and spend so much time. Only children, they become like a third person in the couple, do you know? They don’t get so much to be children, but little grown-ups.”
“This is your concern for Reza?”
“This is our concern. In Paris, we’ve made for him a world of children. He has cousins—not real ones, they’re in Italy—but friends as close as cousins. In our apartment building alone he has three friends, including a girl three weeks older that he’s known always. They see each other almost every day.”
“So it’s a difficult transition for him, to come here.”
“For all of us, yes, of course.”
“It’s helpful to know. Thank you.” I’d hoped for some more intimate revelation. I don’t know quite what.
“But with the bullying, you see—”
“Yes, that was horrible, I know. I’ll keep a close eye. Those were bigger kids who didn’t know him, though. In our class, he’s extremely popular. Very well liked. Boys and girls both. He’s a very kind boy.”
“Yes, kind.”
“And he’s making good progress with his English.”
“Yes. We speak only English at the dinner table now, to practice. All three of us, making mistakes. ‘Please pass,’ we say, and then ‘that thing,’ if we don’t know the word. Sometimes, we’re too tired. But Reza teaches us words now.”
“Not rude ones, I hope?”
“Those also.” She smiled.
We’d finished our coffee. The moment of recognition, the sign—it had to have a meaning.
“But about your art,” I said. “You were going to tell me about your art.”
In that first conversation, she told me about her installations, which were—as I would eventually see with my own eyes—lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carved soap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made. I couldn’t quite picture them when she talked about them, but the idea made sense to me: visions of paradise, the otherworldly, the beautiful, and then, when you’re in them, up close, you realize that the flowers are mottled by filth and the vines crumbling and that the gleaming beetles crawling on the waxy leaves are molded bottle tops or old leather buttons with limbs. Her installations had names from fairy tales and myth—The Forest of Arden; Avalon; Oz; Elsinore—but they were, in reality, the kitchen or the laundry room, and sooner or later the viewer would realize there was an ancient sink behind the waterfall or that the boulders between the trees were a washer and dryer, blow-torched black and furred with dark lint.
She told me too that latterly she’d made videos of the installations, that the story of the videos was precisely this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage; but that first she had to film it in such a way that it looked wholly beautiful and that sometimes this was hard. And also, she said, narrative was hard: when you made a video, there had to be a story, and a story unfolded over time, in a different way, and didn’t always unfold as you wanted it to.
She told me all this and I could tell that on the one hand she was proud to talk about it, passionate even, but on the other, she retained a slightly world-weary air. I was a tad piqued.
“Can I see what you’re working on?” I asked.
She shook her head, looked at me through the film of her hair. “I’m supposed to build Wonderland—that’s my next project. But I have none of that here with me. Maybe I can get a video for you of the earlier stuff, though it’s not the same, really.”
“But why?”
“It’s about the space, and my tools, and my whole world there.”
“But you can’t have a year without your work!”
“No. I’d turn into a monster that neither Reza nor Skandar wanted to know. It’s what keeps me from being crazy. Too much dark, otherwise.”
“I’m the same. I need to do it, or I go mad.”
She smiled, in a real way, as if she actually wanted to hear, now.
And I told her about how I used to paint big messy pictures, but how when my mother was sick, and for all the years she was dying, one small capacity at a time, I stopped being able to paint, stopped being able to make any big gestures at all, and turned instead to little things, to rooms the size of shoe boxes, Joseph Cornell–scaled dioramas, as if these, at least, could not