A Possible Life (36 page)

As I watched her talking in that even California sunlight I could sense she’d re-found her inner balance. It pained my heart to think what I’d lost, but I didn’t go with the feeling. Sometimes with these powerful emotions, you’re crushed. You just flail around and hope for the pain to stop, for some bastard to stop stabbing you in the guts. Other times if you’re very lucky, you can kind of skate along the rim, look into the precipice and it’s almost like you have a choice – to plunge in or turn your head away.

A small flush of excitement was under the skin of Lowri’s throat
as
she described her new life. I thought of all the happiness she’d brought me and of how very lucky I’d been to find her in that oddball household all those years ago.

I could let her go now. Did that mean I’d never really loved her, as I loved Anya? Was friendship greater than love, did goodwill outlive passion? Hardly, because given half a chance I would have taken her to a hotel straight after lunch. But it seemed enough that Lowri was happy and that I could send her on her way laughing.

She turned at the end of the street and waved. She blew a kiss. Then I did feel a little desolate.

It was almost three years after Anya left me in Denver that I had a call from Rick Kohler in New York.

‘Hey, man. Have I got news! Anya’s been in the studio again. She finished recording an album last week with Adam Esterson and Larry Brecker and half the session men in New York City! We can hear a tape next week.’

‘Why the fuck weren’t we told?’ I was dumbfounded. ‘We’re still her managers.’

‘Not been much to manage. Anyway, Vintello’s people are beside themselves. Get your ass over here, Jack.’

‘But we don’t have a contract with MPR.’

‘Well, they sure as hell want to buy it.’

I flew to New York and checked into the Gramercy Park Hotel. It turned out Rick had known Anya was back in America and had been in negotiation with Vintello for a while, but ‘hadn’t wanted to bother’ me with it.

‘Why not?’ I asked by phone from the hotel.

‘Well, I didn’t want some kind of fucking psychodrama with you and Anya and all that crazy shit. I just wanted MPR to pay for the studio. We haven’t signed the deal yet. You can see all the papers.’

‘How is she?’ I said.

‘I haven’t seen her. Just spoken to her a few times on the phone.’

‘How did she sound?’

‘Take it easy, man. She was fine.’

Rick had arranged for the two of us to listen in a studio in SoHo on the Tuesday afternoon. Brecker would be there to play the tape, otherwise it would be just the two of us.

It was a large bare room with a piano, drum kit, music stands and a booth for the singer, the usual things. Rick and I sat opposite one another on a couple of hard chairs while Larry Brecker cued up the tape on the other side of the glass.

My heart was pounding when Brecker came through with a piece of paper.

‘Sorry, guys, this is the best I got.’

It was a list of tracks, written in ballpoint in his handwriting. He went back into the control room, then his voice came through the intercom. ‘OK, I’ll give you a pause of a couple of minutes between tracks, but if you want more time just hold your hand up.’

My eyes raced down the list of songs. It went: ‘Side One: Wolf Point, Esmé Sings, Hollybush Lane, Frida. Side Two: The Doctor From Duluth, Forget Me, Boulevard Haussmann, Another Life.’

Only four songs on each side, so they must be pretty long, I thought. There was the balance we’d got on the first album in which each track reflected its opposite number on the other side. You might think ‘Esmé Sings’ would be about someone else, and ‘Forget Me’ would be personal, but I knew otherwise. ‘Wolf Point’ and ‘The Doctor From Duluth’ obviously balanced. ‘Frida’ and ‘Another Life’ would be about other people – superficially. The other two were about places, real or imagined.

I tried to clear my mind, to keep calm so I could listen properly. It wasn’t easy. And then it began.

How can I describe it? When you’re with a child, you can’t picture how they’ll look at forty. But when you know someone
as
a grown-up and you look back at photographs of them as a kid, you can see that all the adult features were there already, at age two, six, fourteen – it’s just that no one knew which ones would come to dominate. All the best aspects of Anya’s early songs had grown and flourished, all that was unsure had gone.

The word for the record would, I think, be ‘liberation’. She wasn’t dabbling in different kinds of music any more, she’d taken the whole lot under her wing – she’d absorbed them into her own bloodstream. There was confidence, power, soaring melody. There was the exhilaration of a talent that was not ashamed of itself.

