The series was called Ariadne’s Thread. It had to do, Sheila explained, with the idea or memory of a labyrinth, not the actual labyrinth—“in which,” Sheila said mysteriously, “we don’t always believe.” Of the nine canvases only three appeared to be completed and were propped up against the rear wall. The others were ranged haphazardly about the studio, several laid flat on the rather filthy floor. Their colors were muted, subtle—grays shading into mauve, mauve into filmy white—intimations of clouds, a network of nerves, the brain’s secret convolutions. A grid of some sort, not altogether geometrical, appeared to be the organizing structure behind the rough-textured surface paints, but it was visible only in patches. Monica, staring, her senses almost too painfully alert, supposed she could see a progression of sorts from the earliest canvas to the last, which was indeed the lightest and the most buoyant of the nine. It was also the least convoluted: did that mean the labyrinth had been overcome—?

Monica murmured a few things—she did like the paintings very much or, at least, she felt disturbed and provoked by them—they seemed to her extraordinary—but of course she couldn’t explain—she felt so impoverished—her vocabulary, her emotions—

“Not at all,” Sheila said, laying a hand on her arm, “you’re not the impoverished one.”

Sheila stamped out her cigarette in a coffee mug but almost immediately lit another. She mentioned, as if casually, that since Morton’s death and since something that had happened to her—to her body—at about that time, she had lost the desire, and most likely the ability as well, to paint subjects head-on. She hadn’t the faith, probably, that the subject existed; that her perception of it existed in any absolute way; that its inner being (spiritual, structural) corresponded at all to its surface. “We are all contained inside our bodies—trapped, if you think of it,” Sheila said nervously. She felt no contempt, she said, for her fellow artists who counted themselves realists, in fact she envied them, they seemed so young, so untouched, there was something childlike and belligerent in their art. But she could no longer paint that way because she could no longer think that way. Even her eye “thought”—that is, it “saw”—differently.

“Now everything seems to me refracted through mind,” Sheila said strangely.

“‘Mind’? But why do you say ‘mind’?” Monica asked. “Why so general a term, when surely you mean your own—?”

Sheila appeared to be surprised and a little vexed by the question. “No, of course I don’t mean my own,” she said impatiently, “—of what possible interest would that be to me?”