A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  * * *

  After we’d been in LA two weeks I felt I should be in touch with the guys in my band and take Anya to meet them, so I called Pete and told him where I was.

  ‘Hey, Jack. Good to hear from you, man. Why not come up tonight? Jeff’s here. Robbie’s coming back later.’

  ‘I thought Jeff lived in the desert.’

  ‘He’s through with that speedball shit. He’s clean now.’

  ‘You in the same house?’

  ‘Yeah, but tonight we’re going to Evie’s. It’s cool. Come when you like.’

  Pete was a New Yorker and by a long way the most balanced of my band-mates. The others I wasn’t so sure about. Cocaine had eaten into their brains.

  It was a Sunday. I woke quite early, before Anya, and went into the front room, made tea and brought it back across the hallway. She was still asleep, lying on her side, naked, her hair falling on her shoulders and half hiding her face. When she was really tired she could sleep like a child and no noise seemed to trouble her. I put her tea on the table by the bed, then sat down carefully and looked at her.

  There was her knee, the sweep of calf, and the bone of her ankle, all lying as still as if she were dead. I thought of the flesh packed in beneath her skin. And then I thought of the lyrical turn in ‘Julie’ where Anya changed from ‘she’ to ‘I’ in the dreamscape. I gently laid my hand on her hair so I could just feel the skull beneath. I pictured the sleeping brain where even then new microscopic pathways might be forming – connections that would body out ideas and melodies that would enter into other lives.

  I guess all humans are the same, this miracle of thought in flesh, but with Anya it seemed more. I touched her right hand and thought how those fingers had gripped the fence at the Devils Lake Amtrak station, and how those same fingers had struck the chords of ‘Hold Me’; how they’d pressed the nickel in the phone for Genevieve, brushed my fly and circled me and grasped me tight.

  From the first day, making love to Anya was … Well, you can never tell in advance how it’s going to be. In my bad younger days I’d often gone off the woman after just one encounter. Then there had been groupies. But with proper lovers, and I’d only had a few before Lowri, sex always played a different part. It could be a way of expressing need, of pulling me into their life; it could be just a recreation. With Anya it wasn’t any of these things. In return for freedom to do what she wanted with me, I could take any liberty with her. I suppose the oddest thing was that it never felt finished – never, Well, we’ve done that three times today and there’s no other variation left. More often, even as I was dropping off I’d think how nice it might be if she would just touch this bit, like that, while I looked on, or … And it would be something to remember for the following day.

  That early morning as I watched her, Anya shifted onto her back, still breathing deeply. She unconsciously pushed a strand of hair from her face, and her lips opened slightly as though she was talking in her dream. Her breasts lay on her ribs, sliding a fraction under gravity to one side. Her legs were parted just enough for me to see the opening between. Giving in for the hundredth time to temptation, I softly kissed it, then dragged my tongue along the groove, up to the top. It was surprisingly damp, parting easily, so I could get the tip of my tongue to touch her there. Still with her eyes closed, she began to sigh and run her hands through my hair and the next thing I knew she was opening her legs wider and hauling me up by the shoulders.

  Later on, I asked how long she’d been awake.

  ‘A while. I could feel you staring at me. It got me hot, so I pretended to be asleep.’

  ‘And that’s why you were so—’

  ‘Ready for anything, as the ice fishermen used to say in North Dakota.’

  There were a few things going on when we made love. Sometimes I had that rare moment of balance, that control, when, without risking myself, I could make her come at will; then I had a sense of some long-kept secrets being told, some burden of memory being shrugged from her shoulders, as she tensed and shuddered. Eventually she’d beg me not to hold back any longer, as though she’d had enough pleasure for herself. But when I did what I was told, and as she felt me finally thickening inside her, it would set off her own most intense spasm and I’d have to carry on till she was through.

  And afterwards. Well, Lowri used to lie on the bed for ages, tracing her fingertip over my back, softly singing me blues songs she’d heard in the clubs in the South Side of Chicago her uncle had taken her to when she was a kid. But Anya either fell deeply asleep or got up, got dressed and went to do something else.

  I’m giving this detail about Anya and me because what was communicated through sex was more than a coupling; it was the powerhouse of everything between us. It roped us together. That and the music. It was as though we were becoming one creature. I did try to be careful, to check for signs that I might be letting myself into danger, but there still seemed so much that she needed from me.

  For instance, she’d never been to Los Angeles before and was uneasy about the whole place. ‘I don’t really get it, Freddy,’ she said later on that Sunday morning. ‘Hollywood’s a dump, isn’t it? Nice weather, but the buildings are kind of tacky. Not even tacky, just ordinary. Square lumps with a few palms. And who’s in charge?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  We were driving up Melrose in a rented Ford convertible.

  ‘I mean, like in New York,’ she said, ‘you’re aware of Wall Street and the rich people on the Upper East Side and the immigrants moving up or heading out. You can kinda see under the hood. But here everyone’s just hanging round. There’re a few closed-up mansions on the hill there. What’s going on?’

