A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing matters. You’ve just completed the most intense work of your life. Recordings that will be stamped on vinyl and reach a generation in their college rooms, in their cars, in their apartments, in their married houses. You’re a king. You have a talent, not a great one, but by your determination and your work you’re surfing on a twenty-foot wave of luck. You’ve done a great thing and enough credit will be yours, but most of it will go to the girl you love, who’s sitting beside you.

  The café at Chardonnay Gulch isn’t quite what you’d hoped for, just an OK steak with field greens, and the waitress isn’t a California girl but a heavy guy in overalls who generally services the machinery, but the wine stays good all the way down the bottle. You’re burning the days, you’re a millionaire of time, and the sun will never sink on the county of San Luis Obispo, where there are only two seasons, 4 January and summer.

  You may as well head back to the car so you can hit San Francisco in time to find a good hotel. The girl sings ‘Do You Know the Way to San José?’ and you make the car hooter stand in for the Bacharach flugelhorn.

  Up the coast road, with a stop, it’s ten hours. You’ll be in by eight o’clock. Maybe find a place on Russian Hill, where you stayed before with the band, or call that couple who said you should look them up. What do you think?

  ‘I’d like a very clean hotel, Freddy. Sheets so white and starched they almost scrape your skin off.’

  And by chance you find the very place on Powell and California, not far up from Union Square. A handsome building with shutters and tall windows. They have one room in the back with a balcony overlooking a yard of oleander and acanthus trees. The room price includes parking or breakfast.

  Your girl, exhausted by her hours at the wheel, has barely time to phone down a hefty order to the front desk before disappearing to the bathroom.

  You knock the hotel pen against your teeth. Parking or breakfast.

  The man who rolls your food into the room looks like Henry Fonda. Salads, fresh rolls, grilled shrimp, butter discs on ice, vacuum flasks of almost-frozen juice and water, frosted white wine, fresh fruit with stiff cloths and napkins.

  Henry Fonda is gone by the time your girl comes out, wet-haired, in a towel that falls to her ankles when she stretches up to open the window onto the balcony. She picnics naked on the bed, drains half a pint of wine and falls asleep at once on the starched, fresh sheets. You pull a light cover on top of her. How hard she’s worked. God, she deserves to sleep. May her vast creative energies be knitted up, replenished. You think how much you love her. You can’t wait for her to wake.

  The next day, while Anya was at the drugstore, I called Lowri with a sick feeling in my gut. I told her the recording had gone as well as we could have hoped.

  ‘You still on speaking terms?’ she said.

  ‘What? I … Why do you ask?’

  Lowri laughed. ‘I guess it’s pretty intense. Someone’s personal songs and someone else telling them what they’re all about and how to sing them.’

  ‘Well, we had our moments,’ I said. ‘But we’re still talking. We’ve come to San Francisco for a couple of days. Then we’ll fiddle around with the sound before they make the master.’

  ‘What do they think in New York?’

  ‘We’re waiting to hear. How’s the farm?’

  ‘Lonely.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a week, ten days at the outside.’

  Would I? Why had I said that? To make Lowri feel better? Was I going to leave Anya in LA? Or in New York, in the apartment on East Seventh Street that wasn’t even ours? I wasn’t going to risk losing Anya, but I didn’t want Lowri to be unhappy or alone. I loved her and she’d done nothing wrong. So what was my problem?

  I loved two women; that was all. It was hardly a sin. In the world of the Canyon it was considered pretty cool. Lowri and Anya were sophisticated modern women; they would understand. Oh God. Like hell they would.

  ‘We had these awful rooms in LA I told you about,’ I told Lowri, hitting the ‘s’ on the end of ‘rooms’. ‘It’s much better here in San Francisco. My room’s got a balcony and a view.’

  The ‘my’ wasn’t quite a lie. It was mine as much as Anya’s. We talked on for a bit. Lowri had a beautiful manner on the telephone. Her voice was melodious, all concern for me and innocent good wishes. It made me feel terrible.

  There was only one thing to be done. Go and find Anya. Re-engage with her.

  We got back to New York in December, and there were still three months on the lease of the Seventh Street apartment. We eased out a couple of Rick’s friends by giving them $200 towards a deposit on a new place, and I moved into what had been Anya’s room with her.

  John Vintello and the people at MPR were happy with the record. Based on the way the acetate had sounded, Brecker had done some tweaking at the mastering stage so the sound was neither shrill at the top nor muddy at the bottom, and would come through OK even on student record players. Anya didn’t tell them we hoped for people in their thirties and even forties too.

  Then I took the train up to the farm to see Lowri. I felt like an executioner as I watched the woods slide by the window. Like a hangman paid to travel up by train to some remote village and kill someone. I remembered a Methodist hymn my mother used to sing when we were kids, whose last line went: ‘For this our task today we thank you, Lord.’ Thanks a lot.