‘Wolf Point’ began like a mournful piano recital, like something a student might play in a Conservatory, very proper. Then there came a hint of strings, of picked guitar and then, of all things, a gospel choir. A piano bridge led to a string quartet, the whole thing still anchored by the left hand at the piano. There was a plucked mandolin, a bassoon and flute and as that began to fade, a little cry from what sounded like an oboe before it touched the opening verse again, ending with assertive piano chords. It had the range of a symphony in four minutes and five seconds. It was a song of strength and desolation. Anya’s voice had deepened, but only a fraction. It was still a young woman’s, but it now belonged to someone thrillingly in control.

‘Shit,’ said Rick.

‘Yeah.’

There was no longer any fear of sounding too popular. It was as though her mastery had given Anya the right to sound as tuneful as she wanted. ‘Esmé Sings’ rocked slow, like sex in a sleeping car. ‘Hollybush Lane’ had the soprano charm of early songs like ‘Ready to Fly’, but with sly words that switched from ‘she’ to ‘you’ to ‘me’. ‘Frida’ was the longest track, placed in the ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’ position, at the end of side one. It was about the painter, Frida Kahlo, whose physical
struggles
following a streetcar accident had been an agony, an obstacle, but also a subject of her art. ‘The Doctor From Duluth’ had jazz-style muted trumpets and clear enunciation in the words. It was very intimate, as though she was talking to someone, and the ‘you’ of the song didn’t sound like a lover, it sounded like you the listener. ‘Forget Me’ was a breathy pop song, dangerously candid, with brass, sizzling hi-hat, jangly guitar and – for a few bars only – the hated ‘instant schmaltzer’, the pedal steel. She was half laughing as she sang and the slight barrelhouse feel of the organ and brass saved it from sounding overproduced. ‘Boulevard Haussmann’ was a song of agonised regret, and I guessed she’d written it soon after leaving America. But while it told of her misery, it seemed to have a love of men, or a belief in them. There was even a saving touch of humour, as well as a downbeat ending with two or three of her best ‘skull’ notes. For such a sad song it was oddly uplifting. Just as on the day we met, when she played sitting on the grass at the farm, I had the sensation of listening at a double level – thrilled senseless both by the song and the fact that there was someone alive with the talent to write and sing it.

The record ended with its title track, ‘Another Life’. Everything Anya had worked at in her musical career seemed to be contained in it. She had squared the circle by suggesting that there was no real difference between her own life and that of the women ‘characters’ she sang about because they were essentially part of the same consciousness – ‘Another life would be the same/My heart existing by a different name …’ There was an unexpected key change that introduced the melodic heart of the song, which then returned to a sort of recitative before the crux, a heart-stopping major to minor chord change that confessed her powerless identification with a woman she glimpses in a station waiting room.

Then the record ended. I’d been avoiding Rick Kohler’s eye until this point, but now I looked across at him. He was holding
his
face in his hands, but I could see two tears squeeze out over the webbing between his fingers.

I stood up, went out into the corridor and lit a cigarette. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

What had she done? What had it cost her – what had it cost me – to produce this thing? There seemed no point in doing an audit of what we’d paid for these songs. I might have felt differently if the result had been less glorious, but one hearing had made it clear that this music would be listened to with joy as long as people had ears and a brain.

I inhaled the last of my cigarette and went back into the studio, where Larry Brecker had come in from the control room.

Rick was still sitting on the same chair. He shook his head as he peered up at me. ‘Yeah, well …’ he began, then trailed off.

‘What d’ya think?’ said Larry Brecker.

‘What do I think?’ said Rick. ‘I think I’ve done one good thing in my life.’ He sniffed loudly. ‘Now people can’t say, Oh yeah, Rick Kohler. He was that putz from Passaic, New Jersey, never had a real job in his life. Now they’ll say, Rick Kohler, yeah, he was the guy who discovered Anya King. And they’ll bow down in front of my fucking grave.’

Brecker and I laughed.

‘What do you think, Larry?’ I said.

‘I guess she’s pulled off what other people dream of.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

‘I just sat at the mixing desk,’ said Larry. ‘Esterson did a great job. But she knew what she wanted all along, she ran the show.’

‘I can imagine,’ I said.

There was a silence.

