A Possible Life (35 page)

She scrubbed her face dry with a towel, which she then threw down on a chair.

‘Can I go home now?’ she said. ‘I want to be back at the farm. It’s my favourite time of year.’

‘It’s almost hay-fever time too.’ I was trying to keep it light. ‘We’ll be back in two weeks. We can’t pull out now.’

I knew MPR had insurance against no-shows because we’d had discussions with their money men after Anya’s previous difficulties. But I felt we had to complete the tour, especially the two dates in Los Angeles, which had sold out within minutes.

Anya looked at me hard. ‘Who are these fucking rednecks out there anyway?’

They were in fact a good audience, they knew their music, it was just a bad evening. The sound mix was not that great, she was exhausted.

‘Do you want me to go out and say you’re unable to finish? I will if you want.’

She looked at the floor. When she turned her face up to mine again, my heart filled with love. She looked so mournful, so proud, so wrecked.

She said, ‘I don’t know why I have to do this thing. I have to kill myself to do this fucking thing. I literally shat blood last night. Did you know that? It’s like I’ve scoured my heart with steel wool and I’m bleeding out of my ass.’

I kissed her and held her for a moment. Then, without a word, she turned and began to walk back along the corridor towards the stage. My heart was aching as I followed. On some level, I must have sensed what was coming, any day now.

Anya sat at the piano. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said into the
microphone
. ‘Unforeseen … Stuff. I hope the band kept you entertained. This is a song from the new album. It’s called “
Kalimera
, California”.’

There was no tremor in her voice. You would have thought she’d merely gone to the bathroom.

The next day we flew the short hop to Denver. I always like arriving there. It’s at altitude and the air is fresh and cool, especially if you’ve come from the South. You feel better at once. We were staying in a nineteenth-century hotel in the middle of town, a triangular brownstone with a pointed nose like the Flatiron. I was so pleased to be there I just peeled off some dollar bills for the bellhop and flopped down on the bed. Anya went to tidy up in the bathroom.

It was an off day. There was time for lunch and a sleep before we’d even need to think about the soundcheck. We decided to go downstairs to eat. It was kind of an interesting place. You could look up from the lobby straight to the sky through a big glass dome eight floors above. There was a fancy restaurant and an upmarket pub with a baseball game on television, so we sat on stools at the bar and drank wine and I ate grilled shrimp with salad and Anya had a cigarette.

She looked shaken and pale, but I put this down to the strain of performing. I tried to talk to her about the set lists for the next day and the day after. I thought if she played more early songs she’d feel less like she was trying to thrust this new album down the public’s throat.

She just nodded and kept saying, ‘Maybe you’re right, Freddy. Maybe you’re right.’

At one point she put her hand on my thigh and looked lovingly at me, but in her eyes there was something else as well.

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘We have a whole day of doing nothing. Let’s go and sleep. Tonight we’ll go out and I’ll find you the best dinner in Denver and a club to go to afterwards and we’ll
get
back not too late and have one little joint of that grass Rick gave me and sleep till nine in the morning.’

She nodded, but seemed unable to speak. We went upstairs, pulled the blinds, kicked off our outer clothes and curled up together under the cover. I must have fallen asleep at once.

I awoke bewildered in a late-afternoon light. I couldn’t work out where I was. The farm? The Seventh Street apartment? Austin? I kept pressing buttons in my mind and they kept coming up blank.

Then I went to the window and raised the blind. Denver. Of course. Anya King. My love. I remembered now. My pulse quickened at the thought of the gig tomorrow and dinner out tonight.

The bathroom door was open, but Anya was not inside. I looked round the room and there was no sign of her anywhere. I went back to the bathroom and saw that her toothbrush, which I’d seen her use before lunch, had gone.

I walked round the room about five times, wondering if I was losing my mind. She had been there, surely? We’d had lunch together. I wasn’t hallucinating or anything. Then I saw it. An envelope with the hotel’s printed name and mine written in pencil in Anya’s hand: Jack Wyatt.

Well, I didn’t want to open it, but I didn’t let myself admit that. It was a short note, and the writing was shaky. ‘My Darling, You are the most wonderful man I ever met. I don’t want to, but I have to travel on. One day I can maybe explain, but don’t try to reach me now, let me do this awful thing I have to do. Don’t grieve for your little girl. For all of this and life to come, I love you, Freddy. A x’.

