I decided to keep myself busy. The first night, I bleached my roots; then did a conditioning mask; then toned. Still, the clock stretched out ahead of me and my eyes refused to close, listening to the sound, as always, of the opaque little ocean beside me, glittering like polished obsidian in the moonlight and beating a sullen melody across the rocks.

One night I tried all the doors on the property. But everything was locked up tight.

I did need to be alone in the studio, to keep at it—to work, and work, until there was no work left. Though I was productive, I started to feel deeply lonely. When I got a late-night call from Cady, Atticus, and Jonny (the boy—now man—whose room I’d once taken over at 11 Dutch), tanked on a Lithuanian honey liqueur called Virtya, huddled inside a raccoon-fur-lined Humvee they insisted was “a horrible joke” as they waited for the sun to come up outside Vilnius, I felt achingly left out. They’d also arrived early to help assemble Jonny’s sculpture for one of the competitions, and they were buzzed on the joy of it all—of sharing baroque mansions with each other before the crowd arrived, of having the kind of experience you could only earn and never buy.

I tried to party, but sipping bourbon and reading paperbacks alone, while enjoyable, does not a party make, at least not when you’ve been doing it for days and days in a row. I worked in the studio every day until my back was screaming in pain, and whenever I was done feeling lonely, I felt anxious and scared.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed reasonable that Carey had stopped making sculpture because she could not bear to spend the rest of her life alone in a studio, watching everyone else get married and have children and build lives. I was working, for the first time, at the same pace she had, after spending years of wondering how she was so successful, how she made so many objects, how she managed it all. Her pace was hard on the body, but it was much harder, I was beginning to realize, on the mind.

I felt a sudden longing for the 42nd Street library, where they kept the Wallach Division, the collection of everything that has ever been written on art. I used to walk up there, sit in the great big reading room, and read Art Talk by Cindy Nemser, a book of interviews with fifteen women artists, over and over. The closest thing to the library, I reasoned, would be Max’s house—that extraordinary collection I’d spied so briefly at the party. I called her cellphone as soon as I thought of it.

“Hi!” she said brightly. “How’s everything?”

“Aces. It’s going really, really well,” I told her. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“Shoot.”