A Possible Life (26 page)

She climbed the steps to the porch and awkwardly shook hands. Normally at a moment like this, Rick would be talking, rattling on like a typewriter. This time, though, he was as close to quiet as he could be.

Lowri came outside and Rick introduced her to Anya, who stayed kind of reserved.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Rick, ‘I asked a few other people to come up later on as well.’

‘From the city?’ I said.

‘Yeah. Some.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Lowri. I knew she did mind, a little, but would think it wrong to say so.

‘Guess they’ll be here about nine,’ said Rick.

I suggested we go to Maria’s place to swim first, and Rick said that was cool. With the money from two platinum albums, Maria had bought the biggest house in the neighbourhood. A refugee from LA, she spent summers upstate with her husband John Vintello, who was a lawyer with MPR records in New York, kind of a straight arrow, not a shyster.

The pool was in the yard with apple trees round it. Maria put a Dave Brubeck record on the outdoor system. Rick came out through the French doors, naked, walked through the hissing sprinklers on the lawn and jumped in the water. Maria came out from the summer house at the far end of the pool, also naked, the skin of her breasts shining with suntan oil. I never much liked this communal naked thing, but it was OK once you were in. I looked back to the house, where Anya was sitting on a lounger, sipping a drink. She’d put on a straw hat and looked like she wanted to stay in the shade.

Rick leaned against the side of the pool, threw his arms back over the edge and talked to Maria. His hair hung over his shoulders and drops of water fell from his moustache. He was getting up to full speed now, yattering away, and I wondered if he’d had a quick snort indoors.

John, Maria’s husband, came back from the city, driving his station wagon up from the railway halt. He was starting a month’s vacation and was in a happy state of mind. His label had three acts in the
Billboard
top twenty and they had six people from A & R out on the road scouting for new talent. John was planning to sail a boat with Maria and a couple of friends from Key West down to the Caribbean. He’d asked a few weeks earlier if Lowri and I would like to come aboard, and we had both pictured storms blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico and Maria’s pill habit in a cramped space. ‘But you’re a Brit,’ said Lowri, ‘you’re meant to have the sea in your blood.’ ‘And you’re a Yankee girl, you’re meant to be a pioneer.’ ‘Horses, Jack. Covered wagons. We left the sea at Plymouth Rock and never got our feet wet again.’ After the two of us had spent an entire evening calculating what might be the longest period between landfalls we knew it wasn’t our scene.

There was no swimming for John. He brought out some beers and a jug of margaritas. The sun was going down and I called
Lowri
from the phone in the hall. She said two of Rick’s friends had already showed up from New York – Denny Roberts, whose band Blue Ridge Cowboys had had a top-ten album in the spring (a kind of country rock thing with interesting harmonies), and his folksinger girlfriend, Tommi Fontaine.

We took two cars back to the farm, and I finally got Anya to talk a little. Her voice was rich and low. She told me she’d been playing in a coffee bar in the Village when Rick came up and spoke to her after her set. ‘I was, like, a little distrustful of this guy coming on to me. I’ve been handling my own material for three years. Making my own bookings.’

‘You were still in a coffee bar?’

‘Sure. But a New York coffee bar. To a girl from Devils Lake, North Dakota, a Village coffee bar’s as good as Radio City.’

‘How long have you been in New York?’

‘Two years. I had a job in a kind of song-writing factory for a bit.’

‘The Brill Building?’

‘Yeah, like that, only worse. In Brooklyn. We were in a row of small cubicles. It was like a musical reform school. A state pen for tunesmiths. I sold two songs. Two B-sides.’

‘And you left?’

‘Yeah, I’d started hearing songs on albums that weren’t crafted for commercial radio. Songs with real words. I saw you could write a song about … you know, anything.’

‘Not just love songs.’

‘Sure. And you could write for your own voice, to your own strengths.’

‘Are we going to hear you play?’

She smiled – the first time I’d seen her smile. It was a little lopsided. ‘It’s a long way to bring a guitar and leave it in the trunk.’

‘I look forward to it. Rick Kohler has great taste.’

She looked at the floor of the car, then back up at me. ‘I liked your last record by the way,’ she said. Her eyes were flaring with light, but guarded.

