I may as well finish telling you about the plot of that novel I’d imagined writing the beginning of, wherein the painter who didn’t know how to finish the painting she’d started had visited the studio of her friend (who was also a painter) and had ended up sitting on the floor of that studio and talking with that friend and with a third woman (the neighbor who the two of them had met outside on the sidewalk, when they’d been returning from the store to which they’d wandered, after a while, to purchase some alcohol, so that they’d invited her to join them, which she’d done after leaving her dog in her apartment).