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.
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 hou
sehold 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 be
gan, 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.
A Possible Life Page 28