  When we’d arrived at the Santa Monica Pier and were having lunch overlooking the ocean, I told her how I’d come to LA when my first band broke up in England. We’d been to the city on tour once and I’d liked it. I thought it would be a good place to go for a time, while I figured out what to do next. I called the promotions guy who’d done our tour and he told me he was going to a party that night off Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon and it would be fine if I came along. It was fine. So fine that I didn’t leave the Canyon for three years.

  All the inhibitions and the grey rain I’d carried round from a childhood in south London … I dumped those at the foot of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. In their place, I took the vista from the top of Lookout Mountain over the steaming plain. I took half-naked girls, mellow grass and log cabins at the end of dirt tracks where everyone was happy to see you. It was exotic to a pale Englishman, the eucalyptus windbreaks, the heat, the Country Store, a jam each night at someone else’s house, a party till dawn in the night scents of jasmine and acacia. This was how people were meant to live, sharing what they had, loving one another, patching together a better way of living than previous generations with their wars and wage enslavement. It was familiar and easy to me, as though I’d lived like this in some other life, in deep countryside enclosed within a giant city, a frontier adventure with owls hooting and coyotes calling in the night, yet only a fifteen-minute drive from the Whisky a Go Go and free passes at the Troubadour.

  ‘I honestly felt I’d been there before. It was all new yet so familiar.’

  ‘You make it sound like heaven, Fred.’

  ‘I think it was.’

  ‘And what was her name?’

  ‘There were two in the Canyon before Lowri. Cathy and Roma. Not at the same time.’

  ‘Good boy. And what did you do for money?’

  ‘Odd jobs. House painting, joinery. Session work. I borrowed a lot. Then we formed the band and we began to get some gigs and then a record deal. At one point I owed Pete $35,000.’

  ‘Shit! I’ve never seen that much money in my life.’

  ‘Neither had I. That was the problem.’

  ‘Didn’t he mind?’

  ‘He never batted an eyelid. That was what it was like. He’d had a big album with his previous band so he had money. He believed I’d pay him bac
k.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Eventually. He wouldn’t accept interest, though.’

  ‘I like the sound of Pete.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and meet him.’

  That evening we drove up in the open Ford with the radio playing. For some reason I really wanted Anya to be impressed. I wanted her to like the Canyon and even to share in retrospect in the happiness I’d had there. I was talking hard, telling stories, and maybe this was why I overshot the turning. We did a loop past the Garden of Allah, which had been a place of assignation for old movie stars, and through the hairpins of Appian Way.

  ‘The Country Store,’ I said, ‘another place of assignation.’

  ‘Seems to have been a lot of sex going on up here.’

  ‘Sure was.’

  Weepah Way was a steep, precarious kind of trail with a drainage channel down the centre that someone high on acid thought it was a good idea to flood one summer, so you could surf down it on inner tubes.

  ‘And how old were you, Freddy?’

  ‘Maybe twenty-five?’

  ‘Going on eleven.’

  ‘Hey, look, this is it. Evie’s house is down there.’

  ‘And they don’t know about you and me?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  There was a dirt-road dead end. Most of the houses in the Canyon were pretty ordinary, but Evie’s place had a nice wooden palisade and a view over the Kirkwood Bowl. When we went through the gate, I felt anxious that people should like Anya. It was my old life and my new life in collision. Jeff was in a bad way, unshaven and suspicious; he didn’t look that ‘clean’ to me. He disappeared midway through dinner and when he came back he talked non-stop for twenty minutes about the glories of the sandwiches at Canter’s, a drab after-hours deli on Fairfax. He made you feel you were missing out on one of the great experiences of living and somehow doubting his word by not going there at once.

  ‘And the pastrami,’ he said. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Wow,’ we said.

  Pete and Robbie were suspicious of Anya when she refused to sing. It was like a tradition that anyone would perform if they were asked, but I didn’t want to be seen to be hawking her round to build up some sort of reputation before the record came out. Also, I wanted her to reserve her voice for the studio.

  Anya and I left before midnight, and although there had been all the usual talk of the band getting back together it didn’t feel likely.

  I put the disappointment out of my mind. My life had changed, it was as simple as that.

  The recording was going fine until we came to ‘I’m Not Falling’. I had this marked down as a possible final track because it would end the album on an upbeat. I wanted drums, organ and some tenor sax. Anya wanted just piano. Larry Brecker was with me, Tommy thought Anya had a point and Joe the drummer was keen to play on anything.

  I went into the vocal booth so I could speak alone to Anya.

  ‘I’m not trying to bury the emotion,’ I said. ‘We can mix it in a way that you and the piano are in the spotlight all along. But it’s got such a good beat to it, I don’t want to just throw it away.’

  She earnestly grasped my wrists in her hands. ‘Listen, honey, this is my life. It’s not just my song, it’s part of my experience of being alive.’

  ‘Maybe you’re too close,’ I said. ‘I guess we all need someone outside the creative moment, someone who’s not so emotionally involved.’

  ‘Do you really think you’re not emotionally involved, Freddy?’ Her voice had risen. ‘With my life, my work, my body, my every living breath?’

  Until this moment our intimacy had led only to exhilaration. Now I could see how such weird closeness, this connection of body and mind, could go the other way.

