A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Good title for a song,’ said Rick. ‘“Our Kind of Bastard”.’

  ‘It’s good in your Jersey accent,’ I said.

  ‘I already got a title from this conversation,’ said Anya. ‘“So Hard to Leave”.’

  ‘Sounds kinda soppy,’ said Rick.

  ‘Oh, you big tough boy.’ Anya put an arm round his shoulders, then her other arm round mine. We stood on the deck and looked over the fields towards the south, where, out of sight from us, behind the thick stockade of trees, the Hudson was winding down towards the city.

  We had a place in the East Village, a cold-water flat that Rick had got hold of through a friend of a friend. It was a third-floor walk-up with three big rooms, which was enough for Anya to have a private bedroom and for all of us to be able to spread out and practise. I had a man come and fit a gas geyser and plumb in a bathtub. Rick said I should reclaim the money from our first record deal.

  We did our best to make it comfortable, but Anya wasn’t much of a homemaker. She sewed some curtains and liked to buy flowers from outside the late-night shop on Sixth Street, but that was about it. She had no interest in cooking. I was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks anyway while she got started with her thing in SoHo, then I’d be heading back upstate.

  Lowri told me to stay in New York as long as I needed. She said it would give her a chance to get on with her own work, which was to write a play. She had been encouraged by some people she’d met to develop a one-act thing she’d done in her postgrad programme a few years earlier. She seemed set on doing it, and I never thought to find out how sincere her passion was, or even what the play was about. I just liked the idea that, like everyone else we knew, she had a talent.

  Did Lowri suspect I was in love with Anya? It seems a crazy question now. Of course she did. Even Rick said, ‘She’s given you the rope to hang yourself, man.’ What’s even crazier is that I had no idea Lowri knew. It was so against the way we behaved to express jealousy or a sense of possession. We’d been together two happy years, but stayed out of each other’s space. It was the way we all did things. And although it showed respect and granted a load of freedom, it also caused a lot of agony. She might have said something. She should have said something. And I should have used my imagination.

  The place for Anya’s residency was on Broome Street, near Thompson, in a cast-iron building that had been a garment factory. People could eat in the front, drab stuff, burgers and salads, though the place had about five hundred liquor bottles lined up behind the bar. The back of the building was mostly seats; you could get a lot of people in. Anya played two sets every night, one hour each, and all her own songs. There was an upright piano on which she allowed me to accompany her on a couple of guitar-based numbers, though if it was a real piano song, like ‘Julie’, she’d be at the keyboard herself. I don’t think I contributed anything at all musically, but she liked to have me there. On one number I had to patter out a rhythm on the tom-toms, which was embarrassing for someone who, with his first band, had played electric guitar at the London Palladium.

  The early-evening set tended to be a warm-up. There weren’t that many people and they didn’t listen. The later one, at eleven, was better. Word of mouth had begun to spread, but slowly. We needed to get her reviewed or advertised and it seemed to me the best way to do this was to sign the deal with MPR and let their publicity machine do the work for us.

  Then one day we had a review in a music paper. It had clearly been written by some college boy who was using it as a platform to launch himself. It had some words like ‘Weltschmerz’, but it seemed to do the trick. We stuck a line from it – ‘Anya King is a sensation’ – outside the door and took an ad in the Village Voice to push another line: ‘Deeply moving songs of lost love and fractured identity.’

  Without telling me, Rick sent the clipping to Upright Records in San Francisco, and their New York man finally came by and made an offer one evening after the show. Rick told him to stuff his offer, but he rang Vintello the next morning, used the Upright bid to crank up the MPR price and closed a two-record deal that afternoon.

  Anya said she was appalled, but I think she was secretly pleased. She was to go into the studio in November for a springtime release.

  And so it had happened that I found myself living with Anya. Like all things in those days, it was fluid. Sometimes a friend of hers would stay for a few nights, sometimes Rick would be there for a week, but he travelled a fair bit, and his folks had a place in Jersey where he kept his records and other stuff. The only ever-presents were Anya and me.