  I hadn’t planned what I was going to say. It seemed somehow deceitful to plan behind Lowri’s back. We’d never held anything back from one another; in fact the success of our relationship had been that we developed our thoughts by sharing them from the start, so I wasn’t going to go in with a speech or a statement.

  I still hoped there might be a solution. If the Canyon years, if the 60s and all that, had meant anything, then surely it was that there was no ‘right’ way to live. Our parents had problems of fidelity, divorce and bitterness, because their rules were so rigid. One strike and you’re out. It was so cruel.

  Snow was beginning to fall on the woods. It was cold in the train compartment and I pulled my jacket tighter.

  I was in the eye of a storm with Anya. It was inconceivable that I should not be with her and see how our story was to end. To leave her would have been to show a disregard for my own life, my own short time on earth and what it might be. But in going with this wonderful and inevitable thing, did I have to cut down the person I’d most loved and trusted before? Had all the philosophy and the Zen and the counter-culture so come to nothing that we had to make the same choices as married couples in Levittown?

  To choose between Lowri and Anya was like being forced to pick between a guitar and a piano. Yet on the train I felt some drab nagging voice, like a parent or a priest, saying, You have to make hard choices. My hopes rested on Lowri. She might have some elegant plan. Perhaps she wouldn’t feel bitter or rejected. She might be happy to be free of me. Or maybe in her company some answer would appear, and there’d be a shift of understanding that would bring ease to all three of us.

  Anya’s last words to me were, ‘Be kind, Freddy. Be as kind as you can to all three of us.’

  From the moment I saw Lowri, I could tell she knew. When she walked from the house to where the cab dropped me at the gate, her movement was as graceful as ever, but the bones in her body seemed to have gone soft. She threw herself into my arms, as she always did, but then seemed to hang there. Grace and Janis provided a distraction, snuffling and wagging round my legs.

  We got into the house and I risked lighting a wood fire because it was cold. I wondered why Lowri hadn’t thought of it herself. I noticed that the house was untidy and there didn’t seem to be anything for dinner.

  When the logs were flaming and we’d made tea, we settled down on the couch together and I told her all about Los Angeles. There was plenty of innocent stuff to get through – the hotel, the session men and so on. Old Irongloves. It was easy to talk with enthusiasm.

  ‘Shall we go into town for dinne
r?’ I said eventually. ‘We could go to the Fishermen’s. Or Maxwell’s?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Lowri. ‘I’ll call Maxwell’s now.’

  She went upstairs to change out of her jeans, and when she came down she was wearing a dress she knew I liked. It was black wool, quite short, and she wore it with knee-length brown cowboy boots and black woollen tights. She’d tied her hair back and put on some make-up, so her freckled face was revealed in all its lovely oval shape. I’d almost forgotten what a good-looking woman she was, and in what an original way. I told her how great she looked and ran my hand up her thighs, under the skirt. I put my hand between her legs and could feel the warmth of her body, those private folds, through her underwear. I turned her round so I could hold her breasts in my hands from behind while I nuzzled into her sweet-smelling neck. Her breasts were larger than Anya’s and I thought about the way the freckles stopped there and the surprisingly white colour of the skin and the innocent pink of the nipple where the rest of her colouring was russet and straw. She sighed a little. I felt myself stir, and then I felt guilt. Would it be ‘unfaithful’ to sleep with my own girlfriend?

  ‘I missed you, Jack.’

  ‘I missed you too.’

  She took my hands away. ‘Come on. Let’s go. I have a reservation in twenty minutes.’

  I put a guard in front of the fire and followed her out to the car.

  It was hopeless. We had dinner, drank wine, came back and stoked up the fire again. We’d both drunk way too much, three bottles, and I at once started kissing her and had my fingers inside her underpants, rubbing her gently until she couldn’t take any more and knelt down in front of me and unzipped my fly while I lay back and closed my eyes in despair, my head on the back of the sofa, and almost at once I was on top of her on the white rug and her legs, still in their cowboy boots, were wrapped round me, and after some hard work, enough to make me sweat in the firelight, in the snowy night, I felt her beginning to gather herself, fighting it at first, then letting go and coming with a wounded cry that went through me like a spear.

  Of course, I couldn’t acknowledge the sound she’d made. I just stroked her hair and kissed her and carried her upstairs, and when we’d both wonkily cleaned our teeth, bumping into each other a couple of times and laughing, there seemed no other option but to hold her and kiss her and start to fuck her again in the kind of belief that if we stayed drunk and in each other’s arms then things would work out, that reality was no more than an option, one of many.

  I’m not sure Lowri and I ever did break up. Was there a word spoken? If so, I don’t recall. I stayed at the farm for a week and then had a call from Rick Kohler saying I was needed in New York to discuss the spring tour to support the release. ‘You’re her manager, man. Get your ass down here.’ I wondered if Anya had prompted him.

