Kissing Oscar Wilde

by Jade Sylvan

  I bought the blazer50 and thought of Patti Smith talking about dressing like Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud in the sixties. She said that the sixties were the first time people had dressed like people from other times. I didn’t know if that was true, but in 2012, I didn’t think it was possible not to dress like people from other times.

  By the time we made it to the end of the market, some of the vendors were already packing up. It was almost 14:00h. I hadn’t seen another statue of Shiva the whole two blocks.

  We walked as quickly as we could back through all the tables to catch the gentleman with the Hindu statues. He was mostly packed up, but he remembered me on sight.

  Shiva? he said, and opened up a large Rubbermaid box. Shiva was lying on top of a bed of newsprint.

  Oui, merci, I said. Soixante-dix euro, oui?

  He shrugged. Cinquante.

  Vraiment?

  Oui. Vraiment.

  I gave him the fifty euros and he wrapped Shiva up in newsprint. I looked at the dull brown of the antique brass as he folded it into the paper.

  On peut le nettoyer? I said.

  The man paused as if he were confused. Oui. On peut le polir si tu veux.

  Do you think it would be hard to polish? I asked Caleb.

  Caleb shrugged. I think things look cool when they look old.

  The man handed me the wrapped piece, and I put it in my bag. I could feel its weight all the way back to Oberkampf.

  That evening, while Dareka, Agnés, and the other six members of their eclectic band were practicing, I took Caleb out to dinner51. Since we’d lived in Boston, he’d consistently been the one to take me out since his income had generally been more reliable than mine. Now, with my grant money, plus hundreds of euros in cash in my pocket, I could finally sit down across from him and say, Order anything you want. I’ve got it.

  We split a half-carafe of wine (which meant I drank a half-carafe of wine), a basket of pommes frites, and a basket of bread and butter. There was a vegetarian pasta dish on the menu that Caleb could eat, and I tried andouillette, which the waiter described to me in French as “very French,” and which, as far as I could make out when it arrived, was a sausage casing stuffed entirely with some type of mammalian intestines.

  As I slathered a forkful of sausage with mustard, I looked at Caleb and said, So since we’re in France and I’m taking you out to dinner, can I ask you a question, and then we can never speak of it again?

  He choked a little as his fork clinked down onto his plate, then swallowed and looked away with an apprehensive half-laugh. A few moments passed, and then he said, tentatively, Sure, with an inflection that made it sound like a question.

  I realized that he was worried I was going to tell him I was in love with him. That was not what I was going to say, but I could see why52 he would be worried it was.

  What I was going to say, and what I said, was, Do you think I did the right thing breaking up with Thade?

  He let out a relieved breath and laughed a little. Oh, that? Yeah, of course. Is that even still a question for you?

  No, I said. Not usually. But you know, I’m gonna be thirty next year, and I wonder if that was like, my one chance for that type of relationship. Actually, I know that was my one chance for that type of relationship. Even if I met someone now and we spent the rest of our lives together, it’s different to meet someone when you’re already a grownup, when you’ve already solidified as a person somewhat, versus when you’re still forming. They’ll never know me when I was still forming. My stories will always just be stories to them. They won’t have lived it with me.

  Caleb shook his head. Well, even if that’s true, it seems like you’re a way happier person without him. You’re way nicer, at least, if that’s any indication.

  No, I know. You’re right. I tore a piece off my paper napkin and blew my nose.

  And besides, he said, picking up his fork and carefully stabbing pasta, you’re always the one to break things off with people from what I’ve seen. No one ever breaks up with you. They may not be what you want, but you’re the one who always walks away.

  I smeared two thick frites in the meat juices on my plate with my fork. Huh, I said. I guess you’re right. I chewed the crispy, salty potatoes and swallowed. Maybe I don’t actually want what I think I want.

  Caleb shrugged. Maybe not.