  It was a sunny autumn with a cool edge to the air. We never got in before two, but we liked to get up early. I’d fetch the paper while Anya was in bed and sometimes I’d get rolls or pastries from the bakery. The early morning was her favourite time of day and many of her songs referred to mailmen, shop awnings being rolled up, birds singing. Once I knocked on her door and took in some coffee, but she obviously didn’t like being disturbed in bed, where she slept naked. What she did like was to come out in her own time wearing a faded tee-shirt and brief cotton shorts. She’d pour a giant bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes, which she’d work through without a word, sitting cross-legged on the couch. I could sometimes see she had nothing on beneath the shorts. I don’t think she did this to taunt me. These clothes were a halfway stage to getting dressed and she only wore them because someone else was there. After the flakes she’d have some weird Turkish yoghurt as if to punish herself for eating processed cereal, then there’d be pancakes, or eggs with strips of maple-cure bacon and slices of wholewheat toast with redcurrant jelly. She was basically a vegetarian, except for bacon which ‘doesn’t count’. The square wooden table was a mess by the end. She’d slump back down on the couch with coffee and exhale loudly.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘That looked good.’

  ‘Did you want some, Freddy?’

  ‘You always ask when it’s too late.’

  ‘I know you’ll say no, that’s why, skinny boy.’

  In the course of these mornings I heard about her life. Devils Lake was old Sioux country that had been settled by some pioneer then filled with Lutheran immigrants. Her father’s family were from Norway and she’d been christened Anja, but changed it to Anya because she thought it sounded more Russian and romantic. She said Anna Karenina was her favourite book and in the translation she’d read the lover guy called the heroine ‘Anya’ as a pet name. The grandfather had changed the surname from the Norwegian ‘Konge’ – a good move, I told her. She seemed vague about her mother’s people. I wondered if there was some Sioux blood there.

  Her mother ran off with a salesman in roofing materials when Anya was eight. They went up to Canada and never came back. Anya and her father had a card from Thunder Bay, where the mother had set up with this other man and was expecting his child. The parents didn’t bother to divorce. The father never remarried and there were no brothers or sisters.

  ‘So, said Anya, ‘it was just me and Dad.’

  She usually got dressed by mid-morning, so this far into a conversation she was in jeans and bare feet with some sort of peasant blouse.

  ‘Were you lonely?’

  ‘Not exactly. I went to school. It was a nice place and I had friends there. But when school ended there was not a hell of a lot to do. Dad didn’t get back from work till late. The population of the town was only about six thousand. I used to go up to the train station and stare at the trains.’

  ‘Just stare at them?’

  ‘For hours. I liked it. Coming. Going. It made me feel there was always a future. Always another train. Nothing is for ever.’

  ‘Nothing lasts?’

  ‘Yeah, but also, nothing is lost. You just have to wait. The train was going to be my escape. Other days, I’d stand by the highway to Grand Forks and watch the cars and trucks.’

  I pictured this kid standing by the side of the road watching the traffic go past.

  ‘I liked clubs at school,’ she s
aid. ‘Drama and painting. I learned to play the piano. I liked to stay after school as long as possible so I wouldn’t be home alone. I wanted to go to drama school in Chicago. I used to write stories. Most evenings when we’d had dinner I’d go upstairs and write stuff.’

  ‘Didn’t you watch TV?’

  ‘Dad did. He always fell asleep in front of it. I preferred making up people in stories.’

  I must have looked unconvinced, because she said, ‘It’s what lonely kids do, Freddy.’

  ‘But didn’t you have boyfriends?’

  ‘Sure. I kissed Dave Schneider when I was fourteen. I was always interested in boys.’

  ‘I can tell from your songs.’

  Anya frowned. ‘They’re not all me, you know. Some are, some aren’t. Some of the ones that sound most like me – the “I” ones – are made up and some of the ones that sound most like they’re about other people are really about me.’

  ‘And that’s how you keep your mystery.’

  She put the coffee mug down on the table and looked back at me oddly. ‘Am I mysterious to you?’