The fallout from the cancellations was horrific. Some of the venues threatened to sue. I had Vintello’s people in my ear for weeks, though I must say Rick Kohler was fantastic. He had our lawyer
in
New York go in and read the riot act to MPR. He was a litigation partner from a London-based firm. His name was Cheeseman and when he could be torn away from reading the cricket scores on the Reuters tape, he was afraid of no one. ‘I thought he’d be a typical old-style Brit,’ Rick said on the phone, ‘but he knows Anya’s songs by heart, man!’ This Cheeseman guy threatened a million-dollar counter-suit for mistreatment of the artist, for all Anya’s medical expenses and for knowing underpayment of royalties – or words to that effect. Apparently his last words to their lawyer were, ‘You fight me on this and I guarantee you’ll never hire a female artist again.’ He then had an accountant go in and do an audit and discovered an underpayment of $140,000 over four albums. We made a one-off ‘goodwill’ gesture of $20,000 to MPR to cover the incidental expenses of Anya’s disappearance and they settled with the venues from the insurance payout, so no one lost – financially.

When the business side was sorted out, I took the train upstate to be alone. The person I most wanted to talk to was Lowri, but I felt it would be a cruel thing to call her. It was only when I’d got up to the farm that I allowed myself to think about what I’d lost.

Then I guess I went a little insane. I remember one afternoon lying naked under a tree, a tall tree with thin branches and leaves a grey-green colour like olive or birch. The wind made a restless, metallic sound in them. I thought I could hear Anya’s voice in the rustle, then if the wind veered even a tiny bit, the human words were lost, only to come again a few seconds later. It was driving me frantic with despair that I couldn’t hold on to that voice. I could sense her presence so strongly it was as though I could see her. I don’t think actual vision would have added anything to the power of her presence there, in the leaves.

Sometimes by chance I’d hear her voice on the radio and have to run across the room to switch it off. In the farm I put all my copies of her albums in a deep, dark drawer so no visitor should
chance
to put them on the stereo. Once in New York I turned the corner of 41st Street to see a sixty-foot Anya smiling down from a billboard.
Atlantic Palisades
said the lettering above. She had that look in her eye she’d have when she was about to suggest some new love game. I couldn’t quite believe that she still existed – for other people, somewhere.

I had no idea where she’d gone and I didn’t look for her. I knew that for all sorts of reasons I had to let her do what she wanted to do. It was only a pity she had left me with this mountain of a puzzle. How to get through a day, then how to put the days together into something that might be a life worth having.

Then I wondered what it was like for her. If it was as great a torture, minute by minute, for her as it was for me, why on earth had she done it? And if it wasn’t so bad for her, did that mean that she’d never felt as deeply as I had?

Press speculation was hot for a time. Anya was ‘temperamental’, a ‘prima donna’ and other newspaper words. It was strange, but till I read them it had never occurred to me that Anya was difficult. All the dramas in her life had sprung naturally, I thought, from the scale of what she was trying to do. Maybe the papers had a point. I don’t know – but luckily they seemed to tire of it quickly.

Anya’s friend Sandy at MPR had a telegram from Anya in Paris in August saying she was fine and not to worry. Paris. I wondered why. It wasn’t like she spoke French or anything.

Oh, Anya, Anya, sometimes I used to hold the pillow like a child. At the farm, I moved into ‘her’ bedroom, and at night I tried to conjure her, body and soul, from the darkness. All I could see were the timber beams above my head and I envied them their painless existence. I actually envied a piece of wood.

I don’t want to admit how much I missed her being there, her body. The culture I was raised in – London, respectable but poor – and the one I’d moved to – LA, not so respectable, less poor – had one thing in common when it came to men and women. They
both
thought ‘sex’ was the delinquent brother of ‘love’. To my parents and their friends I suppose ‘love’ meant ‘marriage’ and to the people in Laurel Canyon love meant Zen and Buddhist wisdom and transcendental this and that.

They were both wrong, to my mind. We seem to be alive just once – in a random skin and bone that starts to move towards disintegration as soon as it’s old enough that you can kiss it. What Anya and I did with one another wasn’t the poor relation of anything. Once when we were making love, and she was propped up on her elbows, she looked down hard at where our bodies met and whispered, ‘Freddy, this is who we are.’

