One Coffee With (15 page)

“Sorry,” she said, glancing at her watch. It was after eleven. “This has been a long day. The guest room’s second on the left there; I think mother keeps its linens in the bottom bureau drawer.”

They both looked around the big messy living area. Sigrid supposed she should make some sort of effort, but she was too tired. Instead she gathered up her jacket, purse and the Life folder. “If you can’t find anything, just root around,” she advised him. “And if you need me, I’m in the phone book.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll manage,” he said pouring his tea. “All this really needs is a good vacuuming.” He looked again at the clutter—at the heaps of newspapers and magazines piled beside couches and chairs and under tables, at the moldy coffee mugs, ashtrays and stray pieces of feminine apparel.

“Or maybe a shovel,” Sigrid heard him amend as she let herself out.

C
HAPTER
11

From infancy
Sigrid had known puzzled looks from her mother’s friends. Sooner or later would be murmured the inevitable, “She certainly doesn’t take after you or Leif, does she?”

The comparisons didn’t hurt less for being voiced in soft southern accents as Sigrid discovered the Christmas Anne was delayed by an assignment in the Philippines. Grandmother Lattimore had come up from North Carolina to keep Sigrid
company
when she came home from boarding school, thirteen years old and at her very gawkiest.

Mrs. Lattimore had raised three feminine belles, and she was at a loss with this Yankee granddaughter. She had brought Sigrid a Christmas dress of red velvet and white lace, but even she immediately saw how inappropriate such a dress would be on a child all arms and legs. Sigrid was already two inches taller than her grandmother. Her hair was dark like Anne’s, but its absolute straightness came from Leif, and it was so silky fine that it frizzed when Mrs. Lattimore tried to curl it.

“You’ve got a lot of things about you like your mama and daddy, honey,” the woman had sighed, “only you just went and put them together differently. Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. They say you’re going to be real intelligent. That’s nice.” Her voice had been dubious; then more briskly she’d added, “You’re still not grown up yet, and if you cultivate a pleasant personality, why you’ll do just fine! Look at your Cousin Lunette—plain as an old board fence, and she was the most popular girl of her year.
Eight marriage proposals before she was twenty, and she had those squinchy little eyes from the Howard side of her family.
At least yours are nice and wide, honey. All you need to do is learn to use them.”

Anne had always talked about the “marvelous planes” of her face; but after Grandmother Lattimore’s blunt assessment Sigrid had gone into the bathroom, locked the door and studied herself feature by feature, angrily brushing away the tears that welled up in her clear gray eyes. Coldly she noted that her face wasn’t actually repulsive, and that grandmother was right. Her eyes probably were her best feature. They would have to suffice.

Since then Sigrid had stopped looking in mirrors except to be sure everything hung together decently. Once and for all on that thirteenth Christmas she had decided—and accepted the fact—that she was homely and ungraceful, and it had never occurred to her that she might have changed. Or that there were standards of beauty other than her grandmother’s stereotype.

She had no idea how stunning she could look when alone in the evenings, her dark hair loose, and robed in one of the exotic djellabas or caftans that Anne kept sending from all over the world. Tonight’s was a deep wine red with sleeves and hem widely banded by rich embroidery interspersed with crystal beads and tiny mirrors no larger than a thumbnail.

When it arrived last Christmas Sigrid had sighed at her mother’s frivolous taste, and she’d scowled at her reflection upon trying it on—peacock feathers on a crow, she’d thought—but by now habit and familiarity had made it as unremarkable as gray flannel. Only gray flannel didn’t complement her skin as did the robe. She was a
barbaric splash of color as she curled up on her white linen couch to read the old Life article, and the lamplight did interesting things to the hollows of her cheeks and eyes as she concentrated on the magazine.

The article on modern American artists had been her mother’s first important assignment with a major magazine, and her success with it had led to other plums. Perhaps anyone could have photo graphed  the artworks as cleanly, but the Anne Harald touch lay in the way her camera caught each artist’s personality and philosophy more openly than usual as the subjects responded to the woman behind the lens.

