Let us say, in the story I was telling, about the painter who can’t figure out how to proceed with a painting she has started, and who is now in the studio of her friend who is also a painter (along with the other woman who they happened to have encountered on the sidewalk, when they were returning from the store where they’d bought the bottle of liquor), that something unexpected happens, while the three of them are sitting there drinking from paper cups (that the friend whose studio it is keeps in a cabinet above the sink where she rinses her brushes); and that this unexpected thing takes the form of a piece of information that the woman who’d joined them (the woman from the sidewalk, who, unlike them, is not a painter, though she once was one, and now considers herself not a painter only because she no longer paints, and instead does more or less nothing, and survives on a pension that the government provides to most people her age, as well as on the meager savings she retired with, after a career that ended long ago) reveals in the course of the conversation; and that this piece of information involves the location of a painting that, according to the woman (who has declined the alcohol that the other two are sharing, and instead is drinking water from her paper cup), seems to depict, to whoever happens to be viewing it, some episode from the life of that person that the person had never shared with anyone else, and had thought no one else knew about.