I knew what she meant, and I knew she was right and that was why I loved her.

More than a year passed before I had a letter from her. In that time I’d taken up an invitation from Pete in Los Angeles to put together a new band from the ashes of the old. I didn’t want to go back. I’d done LA. But I was dangerously unhappy. I thought about Anya every minute of the day. I used to go and help with the logging on the farm, work till it was dark and I could barely stand. Then I’d drink bourbon and beer, watch a movie on the television turned up loud, maybe with my stoned ex-ad-man friend, and fall into bed. This way I could force Anya to the edge of my mind, keep her out beyond the stockade. But then when I was asleep, when all my defences were down, she’d creep into my dreams – as real a presence as if she’d been in the room, but always with some hard twist in our situation. I’d awake with tears on my face, cursing her. Leave me alone, woman, leave me alone.

Music might yet save me. At least it would be another way of keeping me occupied, of shutting my ears to her calling voice. I went to the local store, which acted as a post office, and left a forwarding address care of Larry Brecker at Sonic Broom Studios. To begin with I’d stay at Pete’s, but I didn’t expect to be there long.

Anya’s letter came – fifteen months after Denver – from an
address
in Paris. ‘My Dearest Freddy, I hope you’re OK. I think about you all the time. I don’t expect you’ll ever forgive me for walking out like that and I don’t think you should. Just so you know, I’ve been in Paris for a lot of the time. Also, I went back to Athens, then spent some time in Italy. It’s been difficult. I think I’ve lost my ability to write. But people have been kind. I have enough money forwarded from the bank. Thank you and Rick for looking after that. I keep trying to write songs but nothing seems to come. Be well. I will come back to the US one day. I wish you every happiness, day and night. A x’.

It didn’t make me feel any better, but I guess it wasn’t meant to. I sent a very short reply: ‘You must do what you have to do. I’m not bitter. I just miss you, night and day, day and night. Back in LA. Looked in at the Pasadena Star last night. S. Davis, Jr sends his love. Always here, F x’.

The re-formed band did fine. Ted Fox, the new guitarist from Seattle, turned out to be good – loud and bluesy, with a flair for catchy tunes though a voice too deep to sing them in. It was a kind of baritone and you need a hard tenor against electric guitars. This meant I had to do a lot of the singing, which made a change after being banned from the microphone for four years with Anya. We got gigs round LA, we got a record contract, we made a little money.

When I’d been in LA six months I finally called Lowri. She sounded pleased to hear from me and wanted to meet up. She named a café-restaurant in Santa Monica with an outside terrace and a view of the sea. I thought a hell of a lot about what I should say to her and how I should come across. I even spent time thinking about what to wear, which would have amused her – and Anya, come to that. ‘Well, look at you, mister, pair of black jeans and a white tee-shirt. My oh my!’ she used to say when she’d got dressed for some big occasion in a vintage dress with beads and coloured eyeliner, and underwear I’d find out about later.

I got to the café early. It was the best kind of place, with green awnings and bright white tablecloths and an air of freshness in everything – the iced water, the clean menus, even in the waitress’s laundered shirt and LA teeth. There was a basket of different home-made breads and chilled butter pats of different flavours, anchovy, parsley, and a dish of fresh sliced radishes and carrots. I also had a large bourbon and a cigarette.

Lowri came into view, swinging down the street from where the cab had dropped her in a knee-length navy linen dress and shades, the dark of these colours against the fair-russet of her swept-back hair and freckled skin, bare legs and sandals. She looked amazing. I sucked deep on the last of the Camel, stubbed it out and stood up to kiss her. I felt we’d never been apart. She threw herself into my arms, as she always did, but this time she had the firmness back.

We ordered grilled fish – grouper, snapper, I’m not much good at American fish, but they all taste good. Lowri ordered Coke, I had beer. After a bit, we began to laugh. She told me about her household on Beech Knoll Road, with Candy and a couple of weirdo performance artists. She’d quit the real-estate thing and now had a job with a music publisher also based in Laurel Canyon. A couple of times she referred to someone called Nick – Nick said this, or Nick and I were going there anyway – rather as though I ought to know who this Nick guy was. I guess I did, really.