In Washington, DC I went to visit Nadya, a friend from high school. We had spoken on the phone a couple times since I arrived. It had been a long time since I had seen her and I wondered how she was like now. Would it be strange between us after so long or would there still be a bond of friendship?

When I arrived at her apartment that evening, she opened the door and put her arms around me. I hugged her back and she smiled.

“Come on in,” she said.

“How you been?” I asked.

“Good…real good.”

I was struck by how much she had changed. Her hair was cut in a shorter, more sophisticated style drawing attention to her dark eyes and high cheekbones.

“What you want to drink?” she asked.

“A beer.”

While she slipped into the kitchen I looked around her attractively furnished apartment. A coffee table of carved ebony and her black leather couches contrasted strikingly with a white carpet. In the corner of the room, a green parrot perched quietly in an elaborate, white cage.

“Nice place,” I said.

“I’m still getting settled,” she said, bringing out the drinks, “and trying to make it feel more comfortable.”

I sat down on the couch and she lounged on the floor, her curvaceous body molded into the thick pile of the plush carpet. She wore a black silk shirt and a pair of tight Levis, which accentuated her slender body. She stroked her black hair with one hand and held a cigarette in the other. 

She looked at me and said, “You hungry?”     

“Yep.”     

 “Wanna order Thai?”

 “Sure.”

“The restaurant down the street has good food.”

While we waited for the food to come Nadya told me about her time studying art in Paris and what she liked about the city.

“You can sit for as long as you like over a cup of coffee. People spend hours there reading a paper, playing chess or just chatting. In the evening I spent hours with my friends at cozy bars frequented by emaciated veteran drunks, slouched at the same spot their ancestors sat, generation after generation, chain-smoking Gauloises and mumbling incoherently about the way things used to be.”

I worked with the performing arts department. Did set designs for the school’s production of Tartuffe. I worked with some really cool people. After work on the sets we’d go down to this fun bar in Le Marais.

She told me about the bizarre assortment of people she met there. Dainty effeminate waiters with Tin Tin haircuts serving drinks to congregations of lost intellectuals of the Paris riots playing endless games of chess. Ageless youth sporting horn-rimmed glasses, sipping coffee behind Le Figaro and armchair revolutionaries discussing the guerrilla tactics of Che Guevara.

“There was a feeling of revolution,” she said. “You’d sit down at a table with people who claim a passionate commitment to some vanished cause.”

Just then the doorbell rang. Nadya got up, paid the delivery boy and came back with a large paper bag full of food cartons. We ate the dinner sitting on cushions by the coffee table. The green curry was delicious, but the spicy beef salad was zesty and I washed down every mouthful with plenty of water. Nadya picked nimbly at the food with her fingers.

After dinner she showed me some of her art. She took some paintings from under a black cloth and propped them against a wall. Although the canvasses had a child-like quality, an unusual intensity seeped through her art. The most impressive one was a swirl of what seemed to be the image of a tiny baby whose features were merely hinted at, with fluid strokes of restless shapes tinged with a deep sadness of shadows.

Nadya said, “It’s called ‘Abortion—she’s got your eyes.’”

I remember how in high school art class Nadya was always the most intense student and always produced something deeper and more disturbing than the rest of the class. It seems that she was artistic from a very young age. When she was barely a year old, she crayoned their apartment walls. Her mother scolded her, but bought her a coloring book to put her creative energy to better use. As a toddler she chalked on sidewalks. The janitor complained to her parents after grudgingly cleaning the apartment walkway. When she went to school she graffitied on the desks and the principal made her stay after school for a week to scrub them.

This obviously didn’t discourage her. She moved to Paris after high school to get a degree in fine arts.

While studying in Paris she was inspired by all the blank walls in her apartment. She only intended to paint a climbing vine around the frame of her bedroom door, but it looked so stark against the naked white walls. She decorated the door with two cartoon characters escaping from a concrete jungle of high-rises along a yellow brick road. Since the yellow brick road needed to go somewhere, it meandered over the adjoining wall where a rabbit ran along the extension of the road, winding his way through a peaceful countryside under a large smiling sun, toward a distant castle on a hill.

A sign on the road led to Wonderland and pointed to where mermaids bathed in a distant stream, wood elves perched on toadstools. A Cheshire cat grinned from a tree with leafy branches bearing exotic fruits and harboring tropical birds. A colorful python curled around the giant tree which spread its branches over the living room window and reached out across the ceiling. When she had covered all the living room walls, she continued into the kitchen. On the wall behind the breakfast nook, she painted a group of her best friends, embraced in the background by a larger-than-life Bob Marley.

When she transferred to college in DC and had to give up her apartment, the landlord insisted she paint the walls and white-out the fantasy world she’d lived in for two years. Her friends from Paris on the kitchen wall were the most painful to paint over. After the first coat, their dark eyes were still visible beneath the white paint. To keep from crying, she’d have a bottle of beer between each coat. It took four coats of paint and five bottles of beer to cover her friends’ haunting eyes.