While Nauman rummaged in the refrigerator, Sigrid went through the dining and living rooms and down the hall to her bedroom. This part of the apartment reflected her own taste. The clean-lined furniture was comfortable to use, if bland to the eye: a white linen couch, oatmeal-colored chairs, uncluttered surfaces. Little by little, though, Roman Tramegra was sneaking in a few softening touches.
Arguing that the dining room was an extension of the kitchen, Roman had felt justified in persuading Sigrid to buy the refectory table he'd discovered in a secondhand thrift shop. 'It's perfect for your chair,' he'd told her.
The chair in question was a massive carved affair with handrests formed of small wooden cat heads which Sigrid had unaccountably lugged home last spring when she found it abandoned on the sidewalk near her old apartment building. Roman had reupholstered the back and seat in a dark red velvet and that made a perfect excuse for bringing in two room-sized oriental rugs in soft red tones.
Behind the couch a row of windows looked out into their small courtyard and Roman had filled that space with ferns and palms and a baby Norfolk Island pine. It was nothing to do with her, Sigrid warned him. "I've murdered my last plant. Either I water things too much or not enough and I'm tired of throwing out pots of dead vegetation."
So far the plants seemed to be flourishing.
Through the years, Anne had given her several framed photographs and Nauman had recently presented her with a playful sketch done in vivid gouaches, and these added vibrant color to the rooms.
Her bedroom, however, remained free of anyone else's touch. Except for a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and a dark green carpet, no brilliant hues had crept in here. Her comforter was off-white, as were her lampshades. An armchair near the bookcase was an indeterminate beige, and on a nearby wall hung black-and-white line drawings, reproductions from the Morgan Library's collection. Sigrid did not believe in yoga or meditation, yet there were times when she retreated to this bare room and sat looking into those ascetic late Gothic faces until her own calm was restored.
While Oscar busied himself with lunch, Sigrid changed into more suitable working clothes of gray slacks, white shirt, and a baggy off-white corduroy blazer with deep pockets that had seen her through several springs and autumns. With her left arm out of commission, she decided to dispense with her shoulder bag; so that meant a gun harness worn under her jacket with the rest of the items she normally carried stuffed in her pockets.
Getting dressed was difficult enough; doing anything with her shoulder-length hair was impossible, for she could not reach behind with both hands. She wound up carrying a blue scarf out to Oscar, who had unloaded a tray of sandwiches onto her dining room table.
"Would you mind?" she asked, trying to gather her hair into position with her right hand.
"Sit down. I don't know why you don't just leave it loose," he grumbled. He liked her hair and thought it a waste that she kept it so confined. "What's the point of long hair the way you treat it?"
"It's easier to take care of." She bent her head so he could get at the job better. "I don't have to keep getting haircuts every two weeks or worry about it flopping in my face. I can braid it, pin it back, and forget it."
She did not like to be touched, so Oscar resisted kissing the vulnerable nape of her slender neck, but he stubbornly took his time tying the scarf. "There's more to hair than just keeping your neck warm."
"A woman's crowning glory?" Sigrid gibed.
"Something like that," he said, fluffing up the bow loops of the silk scarf.
"Haven't you learned by now that I'm never going to turn into a sex object, much less a swan?" she asked and reached back to flatten some of the bow's exuberance. Oscar's face as he sat down across the table from her was so exasperated that Sigrid couldn't help smiling.
"Poor Nauman. Why do you keep bothering with me?"
"Damned if I know," he smiled back. "Want some ale?"
"Yes, but I'd better not mix alcohol and whatever's in this painkiller."
Her arm had begun to throb again and she went back into the kitchen for a glass of cold milk to wash down the tablet. She found that she was as hungry as Nauman had predicted and for a few minutes they devoted their attention to the food.
"Tell me about John Sutton," she demanded when the first edge was off their hunger. "What were you doing out at McClellan?"
"It was one of those interdisciplinary seminars, a sort of academic happening in support of the peace movement. John was president of McClellan's SDS that year. Val was a cute little undergraduate full of innocence and optimism. Flower children hoping to better the world. I was old enough to know better, but I was just as naive. We thought we could make a difference."
"And you did, didn't you?" She took a second sandwich and cut it in half. "The war ended."
"Not soon enough," he said and sat lost in dark memory until Sigrid pushed half her sandwich at him. He looked at it, then began to munch absent-mindedly.
"John Sutton," she prodded.
"Bright. Wacky sense of humor. Played the guitar. Used to make up parodies of Bob Dylan songs-the whiney ones. Val played the autoharp. Quick ear. They hadn't met before, but one night when he played for us, she started echoing his tunes, then embellishing them. Solemn as a churchwarden the whole time. Her face-" Nauman took another bite of his sandwich, waiting for the right words to convey the odd attraction of Val Sutton's face. "What are those cats that look like Siamese except they're all brown? Burmese? Abyssinian?"
Sigrid shrugged, not being a pet owner.
"Think of a triangular face that's a cross between Nefertiti and an Abyssinian cat, with sleek brown hair falling to her waist. That was Val. You'll see. Not beautiful. Men don't notice her right away; but once they do,, they don't forget her. John never had a chance."
He grinned, describing how artfully Val had managed John's wooing; how John, if he had been aware of her wiles, hadn't struggled against them.
Sigrid, who had never so far as she knew turned any man's head but Nauman's, listened and briefly wondered how it must feel to have such power over someone's heart.
"John loved to argue. We had several all-night sessions that summer, but I'd almost lost touch with them when he and Val came east four or five years ago. Vanderlyn's history department offered him an associate professorship and Val audited some of my classes. She's one of the curators at the Feldheimer and a pretty fair Sunday painter herself. I've lent them my place up at Connecticut several times and John and I've served on some committees together. The Mickey Mouse ones. They don't think we take the so-called important ones seriously enough. Administration usually does what it wants anyhow and why the hell they have to waste our time-"
"John Sutton," Sigrid interrupted, having heard tirades against Vanderlyn's administration before. "Who were his enemies?"
"I never heard that he had any. John was bright and opinionated, but not mean. Like last Wednesday when the CGC met and-"
"The what?"
"The Condensed CUNY Committee. That's what John called us. I've told you how the university tries to promote the idea that the different branches around the city are one big happy family?"
Sigrid supposed so. She couldn't work up much interest in the politics of the City University of New York. Keeping up with politics within the NYD was tedium enough.
"So CUNY subsidizes faculty dinners at one of the big hotels and we have to shell out some of our own money to break bread together and pretend we know each other. Except that the combined faculty's so large that it gets boiled down to senior members and one year it's for liberal arts and the next for the sciences, that sort of thing. This year it's the arts and John and I were sent to meet with delegates from the other schools at the Maintenon on Wednesday to set things up and there was this jackass from Brooklyn College who-"