Interviewing Matisse, or, The woman who died standing up

Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class.

Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inezs corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up like a broom in a corner of her Soho loft.

It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.