Sometimes I worry that we don’t talk about ideas. But Warren says, “I hate ideas,” and Chatty says, “Ideas, sugar, are not sexy.”

So a lot of the time it’s moisturizers and accessories, physical fitness and hair. And still so many ways to go wrong, as when I said to Chatty, hadn’t she colored her hair, and Chatty’s frosty reply, that she had not colored her hair, she had enhanced it.

We talk about clothes. On the theory that generic elements improve with repetition, Chatty wears two identical cashmere sweaters, layered one over the other. My own closet, an ugly-dress bonanza, yields sacklike black washed silk. Chatty can wear what she likes; she eats two desserts a night and you would never know it. Whereas the rest of us would gain weight even if we had food poisoning.

Karen presents herself in tooth-torn shirts. She showed up in the Hostility Suite with a miniature dachshund from the shelter. She held the dog in her lap, and while Chatty went on at some length about the plans she had for her wardrobe, Karen ran her opal ring down over the dog’s ears—ears she had made stand up like a rabbit’s—the way you thread the ends of a silk scarf through a scarf ring. Karen said that she had had this kind of dog when she was just out of college, and had taken the dog to restaurants where she would wipe out an ashtray with her napkin, and crumble part of a hamburger into it for her dog. She said she would get her dog’s leash and ask the dog—not, Want to go for a walk? but, Want to go out to lunch?

Chatty told Karen that one thing’s for sure—when you have a child, your dog becomes a pet. That would not happen to me. I can’t stand the sound of a person eating, but I love the sound of a dog crunching down on kibble. I love a dog’s appetite. The appetite of a baby is a frightening thing to me. I watch a mother spoon food into her baby’s mouth, then spoon back in what the baby spits out; to me, it is the job of spackling. If I had a baby, I would change overnight from a woman who worries about the calories in the glue of an envelope to someone who goes to the corner for coffee, a nightgown showing beneath my coat, the hem of that gown clawed to shreds by a cat.

My mother gave away my dogs; when she died, she died with cats. A calico cat sat tucked like a hen on her chest, as though it were hatching her death. A Siamese cat, when my mother was gone, yowled in her empty room.

I don’t know that I have ever seen a cat in one of your paintings. Or a dog. All those paintings, portraits of friends, and not one friend that was dog. My first friend was a Labrador retriever. His name was Needles, and I would saddle him up with a folded bath towel held on with my father’s belt. Needles obeyed only one command in the house. He would run into the living room and you would have to call out, “Swerve!”—one of us would have to call it out—and he would swerve just before he would have crashed into the glass-topped table.