A Possible Life

  The silence after the song was easier to live with this time. Anya looked round the circle, a smile twitching the corner of her lips, as though she was thinking, What is it with these people? She retuned again. She was a fussy, fussy musician. ‘This song is really meant to be played on the piano, but I’ll play it on the guitar. It’s called “Julie in the Court of Dreams”.’

  There was another slow, finger-picking introduction. The song began as observational, a little like ‘Genevieve’, with an open compassion for the girl it was about. You felt how protective Anya was of this imagined Julie, and maybe of all women. Then the music opened out. The voice lowered and Anya brought herself into the song, with that sudden rushing confessional we’d had on ‘You Next Time’. She somehow managed to fuse her true self with this invented girl and make it universal. It was a huge thing to do, but it seemed modest – and that was what was so moving. By the time she played the third verse, the melody had already become familiar. It sounded like a song that had always been there, yet like nothing you’d ever heard before.

  When she finished, she laid the guitar down on the grass beside her and said, ‘OK, I’m going to get a drink now. Someone else can play.’

  But no one moved.

  Anya liked staying with us. She seemed happy just to mess around in our farmhouse by day, go up to swim at Maria’s in the afternoon, then join me playing music in the evening.

  I wasn’t a great pianist, but I could fill out what she was doing with some chords on the warmer songs. There was no point in trying to play guitar for Anya because her own sound was so distinctive. Right from the start she disliked any other voice on her songs, especially a man’s, even though I could reach the notes in falsetto and could think up harmonies. When she saw my face, she started to laugh. ‘All right, Freddy, you can play some chords.’ I don’t know why she called me Freddy. My name is Jack. She often did this, I discovered later, finding names she thought suited people better than their own.

  Although for four years I’d recorded my own songs and several joint compositions with my band, and Anya King had recorded nothing, she only tolerated me as a session-man-cum-makeshift-producer. But I didn’t mind; I knew I was at the start of something extraordinary.

  Rick was always trying to shift Anya back to the city. He’d found her a gig in a bar in SoHo, still pretty unexplored country then. It didn’t start till September, but he kept telling her she should get back to the city and rehearse, get a feel for the venue.

  ‘Just another few days, Rick,’ she’d say. ‘I’m really getting my head together here.’

  ‘You stay, honey,’ Lowri said.

  The summer slid by. Suzanne and Becky moved out of the second bedroom so Anya could have it. The girls took sleeping rolls out on to the porch or the grass, though they tended to get visited and licked by Grace and Janis.

  Rick disappeared to an inn somewhere off the interstate, maybe to score coke, but after a few days came back and slept on the living-room couch. The general store in the village sold pretty much all you needed; we got vegetables from the local farms, and once a week one of us would go to the supermarket in town to get packs of beer.

  The weather stayed hot by day and cool enough to sleep well at night. Every evening after dinner, Rick would say, ‘We got to fix this chick a record deal, man.’

  And I would say, ‘Pass that joint over here, you mean bastard. There’s always tomorrow.’

  And Anya would say solemnly, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

  Lowri would sit watching it all with her amused expression.

  ‘Days like this don’t come round that often,’ I said one night.

  ‘What about yesterday?’ said Anya.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rick. ‘And the day before.’

  ‘And tomorrow,’ said Lowri.

  This seemed the funniest thing that any of us had ever heard. For about twenty minutes we were in agony as the first one able to breathe would say, ‘What about the Wednesday before … l-a-a-s-t!’

  A telephone call did come, though, from MPR records. Some kid in A & R that John Vintello had put on to us wanted to come right on up – or send a train ticket for Anya to go down to the city.

  ‘Screw that,’ I said. ‘You should play some more gigs. Let’s get you in some places up here. Just till the end of August. There’s plenty of small venues in town and a lot of tourists to play to.’

  So next day Anya and Rick and I got in the Chevy and headed into town. We stood in daylight bars that smelled of last night’s beer where the soles of your boots ripped up from the sticky floor when you tried to move. Rick did his spiel, Anya looked demure and icy, I kept an eye out for trouble. A guy with a white Afro and six rows of beads sat Anya on a tall bar stool to play while he slumped down at a low table so he could see up her skirt. An old woman in a pool hall said Anya could play for tips. A bar on the waterfront liked her enough to offer her a week, but not till September.

  We went with the white Afro at five bucks an hour, beer and tips. He told Anya to sing some folk songs, which she had to do anyway because she didn’t have enough material of her own to fill the time.

  ‘I like that,’ he said, when she’d played him one. ‘Is that Appalachian or what?’

  ‘Sure. See you Saturday.’

  Back in the car, Rick said, ‘Was that schmuck trying to get a look at your panties?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What a pervert.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t wearing any.’

  She was the only one who could shut Rick up.