  We didn’t talk much for the rest of dinner. One of the things I’d always appreciated about our friendship was our economy with words. We spoke when we needed to tell the other something. Other than that it was enough just to know the other was there.

  When he first told me he was going to come with me on tour, I didn’t believe him. People are always saying they’re going to do stuff like that on a Wednesday afternoon when you’re eating sea salt brownies on the sofa watching a Woody Allen movie about Paris, but no one ever really follows through.

  Caleb did. He used the last of the Dead Mom Money (DMM) that he’d received on his thirtieth birthday. When I was twenty-three and he was twenty-four, he told me about this relatively modest inheritance. It was set up so he’d receive one-third when he turned twenty-five, one-third when he turned twenty-seven-and-a-half, and the final one-third when he turned thirty.

  At alcoholic, depressive twenty-three, the notion that either one of us would live long enough to enjoy the last of Caleb’s DMM seemed completely absurd to me. If you’d told me what he would use the last of his DMM for when we were mod-podging porno-collages in his living room in Bloomington, I wouldn’t even have known how to understand you.

  I piled mustard on a large chunk of andouillette. Caleb put down his fork on his half-finished pasta and pushed the plate away from him. I’ve always had about twice Caleb’s appetite. He leaned his forearms on the table and clasped his hands tensely waiting for me to finish. I swallowed the rest of my wine and noticed the tattoos on his arms. His mother’s reminders. Remember death. Seize the day.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Montmartre

  Late Monday morning, I bought red lipstick from a department store across from the Moulin Rouge while Caleb browsed the sex toy shop a block down. I knew, from my trip in 2006, that it was possible to walk from Pigalle to Montmartre and then to Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, whose dome I’d seen alighted at night but had never been inside.

  What I didn’t remember was that Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur were at the highest points of Paris and that the walk was a progressively steep uphill climb. The days of walking, churches, museums53, and uneven streets had taken their toll on my left leg. Earlier that morning, watched with interest by Agnès’s incontinent cat, I’d done some yoga poses to try to ease the cramping, but I still walked with a noticeable limp.

  As we walked up the hill I thought of Gertrude Stein walking daily up to Montmartre from her apartment at 27 rue des Fleurus to sit for Picasso as he painted her portrait. The walk must have taken her an hour each way. She would compose sentences in her head as she walked. Picasso was young and poor at the time, struggling alongside Matisse and so many other now-revered artists to find ways to support themselves through their art.

  When we reached the main square, artists had set up their easels among the many gift shops overflowing with cheap incidentals, trinkets, and knickknacks. The artists advertised caricatures. Thirty euro and twenty-five minutes and tourists could go to dinner with their own cartoon portrait under their arm. Three artists were actively working on tourists’ caricatures as we walked by. We stopped to take in the kitsch.

  It’s so funny, I said. In Picasso’s time, Montmartre was like Brooklyn ten years ago. A cheap neighborhood that artists could afford that became a cradle of authentic creative activity.

  Caleb looked at me skeptically. What do you mean, “authentic?”

  I watched an artist as his fingers began to create form out of lines. I’m not sure, exactly. I just know that after the authenticity blossomed, the money found it and the creativity died. Look. Montmartre became a relic of itself. Caricatures
instead of portraits. Shallow, cartoonish imitations of whatever the authenticity here was. Authenticity is attractive but dangerous. You need to embrace uncertainty and unknowing and, if you believe all the world’s saints, yogis, and mystics, some form of poverty. Ownership, status, security, all of it—they all require and cultivate quite a bit of affected protective scaffolding. When these pretenses are stripped away, an artist can speak with honesty, not as a name, a job, or a gender, but as a human being.

  Gentrification happens when people in society recognize and are attracted to this honesty. They want to stay in their structures of name, job, and gender, but they still crave tastes of this essential humanness. They understand it on some level because, by its very nature, it’s universal. But they haven’t done the work to experience it themselves. Then they don’t really understand what it is they’re attracted to, so they tend to mistake the superficial characteristics of the movement in question—Cubism, Modernism, Beat Poetry, Mersey Beat, etc.—with the honesty itself. When the authentic art flees to its new blank, impoverished space, the money seizes the location and look of the particular movement, simplifies and sanitizes it, and packages it for safe consumption by earnest tourists.

