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 A

"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 A

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 di

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 A

A

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 A

"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 ma

"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 A

"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!