We sat around for a time, reflecting on what we’d heard. Brecker played a few bits back – the ice-cold muted trumpet on ‘Wolf Point’, the shimmering lead guitar break (by Elliot Klein) on ‘Boulevard Haussmann’, that chord change on ‘Another Life’. But
I
really just wanted a copy of the record and to listen to it a thousand times alone. I think we all did.

Eventually, we fell silent again, kind of exhausted, so I said goodbye to Rick and Larry and went out on to the street. I so much wanted to see Anya, to tell her the size and wonder of what she’d created – funny little girl from Devils Lake with her fevered heart and her deep brown eyes. But I knew I would never see her again unless by chance. My contribution to her life was over, and only in retrospect could I see that it was a supporting role, not the lead part I’d imagined it to be all those times I held her in my arms.

I walked up Thompson Street towards the great divide of Houston Street, where the dumpster trucks rumble as they go over the potholes, where the big lorries push across the city, loaded down from the waterfront. I stood among the throng of people waiting patiently to cross and tried to mingle with them, to disappear into a greater mass of human life, hoping I might lose my pain, my sense of self, in that tireless commotion.

I did see Anya again once, though I was in the auditorium and she was on the stage. It was at the London Palladium during her farewell tour at the age of almost fifty, in one of the closing years of the twentieth century. I’d read an interview with her in which she explained that this was definitely her last performance. She’d suffered from a recurrence of rheumatic fever and had had two heart valve replacement operations. She had arthritic pain in her joints. ‘Also,’ she told the journalist, ‘touring is such a king-size pain in the ass.’

She’d carried on making records after
Another Life
, but none of them had been anything as good. She reopened her box of influences and went into folk and jazz and world music, and while almost every record had one or two moments of magic it was hard not to feel she was on a lonesome journey. Public
appreciation
trailed away. She became known as the singer who had made that one perfect thing. There was a five-year gap before a
Greatest Hits
, though no single of hers had ever actually charted. She’d lived with various men, mostly musicians, been married once, but was now living happily, said the interviewer, ‘alone in San Francisco, in a large, airy apartment on top of Nob Hill, near the junction of Powell and California’. She had had no children.

I carried on working in the music business. When my second American band folded I moved into production, and when that work dried up I released a solo album. After
Another Life
, I stopped managing Anya and left her in the care of Rick Kohler, who rose to the challenge, while taking himself pretty seriously as the keeper of the flame. With song-writing royalties from my original British band as well as the two American outfits, I had enough to live on. One night in 1986 I bumped into our old lodgers Becky and Suzanne at a gig in New York. They were insanely excited to see me again, I don’t know why, but I asked them up to the farm for old times’ sake and invited Rick to come along too. We had a hilarious weekend, and a few months later I found myself married to Becky. It could easily have been Suzanne, as Rick never tired of pointing out. Those sisters made my soul sing, after all the years. They made me laugh.

I was so glad I hadn’t sold the farm in an attempt to purge the memories of Lowri and Anya. I had come very close to getting rid of it in the lowest of my low days, but it was still a wonderful place to live. Becky, who was by now in her thirties, became pregnant almost straight away. We had two little girls, Loretta and Pearl, and Becky indulged me by giving Pearl the second name of Anya.

I’d been over for my mother’s funeral in south London when I saw the large newspaper ads: ‘Anya King. Last Ever Performances.’
I
didn’t tell Ray or Simon or my sisters that I’d be going to see Anya, but I had to leave the house while there were still people there with the sausage rolls and tea and beer. An old person’s funeral is not such a terrible thing, and some of my mother’s younger friends and neighbours were enjoying themselves.

I bought flowers from a barrow in Soho and took them to the stage door on Great Marlborough Street. I put in a card that said: ‘Good luck. Hoffmann, Daniel and La Roche on standby? Love F x’. Then I went to a pub, because I felt nervous for her. It was full of smoke and tourists and it smelled sweet, of old booze and sweat. I drank a pint of bitter, then switched to bourbon on ice and raised a glass to Anya. There was a man with a grey ponytail who kept staring at me and I had a bad feeling he recognised me from an old album cover. He was probably going to the concert himself and I didn’t want to have to talk to him about what had happened to Pete or Jeff and what Anya had been like in the old days or what had really happened in her ‘missing years’.