Seven lesser luminaries shared one double spread, but Oscar Nauman had been one of five artists who had double pages to themselves. There he was in what Sigrid now recognized as a characteristic pose: his lean frame carelessly sprawled in a chair, but both hands gesturing in an inward curve as he strove to make his point. One could almost feel the energy and intensity contained in that gesture.

The straightforward captions beneath each picture served mainly to identify the subject; but in the accompanying four-page essay Riley Quinn’s prose was lucid and his positions were well-argued. Sigrid had never been able to get past what she regarded as the paradoxes and put-ons of modern art, but Quinn’s style was vivid and easy to follow. Although aggressively opinionated, he had made his points confidently and logically and had marshaled excellent concrete examples to back up his statements.

One would need a strong ego and an even stronger grounding in modernism to refute him or beat him in his own area, and Sigrid began to understand how an artist might fear for his reputation if Riley Quinn turned thumbs down on his work.

As Quinn had planned to do to Piers Leyden? With relish, if one could believe all accounts.

One small dose of innocent-looking orange crystals, and Leyden could subvert Quinn’s book and take possession of Quinn’s beautiful wife.

Nauman had made it sound as if the affair with Leyden were of no importance, yet even drunk and passed out, Doris Quinn had been stunning. Or wasn’t Oscar Nauman impressed by bosomy blondes?

Sigrid turned back to his photograph and idly wondered what type of woman he did prefer. Silver hair notwithstanding, she rather doubted if there had been a lessening of his vitality in that particular area any more than in his art. Those hands, for instance . .
.sturdy
, square-shaped workman’s hands, powerful enough to shape and mold yet capable of delicacy and precision. Of gentle, lyrical touch. . . .

Sigrid sat bolt upright and slammed the folder shut, her cheeks suddenly stained by a blush more crimson than her exotic robe. Oscar Nauman was old enough to be her father!

Dismayed at herself, she went into the kitchen to make a cup of hot chocolate; and while the milk heated, she spilled the little squares of red paper onto her white countertop and began sorting the tones. The milk boiled over, was turned off and grew cold as she struggled with the problem of arranging the squares in nine equal steps. The girl student had been right: twelve steps were rather easy. But nine evaded her.

She poured the curdled milk down the drain and washed the pan, then switched off all the lights and went to bed.

And found herself right back at square one, wondering if Oscar Nauman slept alone tonight.

What the devil had got into her?

She buried her head under a pillow, blocked out every undisciplined thought and put herself firmly to sleep by a concentrated listing of all fifty states in alphabetical order.

C
HAPTER
12

Although not a morning person
, Sigrid usually awoke before her alarm went off, so when a ringing penetrated her sleep next morning, her first response as she fumbled for the cutoff button was a drowsy surprise that she’d overslept.

The ringing continued.
Was cataloged as doorbell, not clock.

Sigrid groped for her robe and stumbled barefooted through her apartment to the door, then after a startled glance through the peephole, undid the latch.

Upon her threshold stood Oscar Nauman, indecently wide awake and as bright as the dawn sunlight edging in through her east windows.
Thick white hair still damp from his morning shower, freshly shaven and smelling of
a good
German cologne, he wore dark chinos and a pale blue turtleneck shirt; he also looked disgustingly like a
man who’d just played two vigorous sets of tennis or jogged five miles. Sigrid’s first impulse was to close the door again immediately and go back to bed.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked crossly.

He consulted a thin gold watch.
“Five-thirtyeight.
I assume you have to be at work by seven, so that leaves us an hour for a nice leisurely breakfast.” He waved a small grocery bag. “I brought jam and eggs for a strawberry omelet.”

The idea of eggs that early in the morning—to say nothing of eggs with jam on them—was so repulsive that Sigrid stepped back involuntarily.

