrons of the bar.

  There were dozens of beautiful young people wearing faerie wings or vinyl skirts or nipple-shielding electrical tape Xs in lieu of shirts. About half the bar wore some form of fishnet somewhere on their body.

  I sipped my absinthe46. The intense flavor of licorice woke me up a little, but the alcohol was soporific. I looked at Caleb. We didn’t need to say it. He was thirty and I was one year shy of it, and we were both feeling our age.

  You know, ten years ago I would have thought this was the coolest thing in the world. I loved bars. I thought facts of the bar—the dim lights, the drinking, the grasping at connectedness through all this obfuscation of the senses, all of this— were so romantic. Now I just look around and see all these people, and I feel like I already know them. That blond girl over there in the sequins? I would have such a crush on her. We’d have a two-week-long romance where she’d overtake my life and crash my car and probably get me fired from some job. Then she’d steal my favorite t-shirt and end up dating some asshole guy with a Poli Sci degree and a big dick. That guy with the blazer and the scarf? We’d hang out for a few months sharing our favorite anime series and talking about Meister Eckhart and Kierkegaard. He’d have a girlfriend who didn’t understand him but who he couldn’t leave. He’d say how much he wished things were different. He’d tell me that I’m talented and brilliant, and that he’d be very lucky to be with me, but he just couldn’t do it.

  I swear, said Caleb, if I hadn’t met Leyna, I’d just be alone forever. I’d never date. I’d never talk to people. I’d just hide in my room and make art.

  Yeah. Maybe that’s what I should do.

  We stood there for a few minutes as silent observers. I experimented shifting my weight in my cowboy boots, trying to find some manner of standing that caused the least amount of pain in my left leg. I started to watch the interaction right in front of us. Maureen had joined Dareka and Julian. She was smiling behind her large glasses and clutching her glass of absinthe in her left hand while she used her right hand to gesture. Both elbows remained bent, the oversized shawl draping around them. When she was finished gesturing, her right hand would rejoin the left to lightly finger the glass.

  I looked at Caleb. He was watching Maureen, too. I said, Isn’t it interesting how what clothes people wear affects the way they move their bodies? He locked eyes with me. I said, I mean, if I were standing here in a short dress instead of pants and a tie, I’d carry myself completely differently. I’d almost feel like a completely different person.

  He smiled, and, for a moment, there was no place where he ended and I began or I ended and he began. That
was the point of Other People’s Clothes, he said. I noticed how even just the way clothes are cut sort of forces a body into moving a certain way. Something as simple as the difference between a tight tweed skirt constricting your movement and a pair of Levis and a t-shirt. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The clothes are designed for a type of person. Then they sort of bridle the person’s flesh into being that type.

  Maureen tossed her head back and opened her mouth wide to mime laughter. I remembered Adélaïde tearing through the moodily lit Dijon streets in her fedora and trench coat. Her laugh sounded like a fox’s bark. I sipped my absinthe and found the bottom of the glass. It had disappeared without my noticing.

  I think the reason I can’t seem to date right is I don’t have any sense of a definable linear identity47, I said. As far as I’m concerned, there is no me, just a bunch of costumes I try on and get bored with. By the time anyone starts to like anything about my personality, it changes. I become someone else. People fall in love with each other for their personalities. To be loved, you need to believe in your own personality. You need to think you know who you are.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Truth of Masks

  It was raining in Oberkampf. Caleb and I huddled underneath a tiny awning waiting for Agnès to come down and let us in.

  Julian had left early that morning after he and I’d shared a restless night’s sleep on a sagging queen-sized pull-out couch. He woke me and Caleb (who’d slept on the loveseat a few feet away) by fumbling around the room at 6:50h, packing up his things to catch his 8:14h train. When he said, in a small, authentic voice, Goodbye, Jade. It was great sharing a tour with you, my response was an unfortunately cranky, Thanks. Bye.

  Agnès looked like a bird. She was tall and lanky, with straw-straight dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She owned an art gallery in town, and her apartment was full of African masks and carvings. Her left eye was lazy and pointed down and to the left as she made intense eye-contact with her right eye and complained to us about being in a band with Dareka.

  If tomorrow’s practice goes like rehearsal did on Thursday, I’m out, she said.

  It was rough? I said, as Caleb and I removed our soggy shoes, socks, and jackets in her entryway.

  She set her bag down dramatically beside two large African drums, pausing with a hand on her hip, gazing away from us out the large sliding glass doors that led to a small cement balcony. Let’s just say he doesn’t listen.

  She was white, which I mention because she was from Ghana. She played African drums in Dareka’s band. French was her first language, but it was Ghanaian French. She said nobody could understand her accent. When she spoke French people assumed she was English, and when she spoke English, people assumed she was German. She spoke to us in English. When I looked at her and listened to her speak English, she sounded German, but when I closed my eyes she sounded African.

  I meet black people in France who tell me I don’t have the right to play the drums or to call myself African, she said. She looked at us with her right eye. I look straight at them and say, ‘Ha! I am more black than you are. You don’t know anything about Africa. You’ve never even been outside of Paris. I can hear it in the way you speak.’

  Caleb and I exchanged glances. The way many white people in Europe48 talked about race made both of us uncomfortable.

  She sank into the sofa, then shifted and pressed her hand into the fabric beneath her. Oh shit, she said. It’s fucking wet.

  A snow-white Persian cat padded out of the bathroom. Agnès stared at it and held out her wet hand.