  Caleb shrugged. I don’t know. I think you can make money and still make good art. The hope is that you find something that feels authentic and true but then also sells. Selling is a way to show relevance.

  The artist I was watching handed a flattering caricature to a grinning teenage girl. Hmm, I said.

  There were tourists everywhere: spilling out of the cafés and gift shops; bumping into us with plastic bags full of souvenir J’&heart; Paris t-shirts and berets; and taking pictures with professional cameras and point-and-shoots and countless smart phones. Whenever someone bumped into me, I had to stop and crack my left knee to realign it.

  Caleb clutched his camera bag to his chest, both shoulders pulled up near his ears.

  Let’s get out of here and see the church, I said.

  Yeah, he said.

  I didn’t know where we were going, but I had a faint understanding that we should continue to walk uphill. A few blocks out from the tourist maelstrom, the streets grew quiet again, the shops and boulangeries appearing to cater to local residents rather than foreigners.

  In front of a steep staircase that ran through a nearly vertical park, I asked a forty-something Parisian-looking woman which way was Sacré-Cœur.

  Ah non, she said. Je ne suis pas une carte. Pas de tout.

  Quoi? I said.

  She said she’s not a map, Caleb said.

  Oh, I said. D’accord. Merci.

  We continued to walk uphill until we saw the Basilique’s dome rising above the rooftops. We climbed up the staircase and paused in front of the entrance to look out over the city’s streets spreading in front of us in organic fractal patterns. I could see Notre-Dame and the Seine, Saint-Michel and the Left Bank. The sun was dodging in and out of holes in the clouds. It was the first time I’d seen a blue sky since being in Paris.

  According to stories, it took Gertrude Stein a while to figure out romance. In her late twenties, she dropped out of medical school because of personal tumult stemming from an unrealized attraction to one of her female classmates. Then, finally, in her early thirties, she met Alice B. Toklas, and they of course stayed together54 until Gertrude Stein died.

  They weren’t yet famous when Gertrude Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It was the book that made them famous. The book itself made them famous because Gertrude Stein used the book to tell the world they should be so.

  Gertrude Stein told the world they should be famous by using her most intimate relationship as a mirror to see herself. The story is not Gertrude Stein or Alice B. Toklas, but Gertrude Stein as she was to Alice B. Toklas as she was to Gertrude Stein. It was only through her eyes that she could honestly see. No one knew Gertrude like Alice and no one knew Alice like Gertrude and what you read is that knowing.

  Before we walked into Sacré-Cœur, Caleb said, You know, we could still go back to the grave, as long as we don’t spend forever in here.

  Yeah, I said, as we ascended the towering staircase. Maybe. Let’s see how we feel if there’s time.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sacré-Cœur

  The stage is bare except for a sign upstage right that reads AUCUNE PHOTOGRAPHIE. JADE enters upstage left and walks to center, pausing to cross herself before continuing to walk downstage. A CROWD of tourists, including CALEB, continuously process behind JADE, left to right, as stage lights dim, about half of them pausing when they pass center to cross themselves. JADE walks with a slight limp into a spotlight, center stage, and addresses the AUDIENCE, which occupies the position of the bema, altar, and mural of the Holy Trinity.

  JADE

  [Takes a tissue from pocket. Blows nose.]

  AUDIENCE

  Why are you here?

  JADE

  Aren’t I supposed to ask you that?

  AUDIENCE

  It would be the same question, and you would get the same answer. Why are you here?

  JADE

  What do you mean, here? Why am I on the planet, why am I in Paris, or why am I in this church?

  AUDIENCE

  It’s all the same question.

