“I think Magritte and I would have made good friends,” she said. “He was quite a quirky character and had a lot of fun doing silly things with his artist friends. Like me.”

It was one of the rare occasions she had started talking about herself, I did not comment, hoping that she would go on. She mostly kept her thoughts to herself, but when she did share her feelings, it was like opening a door and finding yourself in a different world. How I longed to see her world! They were full of images that I could never imagine, so surreal that I had to make an effort to keep up with her or I would find myself lost somewhere in the tangled web of her thoughts. For even in the same world, she was there and not there at the same time, detached as if the presence of her were only a hologram of the real her, located in another dimension.

“Magritte never painted anything surreal,” she said. “I walk the streets of Manhattan, and everywhere, I see his paintings. They are images that are real, but only seem surreal and ironic to people because they don’t know how to see.”