A Live Coal in the Sea Read online

Raffi let herself out the kitchen door and went across the campus to her dorm. She was in one of the old Victorian brick buildings, six storeys high.

  In the lobby she paused at the mailboxes, though she was not expecting any messages. But there was something in her box. She pulled it out, a copy of the new TV Guide. On the cover was a picture of her father. Taxi. He did not use his last name, not too surprising with a name like Xanthakos. Her grandmother, too, used her maiden name, Dickinson, professionally. Someone had put a note in the magazine, with the scrawled message, ‘Thought you might like to see this super picture of your dad. Stick it in my box when you’re through. Dorry.’

  Raffi looked for Dorry’s box and shoved the magazine in. Dorry meant well, she knew that. But Raffi did not like being known as a TV star’s daughter, rather than as Raffi Xanthakos, with her own personality, and her own gifts, whatever they were.

  “Raffi! Taxi is your father!”

  “God, he’s gorgeous!”

  “What’s it like having Taxi for your dad?”

  “I absolutely adore him!”

  “Why doesn’t he have a last name?”

  To that, she would reply, “With a name like Xanthakos?”

  “I think it’s chic, being known as Taxi. Is that his real name?”

  “Artaxias,” she would explain, not amused at their laughter.

  “Weirdo.”

  “Cute.”

  “Some Greek god or something?”

  Raffi would tell them, “Artaxias was one of the generals of Antiochus the Great. He revolted and became an independent sovereign.”

  More delighted laughter.

  “Sovereign! That’s Taxi!”

  “And you, Raffi? Are you named after an archangel? Rafael?”

  Raffi would smile. “I’m named Rose Rafferty after my dad’s grandparents.”

  “Cute!”

  “What a super family, Raf.”

  “And your mother’s a dancer?”

  She lifted her shoulders slightly. “Till after I was born. A dancer’s life is pretty short”—but not that short. Mom could have gone on dancing. Dad wanted her to quit.

  She turned back to her friends, found herself overexplaining, “The New York ballet season’s pretty short, and my dad didn’t want her away on those long tours.”

  “If I was married to Taxi I wouldn’t mind staying home.”

  What Raffi thought about her father was not coherent. She loved him passionately, and she was afraid of him. She was never sure what his reactions would be, and when he spoke to her with scorn, something inside her withered.

  —I’m like a dog, she thought,—never knowing whether my master is going to stroke me or kick me. How does Mom manage to be so calm, so casual about it all?

  Raffi’s mother was Taxi’s third wife. He had married at eighteen, divorced at nineteen, married again, quickly divorced. Somehow Raffi’s mother hung in, disregarding his volatile temper. “I’m like a duck,” she told Raffi. “I let it slide off me. It’s just Taxi’s way. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Didn’t it? Raffi didn’t like unpredictability, didn’t like irrational anger directed at her mother, or herself.

  She climbed the stairs, calling out greetings as she passed her friends. If Taxi could act, so could Raffi, always making everybody think everything was all right. Nothing ever bothers Raffi. Raffi’s always okay.

  Yay.

  She could act in real life; she could act in all the school plays, and loved doing it, until, as always happened, her father managed to put her down. Why? She would put her tail between her legs, as it were, and swear she’d never try out for a play again, but when the time came she was always there, happy and excited, tail wagging hopefully.

  She went into her room and shut the door. What had she expected her grandmother to tell her? Not a long-winded story about how she had met Raffi’s grandfather. What did that have to do with it?

  Something. Raffi trusted her grandmother.

  On her bookcase were several framed photographs, one of Camilla and Mac standing under a large pine tree, with two small children beside them, Raffi’s father, Taxi, and her Aunt Frankie. Beautiful little kids, not scrawny and freckled and skinny as Raffi had been at their age.

  Another frame held a wedding picture of Raffi’s parents. Her mother was, Raffi thought, serenely beautiful. A small gold tiara held a flutter of veil. She could have danced Cinderella at the ball, and Taxi was spectacular as the prince, even though the ballet prince’s costume would not have been a tuxedo. If it had been hard for Camilla’s mother to be beautiful, were his amazing looks hard on Raffi’s father?