  We were sitting very close to one another on the couch, but I felt all right about the way the conversation was going. One thing about us, even at this stage, was that we always got on. There was no awkwardness.

  ‘Yes, you are mysterious to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how someone who has that much talent can be so diffident. If I could do what you can, I’d be in the studio right now recording my third or fourth album.’

  She laughed and flung her hands out wide, a favourite search-me gesture. ‘The most exciting time is when everything is possible. As soon as I put “Genevieve” on vinyl it’ll be like the death of the song. The arrangement, the exact notes and phrasing, whether we have a backing singer … I don’t want there to be a definitive version. I want it to go on living. Every time I sing that song it feels different, like a performance in a theatre that’s never quite the same.’

  ‘And this “not committing,” is that true with people too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this point there was, admittedly, a silence. But she didn’t want anything to be unclear. She straightened up and made an effort, out of respect for me.

  ‘Freddy, if I sleep with you, if we fell in love, I’d give myself to you completely. Do you really want that? Could you handle it? Could I? Is it what we both want?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I love you for telling me.’

  ‘You’re a beautiful man. Look at these hands. And this soft brown hair sweeping over your shoulders. You look like a troubadour, like a medieval knight. I know it would be wonderful. But like this, it’s even better. Maybe. When everything is still just … possibility.’

  In October, I went back to the farm. I think Lowri had been lonely. Becky and Suzanne had left to continue their travels. And as Lowri said, there’s only so much time you can spend sitting at your typewriter with Grace and Janis for company. She’d got herself a job working in a bar in town three evenings a week. She liked having some money that didn’t come from me, though mostly she did it for the company. This made me feel bad, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. When we went to bed my first night back, I looked at Lowri’s beautiful face on the pillow next to mine and I kissed her and soon we were making love as we’d done so many times before. But I came in a great blackout spasm thinking of Anya, when she’d sit on the couch with her ankles crossed and the soft hair I could see through the loose fit of her shorts. I let out this roar of what must have sounded like pain, because Lowri asked me if I was all right and I just made up some stuff about it being a long time since I’d seen her and she said, ‘Well, you’ve certainly been storing it up,’ and we laughed a bit. I rolled away and she put her arm round me. I shut my eyes and pictured myself pulling down Anya’s shorts and bending her over the couch and holding on to her breasts through the tee-shirt from behind, and within moments I was hard again and twisted my hip so Lowri’s hand shouldn’t accidentally discover. I couldn’t keep my mind from where it wanted to go. It was a sort of torment, but a torment where I felt safe.

  The fall was beautiful with the colours the eastern states are famous for, and we could see it all without leaving the farm. Lowri and I stood on the deck looking at the russet, gold, orange, red in a great parade, lit by the thick, misty sun with breezes running through the falling leaves and bringing the half-forgotten smell of wood fires, and for Lowri, I suppose, memories of Hallowe’en and trick-or-treat and freshman socials on the campus by Lake Michigan and for me the clatter of football studs as you ran out on the path that went down to the playing field, and for both of us that quickening of the new term and shorter days and life running on a little too fast. It was almost the first time we’d been old enough to be aware of being grown up. Lowri was the first person I’d shared this with, knowing these weren’t random sensations, but they were wired in and would return.

  I stayed until the last week in October, when I had to go back to the city to help Anya and Rick finalise which songs she was going to record and what session men we needed. After some argument with the people at MPR, it had been agreed that I’d produce the record. Anya had made it a condition. This was fine by me, except I didn’t have that great a knowledge of the technical side of recording. John Vintello wanted us to work with this guy called Larry Brecker in Los Angeles, which seemed insane to me. I mean, to go all that way when there was so much expertise in New York. But I could be the sole producer and Anya could pick the songs, so long as we got them all down in three weeks at the studio in West Hollywood with Larry Brecker at the console. I guess MPR had some sort of deal with the studio, and it didn’t seem too much to ask. It wasn’t like they’d stuck in an arranger or an orchestra or something.

