Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up

<p>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: Inez's 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.</p>