  “Thank God I’m ugly,” she said aloud, and knew she was lying to herself. If she was not beautiful, she was far from ugly. She had filled out. Her eyes were like chinks of emerald in a gamine’s face. She was attractive in her own rather unconventional way, and she had as many dates as she wanted, though she didn’t take them seriously. Time for seriousness later. Time now to ask why she lied to herself so often.

  Did her grandmother know that Raffi went regularly to Luisa, Dr. Rowan, the shrink, and was helped? Even now in college she still went to her, taking the train down to New York and back again the same day. But Dr. Rowan had left for Switzerland for a conference right after the Maria Mitchell ceremony, so had not been in New York when Taxi played that silly song and made his odd remarks. If Dr. Rowan had been available, Raffi might not have questioned her grandmother.

  She looked out the window. Many of the trees were already bare. Lights were on all across the campus, shedding comfortable warmth.

  What had her father been hinting at? What was the hidden message behind that silly song? He had been brooding, simmering, all the way down to the city from the college after her grandmother’s reception, barely listening as Frankie talked about Seattle, and how popular Taxi’s show was with all her friends. He was not satisfied with being ‘merely’ a successful television personality, Raffi thought; it was not enough. He was the star of his soap opera, was a frequent guest on the nighttime shows, did an occasional Broadway play, an occasional movie. But enough was not enough. He was not happy with himself.

  When had she begun to realize that?

  Who was Red Grange that her mother had slapped her father, struck him across the face, because of him?

  Red Grange, a football star in the twenties, because of the borrowing of his nickname, had affected Camilla in college, blasted her again after her marriage, and now, all these years later, was rising to upset Raffi.

  Surely the old football hero did not know how widely his influence extended.

  —I don’t give a hoot about football.

  Raffi scowled, and plunked herself down at her desk and opened her notebook. Who was Red Grange, anyhow?

  —Red Grange was a stupid nickname, Camilla thought, but maybe not for those who set far more importance on sports than she did.

  After her group of seniors left, she banked the fire, turned out the lights, went upstairs. She had left on the reading light by her bed and it reflected brightly against the brass, picked out the delicate colors in the flowered wallpaper, the cushions on the chaise longue.

  The phone rang, and Camilla leaned across the bed, reaching for it. “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s Frankie.”

  “Darling, hello, it’s good to hear from you. Everything okay?”

  “Fine. That was a terrific bash the college gave you. Ben’s really sorry he couldn’t get away.”

  “I am, too. But you were there, and that was wonderful.”

  “We’re proud of you, Mom.”

  Camilla laughed. “Darling Frankie, it really wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “It was, to us. You did enjoy it, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did. It warmed the cockles of my heart.”

  “My niece Raffi’s a really nice girl,” Frankie said.

  “She’s a love. Bright and inquiring and brave.”

  “She’d need to be brave with Tax
i for a father. Sorry, Mom, that wasn’t nice of me. I guess Taxi has a right to be difficult. Thank God for Thessaly. She not only puts up with him, she loves him. And mostly she can manage him. I really like my sister-in-law.”

  “I wish you saw more of each other.”

  “We’re all too busy. Even you, Mom, you hardly ever get out to Seattle. When are you going to retire?”

  “When the college decides it’s time, I suppose. Not for a while yet. I love my work.”

  “And I love mine. I’m doing more painting now, and less book illustrating. We’re lucky to enjoy what we do, aren’t we?”

  “Very.”

  “Good night, Mom. I’ll call again in a few days.”

  After she’d said goodbye to Frankie, Camilla drew a hot tub, then pulled the phone on its long cord into the bathroom with her. No matter when she bathed, it seemed that this was always the time for someone to call her, and she hated heaving out of the tub and hastening, dripping, into the bedroom for the phone.