  I called Lowri to tell her I’d be gone for a month.

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘In a hotel on Sunset. To begin with. But maybe we’ll find something better.’

  ‘Candy might have something in Laurel Canyon.’

  ‘That’d be cool. Will you be OK?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll finish my play.’

  ‘I’ll call every day.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Jack. Just don’t forget to send the paycheck.’

  Her voice had gone flat. She was trying to come over cheerful with the thing about the money, but she sounded like someone dying. And still, stupidly, I just put it out of my mind. Nothing had happened, there was nothing for Lowri to ‘know’. I was going out to work, to pay the bills for our farmhouse. It’s what people do.

  In the last days in New York we went to a lot of art galleries during the day. After her giant breakfast Anya tended not to eat again until midnight, but she was happy to sit with me in a bar while I had a salad or a cheeseburger for lunch. I loved New York food and I loved the long wooden bars it was served at, with the signed photographs of boxers and baseball players on the walls. The city was a dream to me. I liked the way its history is all laid out. The names of the immigrant families faded on the brickwork in Lower Manhattan: Reuben, Kelly, Kasprowicz, Mancini. On parking lots, on warehouse walls, they’d left a printed mark on their journey between Ellis Island and the blank of midtown. It made me feel invigorated and so lucky that I’d never had to crawl off some stinking ship at the foot of the island and claw my way up the grid.

  To be a part of this but not alone, not some London tourist, but in conversation all the time with this extraordinary woman – I was intoxicated, not on Michelob or grass, but on Anya’s dark eyes, the way her teasing was becoming less defensive because she trusted me and was getting ready for what seemed inevitable. While I ate at lunchtime, she liked to drink a big glass of red wine and smoke a cigarette, then go back to the apartment and sleep for an hour to make up for the late night. It made a rhythm to the day. About four o’clock we’d have strong English tea with milk, to please me, and listen to records on the stereo. Anya liked to know what everyone else was doing, and we seemed to buy a new record every day. She’d slide the
vinyl reverently from its waxy inner sleeve. She had a way of holding the disc up to the light, her fingers fanned out on the edge, peering at the grooves as though she could hear by sight. Then the turntable arm would drop, and the needle skated for a second with a hiss before it thunked into the groove. ‘That’s interesting,’ she’d say. ‘That middle eight.’ Or ‘That doesn’t work at all. My God, that’s not a pedal steel, is it?’ She had a horror of pedal steel guitar, which she called ‘the instant schmaltzer’. Then she’d practise for the evening and try out new ideas on me. We’d leave at six to walk to the venue, carrying her favourite six-string guitar, which she woudn’t risk leaving locked up at the club with the other instruments.

  Audiences had been picking up steadily, and the last night at the club was packed. John Vintello and Maria came in for the late show. There were journalists from underground papers, the music press, and some guys from other record labels. There were also musicians, several I recognised, who’d come to hear what this girl was like.

  The size of the audience gave her confidence. People who don’t perform imagine that a big crowd is intimidating, but it’s the half-full room that makes you feel like you’ve been rumbled, and makes the words stick in your throat.

  Anya’s last number was always a foot-tapper called ‘Run Me Crazy, Run Me Wild’, which was there to send them out happy, but before she did it she pulled the microphone a little closer.

  ‘I want to thank you all for coming here tonight and the people at Blue Lounge for having me here these past few weeks. On Saturday I’m flying to LA to record my first album, which is kind of exciting, but kind of daunting too. Thank you, thank you! No, really, it’s – wow, it’s like a great opportunity for me.’

  She looked about sixteen years old as she spoke, like a child showing off her artwork at a school open day. It was incredibly touching.

  ‘Some of the songs you’ve heard tonight are going to be on the album,’ she said. ‘And maybe one or two you haven’t. I’m not sure, yet. I’m going with my producer and my friend, Freddy here. Yeah, let’s hear it for Freddy! And he’s the person I want to thank most of all. He’s been like an inspiration and a guide. So this one’s for you, Fred. It’s called “Hold Me”.’