the scene

If I could paint this is what I would paint in a Persepolis-graphic novel mode (with some inspiration also from Kahlo): a woman stands in a chador, all you see are her heavily made-up dark eyes which are alluring and sex-kitten-like. if you look closely at the layers of paint that make up her chador, you can barely detect that she is wearing red sexy lingerie and has voluptuous figure. she is standing in a room, seen in a skewered, three-dimensional way. there are many walls between her and the outside world. the only link she has to the outside from this prison-like room is a phone cord, that curls around her like a growing vine and trails out the window and over to the other half of the painting.
in this second half, a white woman is curled up in a corner of a room. she has long elegant legs that are curled up gracefully around her, her hair is long and blonde and swirls around her naked breasts. you see a glimpse of her eyes peaking through the hair and arms wrapped around her upper body. they are clear and blue and are outlined by the remains of smeared mascara.
there is an emaciated man lying sprawled as if on a cross on a bed in the room as well. he is asleep but also looks like he could be dead. he is so thin you can see his hip-bones and ribs. he has the eyes of a sad persian poet. a swath of cloth hides his sex. the cloth is decorated with the words: "lies create grief, hidden love creates chaos, secrets create distance, deception creates walls and pain" over and over in tiny print on the cloth. the phone cord has crawled into this room via the back pocket of a pair of discarded jeans that lie on the floor and leads to a cell phone that the man clutches. the phone is in the shape of a heart and is broken and smashed. the walls are plastered with calendars, starting with February 2007, and going until August 2008. there are numbers marked in red on each day in a violent hand.
there is a sense because of the angle of the lay-out that the man on the bed is closer in space to the woman in the chador than to the woman in the same room as him.
in the frame of the room, so close you can barely make out what the fuzzy image is, a brown girl with curly hair sits absorbed in a book, her eyes are glued to the page, she is hunched over in self-protection. the book is entitled: "no father."