One Coffee With

17

WHO can find a punctual woman? Her price is above rubies!" chanted Tramegra in his basso profundo as he opened the door to Sigrid's ring.

Last night the Great White Hunter, tonight a fugitive from a yacht club, Tramegra wore rope-soled sneakers, white duck slacks and a navy-and-white polka-dot scarf tucked into the open neck of his navy shirt. An aroma of burned tomato sauce wafted through her mother's apartment.

"Just the tiniest bit charred around the edges. Won't hurt it a bit. In fact, it adds a certain piquancy to the flavor," he assured Sigrid, whisking her into the dining area.

Somewhere he'd found a red-checked tablecloth and a wrought-iron candelabrum that Anne had picked up in Spain. By candlelight the place looked homey, cheerful and above all neat.

"It hasn't looked this good since the day mother moved in," Sigrid told him, diverted by the novelty of walking through the apartment without stumbling over something.

Tramegra accepted her praise but admitted, "I took shortcuts. And whenever I was completely baffled by where to put something, I stuck it in Anne's bedroom. Perhaps after dinner you could look through the things in there and help?"

He brought in the casserole, and he'd been right. The slight charring hadn't hurt the flavor at all. Sigrid was hungry by then and ate the lasagna with enjoyment. Also the garlic bread. The Chianti was cheap but drinkable. The salad, however…

"You don't like the salad?" asked Tramegra.

"I expect it's the anise," Sigrid answered as diplomatically as possible.

"Now you know, I truly hesitated over whether or not to add anise. Not everyone cares for it, but it's so typically Italian. Oh, not with an oil-and-vinegar dressing perhaps, but plain oil and vinegar are so unadventurous, and cooking should always be an adventure, don't you agree?"

Without waiting for an answer, he described a cooking contest he'd won a few years back with a stuffed-artichoke dish of his own invention. "Well, not won actually, but second place is nothing to be ashamed of. Especially when the prize is five hundred dollars. That kept the wolf from my door a tidy few weeks. And then I wrote up my experiences as a cooking contest entrant, which I sold to three separate magazines." He named them, but Sigrid didn't recognize any of the titles.

As dinner progressed, she found herself warming to the man. He still reminded her of Grandmother Lattimore's pampered Persian, but there was more to him than that. His eyelids were heavily hooded-what Sigrid thought of as Elizabethan; but beneath those hoods his eyes were alert and knowing. There was an absurd pomposity about him that never quite slipped over into buffoonery, until one could almost suspect him of having constructed an elaborate protective facade. He chattered on about himself in that deep voice, as unselfconscious as a child. A bright, self-centered child who looked at the world through unjaundiced, inquisitive eyes.

By meal's end they were on a first-name basis, and Tramegra waved off her help in clearing the table. "I'll just whisk these into the dishwasher and start the coffee, and you must see what you can do with that midden pile."

It was an apposite simile, Sigrid thought, looking at the muddle on the floor of her mother's room and layering her bed. There were newspaper clippings, a half-eaten box of chocolate liquors (which Sigrid had always considered a dreadful thing to do to either chocolate or liquor), an envelope that held a handful of turquoise beads and a broken silver chain, several pairs of panty hose, an extra Venetian blind, shoes, letters without envelopes, odd bits of photographic gear and most of the clothing Anne hadn't taken to Italy with her this time.

Anne Harald was not unhygienic, but the litter she could strew was phenomenal. She was the type who pulled furniture into the middle of the room in order to vacuum the corners, then forgot to push things back. Or she would take down curtains to clean the windows and leave them piled on a chair for a week.

Tramegra had tactfully left a large wastebasket just inside the door, and Sigrid came close to filling it, knowing that if her mother had valued any of the papers, she would have filed them promptly. Sigrid was just clipping the last skirt onto a hanger in Anne's closet when Tramegra paused in the open doorway.

"Excellent, my dear! Simply excellent. Come along now. You've earned your dessert."

Even though he was still comparatively young, he had fallen into an avuncular manner with her, which eased her usual stiffness. She didn't feel she was being 'drawn out' because Tramegra seemed perfectly content to do the talking for both of them if necessary.

"I didn't take time to bake today, but there's an adequate bakery in the next block, and these petits fours seemed passable. I made them give me a sample before I'd buy. You should always insist on a taste," he said pouring coffee from a silver pot into china cups, both of which Sigrid had forgotten Anne even owned, so seldom did her mother use anything except a percolator and mugs imprinted with black and red P & W Railroad logos.

"If a bakery's proud of its products and cares for your patronage, they're always willing to give you a sample. I did a filler once on how to pick bakeries and delicatessens. I shall have to give you a copy of it."