  I adopted her from a shelter four months ago. This problem only started last month though. I brought her to the vet, and they said there’s nothing wrong with her. I don’t know. If this keeps up I can’t keep her, but I know if I bring her back like this they’ll kill her. In short, I don’t know what to do. She walked past us into the kitchen to wash the cat pee off her hand. You’re not allergic to cats, are you?

  I am, I said. But I’m allergic to everything. I’m used to it.

  She walked back out to the living room drying her hands with a paper towel. Well, she’s not allowed in your room, anyway. She opened a door off the living room to a small, windowless guest room with a fully-made queen-sized bed. How long are you in Paris? she asked.

  Till Tuesday, I said.

  Are you staying here?

  Caleb and I looked at one another, then back at her. We’re not sure, said Caleb. Dareka said something about another one of his bandmates maybe having room for us, didn’t he?

  She waved a hand at us and walked back into her kitchen. Don’t be silly. Just stay here. One of the reasons I pay for this stupid apartment is so I can host artists who come through town. Caleb and I both said thank you.

  We unloaded our bags in the guest room. Agnès had to go to work, but she gave us both towels and washcloths and we took turns taking long, hot showers, me first, then Caleb.

  I had to take a paint roller and pan out of the bathtub before I got in to shower. I felt like I stayed in there for an hour, but it was really only about ten minutes. When I came out of the bathroom, Caleb was in the kitchen taking pictures out the window. There, over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, rose the steeple of a Gothic church.

  Every window in France has a church, I said.

  Apparently, he said.

  Caleb went to take a shower, and I went back to the guest room and dropped my towel. I looked at my body in the mirror that hung on the back of the door as I blew my nose on a torn piece of paper towel. I was not old and I was not young. I was not unattractive and I was not exceptionally beautiful. My breasts sagged a little. My calves were strong and taut. I had feminine hips and thighs and masculine arms and shoulders. My hands were perfectly androgynous.

  There are so many stimuli coming at us every second, and we have to figure out some way49 to organize it all. The details we notice become our experience, our experience becomes our story, and our story becomes who we are.

  I don’t know how to tell if I’m a poet because I notice poetic things or if I notice poetic things because I’m a poet. I am a poet, so I notice poetic things. I notice poetic things, so I am a poet. If I weren’t a poet, I don’t know what I’d be.

  It took me years to tell people I was a poet. When I was younger I was afraid they’d laugh and say something like, That doesn’t make you special. Everyone’s a poet.

  I tell people I’m a poet now all the time, and no one’s ever said that to me. If they said that to me now, I don’t think I’d think they were wrong. If they said that to me now, I don’t think it’d make me upset.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Paris est une Fête

  Caleb’s favorite things in the world included thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales. One of our favorite activities in Bloomington, as well as in Boston, had been to go to Goodwill and buy knickknacks, ephemera, and curios to use in our art projects, or, in Caleb’s case, just to keep and possibly display around the house as objets trouvés.

  Before Julian left, he told us about an incredible outdoor flea market he’d gone to when he first arrived in Paris. It took place from 10:00h—14:00h every Saturday and Sunday and spanned two full blocks in the far south of the city.

  On Saturday, after settling in at Agnès’s place and getting cleaned up, Caleb and I had enjoyed a grey afternoon being proper tourists. We’d visited the Pompidou and walked through the fourth arrondissement to Notre-Dame, then crossed the Seine and spent some time in Saint-Michel. We stopped for a late lunch. I ate a duck leg with skin caramelized in its own fat and Caleb ate a cheese omelet and bread and butter. Then we walked through the Latin Quarter of the Left Bank and stopped in the churches of Saint-Germaine and Saint-Sulpice, where Caleb took pictures.

  We talked a few times about finding lipstick and going back to Père Lachaise, but it was raining intermittently and I didn’t want either of us to spend the majority of our time in France trudging through
a damp graveyard wrapped up in one of my compulsive Ahab-esque meta-crusades. I wanted us to sip espresso in cafés and take strolls along the Seine like normal Americans in Paris.

  Plus, every time I thought of the bathetic failure of our first attempt to make a statement, my stomach hurt and I felt like throwing up.

  Saturday night we’d finally gotten some sleep. Dareka was going out dancing and Agnès was going out to some party with an ambiguously romantic male friend, but Caleb and I stayed around her neighborhood in Oberkampf, ate street crêpes for dinner, and went to bed early.

  On Sunday morning, well-rested at last, we trekked out to the flea market. I was looking for two things: one, a vintage men’s velvet blazer, which Dareka had said would be easy to find at a French thrift store; and two, an antique brass statue of Shiva.

  The first booth we passed displayed three full tables of Hindu and Buddhist deities. There was one tarnished Shiva about 18cm tall. It was Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dancers, spinning inside a ring of fire. The owner, a relaxed gentleman of about fifty, said it was from the 1920s. It was just what I was looking for, but I told him I wanted walk around to a few other booths before I bought the first thing I saw.

  In the beginning we spent several minutes at each booth pouring over the varied objects, but when a half hour had passed and we’d only moved about ten meters, we started to make quicker judgments. Caleb found two crucifixes he liked and a tiny, antique painting of a child on a piece of wood. Then we found a vintage clothing dealer with racks upon racks of velvet blazers.

  I tried on about a dozen until I found one that fit, shoulders, hips, chest and all. It was sleek and oil-black. When I put it on and looked into the flimsy full-length mirror they had hanging from the end of the coat rack, I didn’t look like Bob Dylan anymore. I looked like Arthur Rimbaud.

  It’s kind of expensive, I said, which was true. It was fifty euros, and Dareka had told me I shouldn’t pay more than thirty.

  I don’t care, said Caleb. You need to get that. You’re not going to find a better one, and you look ridiculously hot.