As we pulled up to the curb I could see them a little ways off, gathered around the grave like long black shadows. The sky was the blue of a cheap ­paint-­by-­number. Leonard tugged his door handle to get out. Sitting in the passenger side, I squinted behind sunglasses and sipped my vodka tonic from a travel ­mug.

“Viv?”

“Let me be for a minute.” I reached up and shoved the sun visor, pulled it so it blocked the ripping afternoon glare. “Wish to hell it had rained today.” Contrary to its ceiling now, the city’s floor was one big sog after an onslaught of rain falling in sheets and drizzles and sheets again. Today was the first sunny one in three weeks. Timing is everything. Len sighed, closed his ­door.

I had shown up at his apartment an hour ago so we could head out together. His building is less than a block from mine. Len liked my mother. She liked him too, as much as she was capable of liking a guy. Frank, on the other hand, didn’t care for my mother, which was appropriate because she loathed him. She had loathed my choices in lovers pretty much across the ­board.

“Wow. Bright,” Len had said at first sight of the ­stoplight-­red skirt and jacket I chose for the occasion. He was wearing his navy suit, a little beat up, shiny in spots, the only one he owned. I always thought if I won the lottery, the first thing I’d do is take Len shopping. Len deserves the things he can’t ­afford.

“I need a drink. Have you got anything?” I stood in his living room, clenching and unclenching, gulping breaths and heaving them out like ­garbage.

“Ah–” he touched at his suit as if patting himself down for cigarettes “–sure. I think we’re running a little late though.”

My hands jumped to shore off demands and questions, flicked him off toward the kitchen. “We’re already too late. It’s a funeral.”

Unscrewing a bottle from the cupboard over his stove, he stopped on the verge of pouring. “Scotch or vodka?”

“Vodka.”

He rescrewed the cap and grabbed another bottle, poured. “What the hell,” he muttered and poured a shot in a second glass. Dumped tonic in both. I sat on the couch and gawked straight ahead at the blank wall. He’d painted over the mural that had been there ­before.

“Hair of a mongrel, madam?” He handed me the drink and I looked some more at the nothing in front of me. Yesterday there was ­floor-­to-­ceiling rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Now it was blank with eggshell white. He must’ve done it after I left last ­night.

“What’s with the blank wall?”

His brows hopped. Off my blank stare he said, “Come on, you’ve been drunker. Last night. You kept bitching about it.” He swapped his tone for a whiny shrewish imitation of mine. “I hate that ugly ­Spider-­Man with his dink hanging out.” He shrugged. “I want to do something else there anyway–You sat right there while I painted over it.”

I nodded. Last night I had wanted to drink myself to tears as though the tangibility of drunken rivulets might shove me past the gauzy void, up against some nice flinty edge. But it was more like anaesthetizing a corpse. Part of me had an urge to turn the stove on high and slap my hand on the burner and part of me thought, Christ, millions are doping themselves up with antidepressants every day to get this sensation, maybe I got a good thing ­going.

“Frank never showed up this morning,” I ­said.

He looked at his watch. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Probably still in bed, jerking off to porn.”

“Ach . . .” Leonard raised his hand against the image. “Please.”

Len’s a bit precious when it comes to things too raw in the sex department. When we were eighteen, out of curiosity we rented Deep Throat. I was no virgin but still sat with my face screwed up in skepticism: “Gross, he can’t stick it in there.” “Girls don’t have clits in their throats either.” Len, meanwhile, clutched his head like a Vietnam vet experiencing flashback, shock searing its way though his frontal lobe. I suggested we ­fast-­forward to the story part. There was no story part. We pressed eject. Len rolled a joint and sketched my feet the rest of the ­afternoon.

“Don’t you think it’s just this side of obscene not to accompany your girlfriend to her mother’s fucking funeral?” I ­asked.

“You told him you didn’t want him there. At least that’s what you said last night. They didn’t like each other, you said, so why put on a big phony show.”

I stared into my glass and sloshed the fizz around. “He should want to be there for me.”

“What?”

Taking a gulp, I looked past him to the blank wall again. “So, what are you going to paint there. Did we decide?”

“How ’bout I paint you?”

“You’re done then. It’s a masterpiece of ­photo-­realism.”

Leonard slid the pads of his fingertips up and down the steering wheel. When he finally spoke again it was to remind me, “She never liked this car.” I’d tossed my keys to Len feeling too shaky to drive. He tapped at the ­push-­button ­transmission.

“She thought it looked like some old Valiant she sold when she first moved here,” I said. “And she didn’t like the colour.”

My car is black. Like the guy I bought it off. Though he had a kind of ­pimped-­out affectation he was actually a student/actor I’d met on set. He was about to drive back home to New Orleans, when he decided to sell the car and fly instead. I hadn’t made up my mind whether the car was my style or not and met up with him on campus to have lunch and another look. He was flirtatious but I wasn’t much interested. Then, outside the Student Union Building, we ran into my mother. Between the guy and the car – the look on her face.