  —Why are we so compulsive about phones? Because there have been too many traumas, too many urgent calls. The more people we love, the more vulnerable we are, and the more likely to rush to answer the phone …

  It rang. Taxi.

  “Mom, who am I?” This was not unlike Taxi, cosmic questions out of the blue.

  “You’re Taxi, darling.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Mom, I don’t know who I am. For the past ten years I’ve been so bound up with the idiot I play on my show that I’m not sure I have any identity of my own.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “When people recognize me wherever I go, and they do—”

  “Yes, Taxi, they do.”

  “They don’t recognize me, Taxi. They recognize a character written by somebody else.”

  “That’s how real you’ve become for them.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it? My life has outsoaped any soap opera, yet here I am, depending for my living on one of these idiot shows.”

  “It’s not an idiot show, Taxi. It’s pretty good.”

  “What would happen to me if, for some reason, I wasn’t on the show anymore?”

  “That’s not likely to happen, is it?” She kept her voice quiet, reasonable. “Your show has high ratings. You’re a household name.”

  “But who am I?”

  “Taxi,” she repeated. “Artaxias Xanthakos.”

  “I’m named after someone I called Papa, who was, more or less, my grandfather.”

  “He was your grandfather, Taxi.”

  “Oh, God, Mom, I’m glad you’re there. I’m lonely.”

  “So is everybody, love. It’s the human predicament. You know that.”

  “You’re not lonely, are you? Always surrounded by adoring students. And your stars. All you have to do is go out at night and look at your stars and you’re never alone.”

  “In a manner of speaking. I’m glad you have Thessaly.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, Taxi. Thessaly loves you and is there for you, no matter what. She’s proven that.”

  “She’s a fool to put up with me.”

  “No, Taxi, she’s very wise.”

  “Good night, Mom. Thanks for being there.” He hung up before she had a chance to say good night.

  Why had he called? Why this sudden questioning of his role? Why hadn’t she called him to ask him why he had played that record in front of Raffi, why, after all these years, he had exhumed Red Grange? Why hadn’t she asked him now? Why was she afraid?

  She drew some more hot water into the tub. When she felt warm enough she got out and wrapped herself in a bath sheet. She dried herself, glancing at the pictures on the wall, photos of her children, her grandchild. Raffi as a baby, a little girl, an adolescent. Taxi as a baby, a handsome three-year-old, and as Hamlet. The production had not been a success, but the picture was of Taxi brilliant as a flame against a dark night. He himself had come off well in the reviews, some critics going so far as to say that the production was worth seeing because of Taxi’s performance, which lit up an otherwise inept cast and clumsy interpretation. ‘Why don’t you take that down?’ he would sometimes ask, but the picture was striking enough for his protestations to be fleeting.

  She climbed into bed. It was apparent to her that she was too restless to sleep.

  Nothing more, now, please. Nothing more. They had moved into a period of moderate peace. She did not want it disturbed, old pains reawakened, old anxieties resurfacing. There had been enough. Enough.

  She pulled a book out of the small case by her bed, a battered paperback of Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars. The beauty of his writing would calm her. She read for half an hour, until all the taut muscles in her body had relaxed. Before she turned out the light she looked again at the picture of Frankie and Taxi, and a wave of homesickness so violent that it shook her swept over Camilla. If Mac’s parents had not had that picture taken, there would be no visible memory of that time which was shortly and violently taken away.

  By Red Grange.

  In Professor Grange’s class the day after Camilla had met Mac, she looked at the older man as though seeing him for the first time, a reasonably good-looking man, middle-aged, middle height, middle build. Reddish-gold hair. Fleetingly she wondered if the rest of his body hair was that same sunny color. Was his affair with her mother part of that famous midlife crisis? His wife was a handsome woman who taught in the history department. Could Professor Grange just forget about Rose Dickinson when he went to bed with his wife? Could he forget his wife when he went to bed with Rose?