  I saw how far we’d penetrated one another’s lives. I didn’t know what to say. We just kept staring. In her eyes there was anger, love, pride and desperation. God knows what she saw in mine.

  She said, ‘And if by any chance you don’t feel that involved with me, my darling, don’t sleep with me tonight.’

  There were tears in her eyes as she spoke. Then the conflicting emotions seemed to resolve themselves. She reached up and kissed me on the mouth.

  ‘You’d better be right, Freddy.’

  ‘Do you trust me, then?’

  ‘I trust you. But you’d better be right.’

  Once Anya had committed herself to doing it with other musicians, she did let them play. Even Old Irongloves was allowed a look-in, though he was pretty far back in the mix. Stephen played a short tenor solo as well as some fills on the last verse, Anya was on piano and I thought it best for me to stay out of it altogether. It was a painful few hours, going over and over the arrangement, but Anya sang with conviction. Maybe she was thinking, If this is a fuck-up I can blame Freddy.

  The last two days were spent on two Anya-only songs, and we were able to send the other musicians on their way. ‘Thunder Bay’ was about her mother leaving; ‘Boxcar Days’ was about watching the trains coming in and out of Devils Lake. It wasn’t my favourite song, though it had some nice touches in the lyrics.

  The final running order was this:

  Side One

  Side Two

  Hold Me

  Ready to Fly

  Genevieve

  You Next Time

  Thunder Bay

  Boxcar Days

  The Need to be You

  Boulevards of Snow

  Julie in the Court of Dreams

  I’m Not Falling

  We felt the album had a balance to it. It kicked off and ended with the most obviously crowd-pleasing numbers. The slighter songs were hidden in the middle of either side. ‘Julie’, the album’s masterpiece, had a good position. The second side opened strongly.

  Delirious with pride, our quarrel buried beneath an avalanche of sex, Anya and I spent happy hours in room 289 roughing out album cover designs, drawing up the credits, making sure we left no one out, including ‘Produced by Jack Wyatt at Sonic Broom Studios West Hollywood, Calif. Engineer: Larry Brecker. Assistant Engineer and sandwiches: Russ Gibson. Joe Aprahamian appears courtesy of A & M Records. Special thanks S. Davis, Jr., S. Cooke and all the staff of the Pasadena Star Hotel. This record is dedicated by Anya King to “Mom, wherever you are”.’

  As for the title of the album, there were plenty to choose from among the tracks. Anya liked Boxcar Days, I liked Boulevards of Snow, but when I called the people at MPR they’d already fixed on Ready to Fly and you could see their point. For a first record by a still-unknown artist it was hard to beat. Anya, uncharacteristically, gave way at once. She did want to sell records.

  We said goodbye to Larry Brecker and sent a tape back to John Vintello in New York. We’d have to go back to listen to an acetate on lots of different speakers – plastic bathroom radio, automobile rear shelf – and fiddle around with sound quality on the master, but we could leave that for a bit.

  It seemed like a good idea to get out of the Pasadena Star, though we’d come to love it in its crummy way. Your choices from LA are: south to Mexico, east into the desert or north to San Francisco. We flung two bags into the back of the Ford and started up the coast road with Anya singing ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’ in a high, mocking voice that made us both laugh so much I swerved into the wrong lane and was almost crushed by a giant trucker.

  I grew up in a normal house in a normal street. My father was a sales rep and my mother was what most mothers were then, a housewife. There were five children. I was number four in a running order of boy, girl, boy, boy, girl – Ray, Susan, Simon, Jack, Gabrielle. As positions go, four out of five is as near invisible as you can get. My elder sister, Susan, used to mother me and dress me up in girl’s clothes and my little sister, Gabrielle, looked up to me with open adoration. Ray and Simon shared a room, so I was put in with Susan. When she started having bras, I was switched to sharing with little Gabrielle, and this made girls familiar to me. For the first fourteen years of my life I roomed with one.


  The sister thing was good, the brother thing was tough. Ray and Simon didn’t want anything to do with me, and in an effort to get into their gang I started to stay late and practise music at school. We didn’t have much money, but my parents were ambitious for us in their way. They pushed me through the eleven-plus so I got to a grammar school with a real music department.

  I took up guitar as a way of impressing my brothers. The school provided an instrument and free instruction from the history teacher so long as I promised to study the piano as well. I sang in the choir, which I didn’t like except when you did descants. At home, when Ray and Simon were strumming together in their room, I’d offer a harmony, but they wouldn’t take me along to the pubs until my voice had broken. I think they were hoping it would go out of tune as well as dropping, but it didn’t. By then, the revolution was coming from Liverpool. I never did my exams at school. I left at sixteen to be a musician.

  These are the kind of drab life facts you tell on long journeys, with the Pacific slumped against the coastline to your left. The girl is on your right, the Santa Ana winds going through her hair, the radio struggling to make itself heard over the engine. Later, there are signs to wineries in San Luis Obispo. You wonder if you should stop and taste. You persuade your girl that it’s her time to take the wheel and in return you’ll find her a great salad and home-baked bread somewhere in Zinfandel Creek. She’ll have to go easy on the wine, it’s true, but she drinks only gin these days.