Nauman interpreted that as an invitation and breezed past her toward the kitchen. Sigrid followed, protesting, “I don’t have to check in till eight, and I never eat breakfast.”

“That I can believe,” he said, rummaging in her refrigerator. He’d never seen one so bare in a woman’s kitchen. The top shelf held orange
juice,
a pound can of coffee and a quart of milk that would be sour by tomorrow. There were a couple of cheeses, a stick of butter, a loaf of whole-wheat bread, peanut butter, mayonnaise, three brown bananas and a head of wilted lettuce turning brown at the stalk.
Nothing more.

Incredulously he opened cupboard doors and found a toaster, two saucepans, one skillet, a half dozen cans of soup, cocoa mix, three cans of tuna and a box of crackers. Salt, pepper and sugar completed her staples.

“Soup’s all you ever cook?”

“And grilled cheese.
That’s a balanced enough meal. I suppose you fix yourself a four-course dinner every night?”

“What happens when someone drops in for a meal?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“No one with any manners ‘drops in,’” Sigrid said acidly. “They wait for an invitation, and then I take them to a proper restaurant.” She picked up a percolator from the counter behind him, rinsed it and filled it with cold water, then measured coffee into the basket. Morning sunlight caught the shiny beads and mirrors of her robe so that with every movement of her slender arms and hands, tiny rainbows of prismed sunlight flashed and coruscated on the surfaces all around her.

Nauman was enchanted. His artist’s eyes moved from the fugitive, darting colors to their source, then widened as he really saw her: narrow feet bare on the tile floor, the boy-slim body made graceful by the clinging red robe, the tilt of her head that sent long dark hair swinging as she plugged in the percolator.

In an exuberance of delight at the picture she made, he turned her to him, lifted her chin with his strong fingers and placed an impromptu kiss on her startled lips.

He’d meant nothing more serious than his usual homage to unexpected beauty; but as she tried to pull away, something made him tighten his hold and kiss her again. She wrenched herself from his arms, gray eyes blazing with anger as she searched for the cutting insult.

“You—
You
must be at least sixty!”

“Which still makes me thirty years younger than you!” he retorted. The thought made him grin unrepentantly. “Never kissed an older woman before, but it’s an experience worth repeating.”

She glared at him, speechless as he moved toward her purposefully,
then
fled from the sunlit kitchen, taking all the rainbows with her. A moment later and her bedroom door banged shut. Thoughtfully Nauman broke eggs into a bowl and began beating them with a fork.

She doesn’t know she’s a woman, he decided at last, and found that the thought both disturbed and intrigued him.

Sigrid,
leaned against her closed door and drew a deep steadying breath as the clink of metal upon glass reached her ears. Mind and reason warred with unfamiliar, muddled emotions as she stripped and headed for her bath. She turned the shower on full, and jets of water streamed down upon her body until the convulsive turmoil was sluiced away and her equanimity was almost restored. Then the bathroom door opened, and she heard Nauman’s voice above the water.

“Your coffee, Lieutenant.”

“Will you get the hell out of here?” she cried angrily.

He was gone when she turned off the water and peered around the curtain, but she snapped the door bolt anyhow before toweling herself dry.

The coffee that he’d left on the lavatory was more welcome than she wanted to admit, and she took a big swallow,
then
tackled her damp hair. A few minutes sufficed to plait it into a thick braid and secure it at the nape of her neck, and usually she didn’t bother to wipe off the steam-fogged mirror. Today she polished it clear and
examined herself closely to make sure every hair was pinned in place. She noticed that her cheeks were flushed an unaccustomed pink and splashed cold water on them until the color subsided.

Another prudent look from the doorway revealed that her bedroom was also empty, so Sigrid crossed the fern green carpet to her open closet. Normally she would have worn the next dark pantsuit in line, a dull gray with another white silk shirt like yesterday’s; but nothing was normal this morning, and she flipped past it, finding nothing in her closet to fit her unsettled mood until she reached the far end of the rack where she kept what she called her Carolina wardrobe.