  JADE

  [Pause.] When I was a child, I thought I was destined to be some sort of historical something. I believed I would find something profound to say and would say it and that it would change, somehow, the face of the world. When I got older, I realized that this feeling didn’t make me special. That lots of people feel this way when they’re young, and then they, as they say, “grow out of it.”

  AUDIENCE

  You did not grow out of it.

  JADE

  I don’t know if that means there’s something wrong with me or not. I still think every breath I take is somehow important, even though at the same time I know it makes me just like everyone else.

  AUDIENCE

  Can’t it be both?

  JADE

  I think everything’s always both.

  AUDIENCE

  Existence is composed by the interplay of opposites.

  JADE

  When I was at my lowest point in the Psych Ward there were a couple of hours in which I truly believed I was the Divine Incarnation, Jesus Christ, or whatever. I looked at the flesh of my hands covering the muscle and bone and knew deep down that I was (G/g)od.

  AUDIENCE

  You romanticize your time in the Psych Ward when you tell the story, you know. You were only there for three days. Your parents drove down from Indianapolis and visited you every afternoon. And when you took all those pills, you called your friends right away. You never really wanted to die.

  JADE

  To be alive is to be divine. Am I a kind of Jesus in the sense that I’ve used my flesh to act out myth? I’ve taken all I have, my only life, and thrown all of it into this idea. Anyone who really lives is really Christ.

  AUDIENCE

  What is really living?

  JADE

  What anyone great—and I don’t just mean like Oscar Wilde or Gertrude Stein or Arthur Rimbaud or Patti Smith or whatever, I mean also just like great teachers or great mothers or great bartenders or anyone—has done. Committed themselves fully to their flesh as it played out its character moving through time and space and relationships.

  AUDIENCE

  Did/do you choose your character?

  JADE

  When I was twenty-two, three years after I’d been in the Psych Ward, I wanted to kill myself again. I was finally normal. I had a recognizable role—someone’s girlfriend in a town in Indiana. I was living a small, safe life, but I could find no meaning in it. I couldn’t see any future for the person I was, and so I thought I wanted to die. After lying in bed for two weeks in the middle of a sweltering summer, it was clear I had a choice between jumping into the river or jumping into the unknown. Instead of killing myself, I decided to change mys
elf completely. I did an out-of-character thing—something I would never do— and in doing so, I created a new character for myself. The desire to kill myself was just my noticing that I was already dead. I didn’t have to die, I just had to accept the end of a certain story and begin the next one. The story of me I’d been living had developed and completed its plot arch. It was resolved. It was already a corpse. [Blows nose.]

  AUDIENCE

  You’re talking about when you and Thade were sitting slumped against opposite walls in the dining room. You were both crying too hard to speak. Do you remember?

  JADE

  Yes.

  AUDIENCE

  You saw something.

  JADE

  Yes.

  AUDIENCE

  What did you see?

  JADE

  I saw two stories of my life, running parallel, like two simultaneously playing films. In one, I stayed and had a shared bed and a sublanguage of inside jokes and comfortable walls, and in the other, I left and was what I am now. They were both real, and they both depended on whether I said yes or whether I said no.

  AUDIENCE

  What makes you think you’re so special?

  JADE

  I don’t know. Being talented means nothing. There are a million talented people. Being smart means nothing. There are a million smart people. I think if it’s anything it’s that my body kept rejecting the other life. I was sick all the time. I could barely breathe. I tried to kill myself once, and thought about it many, many more times. Maybe you can only become an artist by default. The only people who actually become artists are people for whom it’s the only alternative to death. We must create or we must die. We must die or we must create.

  AUDIENCE

  And why not death?

  JADE

  Why not life? If it doesn’t matter, if I’m going to die anyway, I may as well throw myself into this absurd romance. [Blows nose.] Besides, if I don’t, who’s going to?

  AUDIENCE

  Have you been alone?

  JADE

  Yes. It feels like always.