  Camilla had had her own daydreams about Grantley Grange. She knew he was married; she’d even taken a survey course with his wife. But his marriage was not a problem in fantasies which were never going to be realized. He was the best teacher she had, and their minds sparked off each other, and she knew that he liked that as much as she did. It was, in fact, a kind of intercourse. She wanted to sit across from him in a small, dark booth and drink coffee, and then have him reach out and hold her hand. That was about as erotic as her fantasies went because, to her, eros spelled nothing but trouble.

  Grantley Grange had done more than hold hands with her mother. How could he? After what he and Camilla had together? But they had nothing. Nothing.

  My mother, Rose, the seductress. In the old days, didn’t seductresses get stoned to death? Or was it only adulteresses? Camilla did not want to have her mother stoned, but she was still angry. Angry with her mother, with her professor. Angry at the loss of her betrayed daydreams. There was no way she could continue to fantasize about a man who had bedded with her mother. It would be, she thought, scowling, incestuous.

  Professor Grange’s voice broke across her thoughts. ‘All right, Camilla. Tell us what the equivalent electromagnetic radiation is to the background radiation which indicates the beginning of the universe?’

  Her mind snapped into focus. ‘It’s equivalent to what’s called a black body,’ she replied.

  ‘Right. And at what temperature?’

  ‘2.7 K, or minus 270° Centigrade.’

  ‘Feeble, wouldn’t you say, as a manifestation of the wonders of the beginning of the universe? Nonetheless, fascinating. But even for radiation with energy corresponding, as Camilla pointed out, to a black body with a temperature of only 2 K, the marvelous thing is that there is as much energy in this feeble hiss of radio noise as—hear this, class—the mass energy of all the bright stars in all, all, mind you, all the galaxies put together. So, in cosmic terms, what we have picked up with our radio telescopes is extraordinarily significant.’

  Was it only her imagination that he kept glancing at her during the hour of the class? He taught well, with energy and verve. He was popular. Many of the students raved over how cute he was, how dreamy his hazel eyes, his light red curls. Luisa had asked if the curls were real, or if he’d had a perm and a touch-up. Camilla had paid more attention to his mind than to his loo
ks.

  He asked her another question, which she answered. The bell rang. With the other students she gathered up her books, headed for the door.

  Mac was waiting for her. She jumped. She had not really expected him to be there. She felt herself flush with delight.

  ‘I thought you might like a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Thanks. I would.’—Even coffee as bad as the cup he had given her the night before.

  ‘He’s a good lecturer, your astronomer prof. What’s his name?’

  ‘Grange. Grantley Grange. Yes, he’s good.’

  ‘I sat in the back of the room for most of the class. What’s this K you kept referring to?’

  ‘K stands for Kelvin, after Lord Kelvin, who was important in our understanding of heat.’

  ‘You really know your stuff, don’t you? I couldn’t make head or tail of it all, but you answered his questions as though he’d asked you two times two.’

  ‘Well, it’s what I’m majoring in. Today was just memory work, but it’s interesting. Funny, when he came into class it was as though he’d hit me and I thought I’d forget everything I’d ever known, but then when he asked me anything the answer just floated up to my conscious mind. Thank heaven. He asks me because he knows I won’t let him down.’

  ‘You care about letting him down? After—’

  She shook her head, her dark hair for a moment covering her face. ‘I did. Now more likely I don’t want to let myself down. I certainly didn’t want anybody in class to know I was upset.’

  ‘You succeeded. If I hadn’t already known, I’d have thought you had nothing on your mind except astronomy. Come on. Let’s go down the back stairs and out the side exit.’ He opened the door. ‘It’s frigid out there. Let’s run.’ Ducking their heads against the biting wind, they ran down the path, brushing against other hurrying students. Slipping her hand out of his, she panted. ‘I want to apologize.’

  He turned toward her, surprised. ‘For what?’

  ‘Dumping myself all over you last night.’

  He reached for her hand again, holding it firmly. ‘You didn’t dump. You were legitimately upset. I could have smacked your professor this afternoon, with half the female population swooning over him.’