  Those few weeks, I was so happy I hardly dared inhale. I think it was the same for all of us. Households could break up as quickly as they formed and no one liked to talk about what made this one work where the last one crashed. I’d first met Lowri when I was in LA after my English band had broken up and she was living in Laurel Canyon in a house with six other people, three of them with giant egos. Lowri was the glue that held it together and no one seemed to notice how beautiful she was – with her brown eyes and straw hair and dusty freckles. She was always pushing herself into the background. I noticed her, though. She and I went to the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go and saw all those people who’d go on to be famous. That was way back, out West. But this summer, with Anya and Rick. What made our farmhouse run so well? It could have been the joker in the pack: maybe Rick gave people just enough to find annoying, so he was the lightning conductor. Maybe it was the bit-part characters, Becky and Suzanne, who went to work at the big neighbouring farm by day, saving up their wages to travel in the fall, and earned their keep by helping out and being cool (and in both cases, I suspected, visiting Rick on his couch in the night. The runty little guy had a way of getting girls to do things to him). Maybe it helped having Maria and John up the road for a change of scene. Also, there were no money hassles, thanks to the royalties still coming in from my last album.

  We accommodated Anya. Softly spoken, young, unrecorded, mild-mannered … Was there anything that wasn’t easy about it? The size of her talent, I suppose. The silent power of her self-belief. It left this kind of force field round her. She was in no hurry to get back to the city; it was like she knew her time would come and there was no need to rush. Perhaps she could foresee the limousines and the press officers and the chain hotels and all the other things that would threaten her ability to find the pure thoughts inside her.

  The gig we’d set up in town turned out pretty well. The audience was folkies for the most part, but with plenty of vacationers passing through and a solid core of drinkers who took a lot of winning over. When she needed to retune or change guitars and they just wanted something to sing along to, there was kind of a big frost. She never played a note until she was one hundred per cent ready.

  When did I begin to fall in love with Anya King? Before I met her. Before I knew her. The day her head bobbed up from the other side of Rick’s car … I felt I’d known her all my life and here she was at last. But she was someone I was also dead afrai
d of, because she was too much in me, too much a part of me and, in some way I couldn’t understand, stronger than me. She was more me than I was.

  And I had to deal with the fact that I still loved Lowri. Yet the way I loved Lowri was full of respect. She was the opposite of me: she was fair, practical, considerate, wise. I was none of those things. We got on so well because we complemented one another. When I met her, it was like, I’ll take this one, she’s the deal, she’s got all I need.

  With Anya there was no weighing up and no decision. There were things about her I thought wrong, things I didn’t understand and ways in which she was a lesser woman than Lowri. But none of them mattered at all. She was my destiny, and all I could do was ride it.

  ‘Come on, Freddy,’ she’d say each day in the evening light, banging on the bonnet of the Chevy. ‘Time to go. I’m gonna try that new song tonight.’

  She’d learned to drive an automobile when she was twelve – anything to get out of Devils Lake – but liked me to take charge of the expedition, like a roadie. In my bad moments I thought maybe she gave me roles in her life out of charity, but mostly I knew she needed someone to be between her and the world. She needed me to mediate for her. And I was thrilled, though I didn’t let on.

  ‘This time last year I was a guy with a top-twenty record. Now I’m an unpaid driver.’

  ‘We make a left here, Freddy.’

  The new song she was trying out was called ‘Ready to Fly’, and it made me excited and uncomfortable at the same time. It wasn’t a fully personal-history thing like ‘You Next Time’, but it seemed to refer to her own life at that moment. The chorus had a see-sawing quality that had the people in the bar tapping their feet and humming along. The words went:

  There’s a time you’re unsteady

  This feeling is heady

  You know you could easily cry

  But you’ve spun there already

  This frightening eddy

  Now you know that you’re ready to fly.

  There were a few things that kept the song from being as simple as that chorus looked. The tune kept going from major to minor and back again, so you weren’t sure how happy she was. The final word ‘fly’ was on that breaking verge between her middle and lower register, and she slid over two or three semitones. There was a ‘he’ or a ‘him’ in the song and if you were a woman listening then it could have referred to your man, but it could also have been someone in particular for Anya.

  And was it just me or was there a rhyme-word that was obviously missing? And wasn’t that word ‘Freddy’?

  I’d sit at the back with some of the rowdier guys and try to set an example by applauding like crazy at the end of a song. Sometimes they’d look up to see what I was on about, and sometimes they wouldn’t bother. I’d first played at the age of fifteen with my brothers in pubs in south London, so I knew the score.

  The middle of the set was given to folk songs and to covers of other people’s material. It amused Anya to pass off one of her own as a song from the Appalachians. She liked to watch some of the older men nod their heads in approval, as though they’d had enough of this young woman’s life and appreciated a real song now.

  When Anya played, I was in the back-alley cold of ‘Genevieve’, in the wilderness of ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’, in the vertigo of ‘Ready to Fly’. And I was in her fingers on the strings, in her breathing, in her phrasing. I was pouring all my energy into her. I was part of something being born.

  Late one morning, towards the end of August, I was sitting at the end of the house pushing a few chords up and down the piano, humming, and wondering if I would ever write my own songs again when I felt Anya standing behind me. This was a trick of hers, to materialise without a sound. She didn’t make you jump; it was more like she’d been there all along. I pretended not to notice, and carried on playing.

  She rested her head on my shoulder and watched my hands move on the keys. I could just feel the point of her breasts against my back. Then she leaned over, took my right hand away and replaced it with hers.

