My favorite suicide note has been fairly widely reported. It was left by a fellow who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge: “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”

“San Francisco,” my mother once said, “is the only city that demands you love it.” And she did. She wanted to keep other people alive to see it. She wanted them to have her organs, transplanted. Apparently she didn’t know that the pills she took would destroy them.

I wonder what makes you angry, what happens when you are. Have you ever destroyed a canvas? You are not, I have heard, or I have read, a drinker. Does it take its toll in silence? Do you get angry with yourself? Are you, like me, your own worst critic? How do you let something out into the world when it’s a sure thing someone out there won’t like it?

You’re good, my mother seemed to say to herself, in fact, you’re very good. You’re just not good enough. My mother refused to show anyone her paintings. After a while, she stopped painting at all. What was left of her gift was the argument she had with the painter who came to paint our house and was unable to mix “her” blue.

Chatty’s gentleman caller was due to arrive. Back in her room, I brushed green eyeshadow on her, but she said it made her look like she ate colored babies for breakfast. I painted on the palest lip color. “I’d sooner ride a hog to Memphis,” she said.

“The Hindus have a word for this,” Karen said, watching the makeup lesson. “Overexcitement. They say that when your pulse races and you get flushed and anxious, the person is bad for you.”

“He was trained to get us overexcited,” Chatty said. “By keeping himself still? By holding the best part back, and suggesting it? The best actors do that.”

“Three dogs are put in a room,” Warren says, and the rest of us hunker down.

“An architect’s dog, a doctor’s dog, and an actor’s dog. Each dog is given a pile of bones and told they’ll be given one hour.”

Chatty blots her lips as Warren continues. “The architect’s dog arranges his bones into a Cape Cod saltbox house. The doctor’s dog arranges his bones into separate piles by species. The actor’s dog—”

“Hand me that eyebrow pencil?” Karen says.

“The actor’s dog eats all his bones, fucks the other two dogs, and asks to go home early.”

“He’s not an actor anymore,” Chatty says. “He teaches. In a university.”

Suddenly I am no longer jealous of her; I wilt at the thought of the earnest exchange of information, explanations of the way things work and who invented what.

Karen tells me about her trip to town with Chatty. “I found a ten-dollar bill on the grounds,” Karen says, “and she told me you said it’s bad luck to keep found money, I should spend it right away. So we sign ourselves out and call a cab. We get the only slow cab in the history of cabs. We miss three lights in a row, and the driver says into his rear-view mirror, ‘You’d better buckle your seatbelts.’ And Chatty says, ‘Why? If we have an accident, I’ll be out of the car before you hit anyone.’