I thought when Noah came to visit the city I was obsessed with, he’d understand. He’d never been to New York before, aside from the obligatory eighth-grade field trip. I wanted him to drink in the architecture, the life and pulse of the city. I thought he’d appreciate the glittering skyscrapers and gracious brownstones, the cobbled, uneven streets of SoHo, the thrum and rush of noise, the smells of street food and the variety, my God, the newness of every single block.

He came to visit for the first time on Columbus Day weekend of my freshman year. He didn’t love a thing. In fact, he hated it. “How can you live here?” he asked the second night, rubbing his forehead. “You can’t hear yourself think. How do you paint?”

My mouth dropped open. “I’m getting really good!”

“You were good already.”

I made a disgusted noise. “Anyone can do a pretty landscape, Noah,” I said patiently. Landscapes had been my forte in high school, and they won me those prizes at our town’s art contest (which meant nothing, I had quickly learned). “I’m really growing as an artist. It’s mind-blowing, what I don’t know yet, and how good I could get.”

I stopped in front of a gallery; we were in SoHo, and you couldn’t swing a cat in this neighborhood without hitting a posh space staffed by black-clad beautiful people who spoke three languages. “This is art,” I said, pointing to the sole oil painting in the window. “It’s so much more than a pretty picture. This says something.”

“Looks like blobs of black tar to me,” he said.

“It’s a statement on materialism and abstraction,” I said. “There’s a tension here, a grittiness and impact. It’s a dissonant whole worldview about what’s real and what we want to be real.”

“It’s black blobs, hon,” he said. “That painting you did of the blood moon rising? Now that’s beautiful.”

I sighed. “Yeah, well, I’d kill to have been the one to come up with this. You know how much it goes for?” I knew, because my class had had a field trip here just last week (hence my knowledge of dissonance and such). “Three hundred thousand dollars, Noah.”

His eyebrows jumped. “Jesus. But then you’d have to look at the goddamn thing. Whereas if someone bought one of your paintings, they could actually feel happy.”

“Noah . . . knock it off.” But I smiled, even if I felt somehow slighted by his compliment. Happiness because of a painting? How plebeian. Why not just frame a picture of your dog? (I mean, yes, I did have a picture of my dog, the late, great Pokey, who died when I was eleven.) But art was supposed to do more.