One Coffee With by Margaret Maron Page A

here, but she doesn’t use it much. She’s all over the world these days, taking pictures about issues with more social significance.”
    “Meaning that art has none?” Nauman asked, amused.
    “Well, does it?”
    “Very little,” he admitted wryly. “But not for any reasons you might give.”
    “Probably not. Of course, I don’t know very much about art, but—”
    “Oh, Lord! You’re not going to say it?” he groaned.
    “—but I know what I like,” she finished firmly.
    “She said it!” Nauman mourned to the waiter, who’d just arrived with their steaks.
    The waiter beamed uncomprehendingly and deftly distributed their dinner dishes. As promised, the salad had no romaine lettuce, just wilted iceberg under an indifferent bottled dressing; but the baked potatoes had crisp jackets and had been split open to receive huge dollops of butter, while the man-sized steaks still sizzled, and small streams of deep red juices trickled from several fork pricks.
    Sigrid suddenly remembered that she hadn’t eaten since early morning, and when Nauman insisted that she try an anchovy, she was too hungry to resist. With that first taste of a steak grilled to absolute perfection she instantly forgave the greasy table and smoky air, the food-specked menus and crazed earthenware dishes. And the salty anchovies were such a delicious complement to red meat that she might even have forgiven Nauman’s condescension had he not tactlessly brought it up again.
    “Very well, Lieutenant, what kind of art do you like?”
    “Pictures of people.”
    “Norman Rockwell?” he jeered.
    “No.” She speared another anchovy.
    Nauman studied her intently, feeling slightly annoyed. Taken separately, the features of the young woman across the table were excellent: strong facial bones, clear skin, extraordinary gray eyes, dark hair that tried to escape from its braided knot, and a wide mouth shaped for generous laughter. Yet collectively her features might as well have added up to total gracelessness for all the use she put them to.
    Despite his fame Oscar Nauman was not an arrogant man; still without realizing it, he had become spoiled. He was used to having women make an effort to amuse him. As his reputation had grown in the past thirty years, so had the number of women who sought him out. He was cynical enough to know why many came—the would-be artists, the bored faculty wives, the semi-intellectual sophisticates, all drawn like moths to the flame” of his public recognition—but he had attracted women before he became well known, and an innocent pride in his own masculinity made him think he knew why the ones he chose had stayed.
    Nor had his relations with every female been purely physical. Among his closest friends were many women whose minds he respected, who could hold their own in fierce intellectual debate. But even with these, there had been an initial period in which they had probed and tested each other, an exchanged awareness of sexuality. Sublimated, yes, but quite definitely there.
    With Sigrid Harald he felt none of these subtle nuances, and it piqued him. She seemed as sexless as a young boy. For a brief moment he wondered if he were getting too old; then his subconscious pride discarded that hypothesis and flicked onto other reasons. Could she be frigid? A lesbian? Or had she been too early or too bitterly rejected? Was her prickly facade merely a thick shell covering a romantic nature? He rather favored that last theory and thought it might be interesting to prove.
    “Renaissance portraits, right?” (In his experience most closet romantics loved the Renaissance.) “Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo?”
    “Some of them,” she admitted. “But my favorites—do you know those pen-and-ink heads by Durer? And Holbein? And especially those drawings by Lucas Cranach?”
    “The Goths?” Nauman was astounded. His memory conjured up those north-European masters of the late Middle Ages. The sober and pure linear quality