  ‘You play with the left, Freddy, I’ll play with the right.’

  Her hair was tickling the side of my face and her left breast was pressed flat against me as she reached forwards. Her spare hand was on my shoulder. I played a simple rolling blues with the left hand and let her improvise with the right. I wasn’t, as I’ve said, much of a pianist, and her body pressed against mine was making it difficult to concentrate. I felt myself hardening uncomfortably in tight jeans, but was determined to keep going. I didn’t want her to think I was under her spell. As we played, Anya began to hum in my ear. The movement of her right hand seemed to be suggesting a melody to her.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said, detaching herself from me and coming round the other side. With her left hand she played a sequence of a few bars. ‘Can you play that?’

  ‘Sure. And just keep repeating?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She went back to the other side, squeezed back in tight against me and began to play the tune with the right hand. ‘A little bit slower,’ she said, ‘more of a rocking rhythm. That’s it, that’s it.’

  I watched her fingers going up and down, feeling out the melody while she hummed it in my ear.

  ‘And what’s it going to be about?’ she whispered.

  ‘Personally,’ I said, ‘I usually sing nonsense words with the right rhythm till I’ve figured it out. Any old words. “Sod this, it looks like turkey.”’

  ‘Nice try, Freddy.’

  She kept humming for a bit, then sang, ‘“Susie, she’s kind of lazy …”’

  ‘Or, “Fuck me, you drive me crazy.”’

  ‘Ssh. “Hold me, I’m feeling lonely …”’

  ‘Stay with that swoop you’re getting when you slide between “hold” and “me”. That’s your killer. It goes through my teeth like a …’

  ‘Like a what? Like a dentist’s drill?’

  ‘Yeah, but like it’s drilling on a nerve of pure pleasure.’

  ‘Shucks, mister. Really!’

  ‘Find that note and stick it in as often as you can.’

  ‘You saying I should construct a whole song just so it involves that note as many times as possible?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because my loyalty’s to the song, not to people’s pleasure.’

  ‘Oh, Anya. Come to meet us. Come halfway.’

  She pressed herself more tightly in and played the tune that was emerging. My left hand was still plodding away in the lower reaches.

  ‘What do we call this special note, then?’ she said.

  ‘Search me, I just call it your “skull” note for where it hits me.’

  ‘“‘Hold me, you wondrous lady,’ I heard him call,/When the lights from down the highway washed up the bedroom wall.”’

  ‘It sounds lovely, but maybe a bit comic.’

  ‘Not by the time I’ve finished with it. Anyway, love is comic, isn’t it? The fools we make of ourselves.’

  ‘When you look back at it, maybe.’

  She brushed her left hand across my groin and the fingertips lightly traced the straining outline.

  ‘He must be awful cramped in there, Freddy.’

  ‘He’ll survive.’

  It turned out Rick was playing a long game with MPR. He’d recorded Anya at the club and sent tapes also to Upright Records in San Francisco and to Antigone, a new label one of the big entertainment companies had spun off in LA. Anya liked the look of Asylum, but Rick told her they’d been gobbled up.

  ‘In the end Warner Brothers swallows everyone, sweetheart,’ he said.

  ‘How are you going to tell John Vintello you’ve been going behind his back?’ I said.

  ‘We’re allowed to look at different offers. But we need enough songs for the album.’

  ‘I have maybe twenty songs,’ said Anya. ‘I just don’t play them till they’re good and ready.’

  It was mid-morning and we were sitting on the verandah, drinking coff
ee.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Rick, sceptically. ‘“Julie in the Court of Dreams”? How long you sit on that little baby?’

  ‘I wrote “Julie” when I was nineteen.’ Anya took a sip from her mug.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Rick. He scratched his chin as he tried to regain his composure. ‘You know what I think. Maybe split the album and do one side of, like, really personal things and the other of more story-like tracks.’

  ‘Like a concept album, you mean?’ said Anya.

  ‘Yeah, kind of.’

  She pushed the hair back from her face. ‘That is a really, really terrible idea, man. Each song is a different world. You try and force them together, you diminish each one.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’ Rick stood up. ‘But one thing I can tell you for sure is you gotta get your ass back to New York City.’

  ‘It’s just so hard to leave,’ said Anya.

  She was gazing out over the farmland to the woods. I looked out there, too, and saw the first softening of autumn in the thick light on the meadow. My throat felt thick. ‘Maybe we should clear up who’s doing what in this little band,’ I said.

  Anya leapt up from the old car seat. ‘I want you with me, Freddy. You gotta be my road man. I need you there. And Rick, you can suck the cocks of the record executives.’

  We’d never heard her talk like this before and we exploded laughing, even Rick.

  ‘Sorry,’ Anya said. ‘That just kinda slipped out.’

  But we shook on a deal that we’d split the management fee, Rick and me, straight down the middle, and if one day he spent ten hours in meetings while I played a few piano chords and if another time I was on the road for a week and he was on vacation in Mexico, neither would complain.

  ‘One thing I would say, though, Rick. Let’s go with John Vintello. MPR is a good label. We need a bastard on our side and John’s our kind of bastard.’