‘Thank you. We’ve pretty much broken up. The band, I mean. I didn’t like the production. I thought it was too West Coast.’

Anya focussed on rolling a small cigarette with tobacco from a tin in her Mexican shoulder bag, as though she felt she’d given enough of herself for now. She felt no awkwardness in just shutting down. There were no fade-outs, no goodbyes.

The farmhouse we lived in had once been little more than a barn and was still only half converted. In the music room at one end of the ground floor, there were a piano, three guitars, various harmonicas, maracas and tambourines, and a double-height window that gave onto the woods. At the other end of the ground floor, Lowri had made a living space with sofas and a kitchen and a brick fireplace, which we seldom used for fear of setting light to the whole building. There were red curtains at the window, cottage furniture and always jars of wild flowers. The two bedrooms were upstairs, in what had once been a hayloft.

Two more friends of Rick’s showed up, plus Becky and Suzanne, and after we’d all eaten we went outside and sat on the grass. Rick and I took guitars and played a bit just to set the atmosphere, which was fairly mellow in any case, with red wine and some fat joints going round. It was still hot. We’d brought out a couple of hurricane lamps and some candles and you could see the moths zooming about crazily.

I remember so well how Rick laid down his guitar and stood up, smirking from ear to ear, like a kid who knows some stupendous news.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, bowing, his red cigarette-end arcing back in the flourish of his hand, ‘may I present to you something the like of which you have never heard before in your life, the unique … Anya King.’

Anya, cross-legged and unsmiling, took up her own guitar and began to finger a few notes, stopping to tune the strings. She had a delicate picking touch with the right hand, and the sound of the instrument was ethereal. It wasn’t the metal six-string tone we were all used to. I wondered whether it was the guitar itself or the tuning.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll sing four songs. This first one’s called “Genevieve”.’

For a long half-minute, the fingers picked with a fussy precision, seeming to use the top three strings only. At last the thumb flushed an arpeggio, bringing the lower notes in for the first time, then it was back to the home chords, minor, frosty. And then came the voice. It was high and clear, much higher than her speaking voice. She went through the middle of each note like someone bursting soap bubbles with a pin. There was this terrible purity. The song was about a girl lost in the city, trying to make her way, and it was set in the dead of winter. And out there on the hot summer grass, all you could feel was the ice in your fingertips. You could feel the bone-freezing cold of the back alleys, hear the trash-can lids roll and the rattle of old fire escapes where the homeless sleep. In her song she built this fragile world, but hard, cold, made real by the force of her imaginative belief in it. She ended with a minor chord struck slowly down through all the strings, and lightly smacked down with her palm to stop the ring.

I had heard nothing like it in my life. Most of our group, sitting on the grass, were looking at their laps, fumbling, as though they didn’t want to be the first to offer an opinion.

Anya coughed and plucked the A-string, twisting the tuning peg, perhaps for something to do. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘The second song is called “You Next Time”.’

Where ‘Genevieve’ had been sideways-on, like a short story about someone else, this song was so direct, so confessional it made you flinch. It was in the first person and it sounded as
though
it had been channelled that morning direct from her own experience. She’d loved a man she couldn’t have, had given way to a cruel separation but vowed to meet him in another life. ‘No mistake the second time around,/I will die and rise, the shadow on your wall,/My name will be the only one you call,/Oh, my darling, you next time.’ The emotional openness, the lack of self-protection, was a little frightening.

In the break between songs, Anya smiled her thanks for the friendly clapping, but didn’t really seem interested in our response. I didn’t like the third song so much. It was called ‘Reservation Town’ and had a social edge. There was folk and protest music, a tinge of bluegrass, and it was less purely original. It had ancestry. What I did hear in this song, though, was the range of her voice. It wasn’t just the three-octave span, it was the variety of tone when she went into the lower register. Here, the cold purity was touched by something warmer and more womanly. It was a beautiful sound. I’d always felt the best soul and pop singers, women more than men, had a few notes they needed to hit as often as possible. Anya had two or three of those notes where her mid-range met her lower that you just wanted to hear again and again. The word she sang could have been ‘toothpaste’, it wouldn’t have mattered; the sound was so exquisite it sent shivers through your skull.

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.