It was becoming clearer that Roman Tramegra was a journalistic magpie who scraped together a living of sorts on the fringes of authorship and publishing, carefully gathering up a bauble here, a gewgaw there, which he polished into small salable tidbits: household hints, buying tips, brief how-to-articles, explications of humorous bits of nonessential information and a multiplicity of filler items for magazines. Most of his markets were small magazines or trade journals, which paid just enough to keep him going; occasionally an article would score with the higher-paying 'slicks', and then everything was jam tarts and honey.

"I once wrote two thousand words on how to call a cat in twenty different languages," he said in his dignified rumble, his hooded eyes drolly solemn as he elaborated. "You know-Here, Kitty-kitty, in Japanese, Swedish, Choctaw and so forth. Holiday bought it first for a most generous sum, then Cat-Talk took a second version, and finally Reader's Digest. My dear child, it paid the rent for two years!"

He reworked legends on flag lore and major holiday customs, and explained why chimney sweeps wear top hats, or why the fifth borough of New York is called the Bronx instead of Bronx. A hundred different subjects.

"How do you think of so many?" asked Sigrid with an amused smile.

"If something catches my eye, makes me stop for a second thought, I jot it down immediately. Whenever I see someone doing something unfamiliar, I ask a million questions. Mostly, yes, mostly people are flattered that someone's interested. And really if a man likes his job, there's simply no way he can be boring when he talks about it. Think of the librarian for a symphony orchestra: finding a complete set of scores for all his orchestra members.

I mean, you just don't run off a photocopy of the violinist's score and hand it to the oboe player. And the commissary manager of a large zoo: where does he buy mice for the snakes and owls, and live grasshoppers for birds that turn up their fussy little beaks at dead ones?

"Or the curator of an art museum. How does he go about authenticating a dubious painting? Incidentally did you know that Picasso was quite unreliable about that? His early works are often forged, but I've heard there've been cases where he capriciously disavowed things he had actually and truly created. Don't think that won't give a museum director white hair!

"Oh, no, my dear, the problem has never been thinking up subjects, but selecting. There's the difficulty. Everything is grist for my mills, I grind fast," he said with sonorous resonance, "but exceedingly short, unfortunately."

The mangled metaphor made Sigrid laugh, and Tramegra looked pleased. "What a lovely laugh you have, my dear," he said; and before she could become self-conscious about it, he was off on another round of anecdotes.

Sigrid pushed her cup across the newly polished coffee table for a refill and sat listening with one denim leg drawn up, her strong chin supported on her knee.

Tramegra refilled both cups, then padded from the room to get a magazine article he'd written the month before that he thought would interest her. He even walked like a cat, Sigrid thought idly, watching him go. He moved lightly for one his size, each footstep placed precisely and neatly, one in front of the other.

When he returned, he had circled back to a previous point. "Speaking of Picasso forgers, did you know there are artists who forge their own work?" He dumped the contents of a large manila envelope on the couch beside him. "I've been gathering material about it."

"That sounds like a contradiction in terms," said Sigrid. "I know artists often paint several versions of the same subject, but that's not forgery, is it?"

"Not if they're all connected, no. But suppose an artist in the first flush of youth is entranced with painting blue cubes. For four years, let us say, he does nothing but blue cubes-singly, in tiers or jumbled on top of each other. Then he gets bored; moves on to mauve and puce gardenias. Now further suppose, if you will, that the public has liked his blue cubes but loathes these mauve and puce gardenias. Beastly colors, and anyhow, the critics don't think his draftsmanship's as good with flowers as it had been with cubes. Nevertheless, our artist stubbornly perseveres and for twenty years paints gardenias, tiger lilies and tulips, all in mauve and puce. Sooner or later he has to realize that they simply aren't bringing in much capital. In the meantime, seeing that there will be no more pictures of blue cubes, the price has simply skyrocketed. Our artist, starving in his miserable garret, begins to think how jolly it would be if he still had a few of those old canvases around. So one fine day he sneaks around to the local paint store, buys a couple of tubes of ultramarine, and a few weeks later after the paint's had time to dry, he announces to the world the discovery of several forgotten canvases from his blue-cube period. There he is, you see-a forger of his own work."

"But it's still the same artist doing the same sort of picture," Sigrid protested.

"You know that and I know that and so does the artist," Tramegra agreed cheerfully, "but critics cry foul every time. They say it's not the same, and anyhow-"

He had taken a swallow from the coffee cup and now broke off to stare at it distastfully. Then his brow cleared. "How silly of me! I've taken your cup by mistake. How on earth can you drink it without sugar?"

He brought her another cup and pointedly pushed it over to her side of the coffee table. The swallow had been so bitter that he added another spoonful of sugar to his already sweetened cup. As he stirred the dark liquid and rattled on-he had switched subjects again and was now onto Tibetan tea flavored with rancid yak butter-Sigrid felt a faint flicker of conjecture. A flicker that steadily brightened into radiant certainty.

Gratified by the expression on her thin face, Roman Tramegra expanded on Montezuma's addiction to cocoa. A fascinating subject, he decided. Perhaps he should write an article on it.