  On the morning I left, Lowri and I talked about how long I’d be away this time and what Lowri would do while I was gone. She thought she might get her sister, who’d recently graduated from Northwestern, to come and stay. I encouraged her to stick with the bar job – not for the money, because I was making a regular transfer – but so she wouldn’t be lonely. She said she’d try. We talked it round so it seemed quite natural that I should be disappearing for an unknown length of time, like a merchant seaman. It’s what men do, work, is how we explained it to ourselves.

  I packed my bag with a feeling of death in my hands. Lowri stood in the doorway of the bedroom, watching me in silence. I turned and saw the path of silent tears on her skin. I said nothing because we’d fixed on a fiction to get us through and I didn’t want to blow it.

  The cab was waiting by the gate. Lowri was still in a dressing gown on the cold porch, by the old car seat. I held her close and said I’d call when I got to New York.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  I forced a kind of gaiety. ‘Shit, it’s cold. Wrap up, honey. Take care. Bye. I’ll call.’

  ‘Goodbye, Jack.’

  I crunched across to the waiting cab that was blowing poisonous exhaust clouds in the air. I didn’t look back.

  The driver put the car in gear and we began to move. Then I did look through the rear window. Lowri was still on the deck at the front of the house, but she’d fallen to her knees and her head was resting on the wooden rail.

  There was a lot going on in New York. They’d taken some photographs of Anya in Laurel Canyon while I was tweaking the sound with Brecker. The art department wanted a kind of pioneer look and they’d faked a wood cabin for her to sit in front of. She was wearing a very short skirt and although her knees were together it was difficult to think of anything other than what underwear, if any, she had on beneath. She was unhappy with the picture and we had a big fight with the label. In the end, they used an out-of-focus close-up of her head and shoulders with a mocked-up rustic background. It was better than it sounds. Kind of folksy but dynamic. It worked with the title, Ready to Fly, and Anya King in big block letters. It had a real fuck-you, here-I-am look. We all liked it, but the label retained the right to use the short-skirt picture as a publicity still.

  Anya designed the back of the cover, and the words to the songs were printed on a single sheet inside. The first finished records came through in February. We all went into John Vintello’s office on 6th Avenue to listen to it. Anya squeezed my hand when John’s assistant slipped the shiny black vinyl from the inner sleeve. Static made it stick for a second as she eased it out. She held it carefully by the rim in both palms, lifting it like a priest at the altar, then placed it on the spindle and lowered the needle into the groove. The first chord of ‘Hold Me’ rang out with amazing fidelity on Vintello’s thousand-dollar stereo system. I had a flashback to the front room in the Pasadena Star, the kitchenette, Sammy Davis, Jr. I could almost taste the gin.

  Besides Rick, Anya and me, there were seven or eight people from MPR records. Vintello sat with his feet up on the desk, smoking a Chesterfield. Behind his head were framed gold and platinum discs. He nodded appreciatively at intervals and the other people took it in turn between tracks to say, ‘That’s my favourite,’ or ‘That was so beautiful.’

  The whole thing was incredibly phoney. To defuse the tension, Rick and I talked only about sound production details. Eventually we got to the big close with ‘I’m Not Falling’ and broke open the champagne. Anya and I were glad to get out of there and back to Seventh Street.

  When the album came out in March, Anya gave some interviews in the music and underground press. Journalists seemed interested by her story and didn’t try to stitch her up, though one of them referred to me as her ‘producer/manager/boyfriend’. I don’t know if Lowri saw it, but I guessed other references might follow.

  The reviews were positive. They even said nice things about the production – ‘spare but warm’ were one paper’s words. None of the reviewers seemed able to grasp the size of what they’d heard. They weren’t musically educated enough to analyse it. They also puzzled over which songs were personal to Anya and which weren’t, and only one writer understood that what Anya had done at her best moments was to wipe out that distinction. But there was a good deal of air play on folk, rock and local radio stations. Sales were strong, and the album nosed its way into the top hundred, then the top forty. It was a slow burn, but people were responding to it and talking about it.

  Then one day John Vintello called to say it had gone into the top twenty at number eighteen. By then we were on the road.

  The tour was twenty-four dates in thirty days. It had been put together in a hurry. Some places we had local acts opening for us, usually singer-songwriters, occasionally a band. More often, it was just us at the student hall. Everyone knows what touring’s like. There’s the airport, flight, hotel, getting to the hall, sound-check, hotel, back to the hall, performing, party. But mostly it’s being in a car. We’d asked Tommy Hawks to come and play some acoustic bass, but he had another gig with a jazz band. Then Stephen Lee called and said he could play bass if we wanted, as well as every
thing else, so he ended up on tour with us. I persuaded him to take over the tom-tom part on ‘Reservation Town’ while I sloped off for a cigarette.

  Ann Arbor, about midway through, looked at first like a typical date. We got in from Detroit at about twelve o’clock and went straight to the soundcheck so we could have the afternoon off. After we’d dumped our stuff at the hotel, Anya came with me to a bar on campus that was famous for its cheeseburgers. She had the usual big glass of red wine and a cigarette.

  ‘I like watching you eat,’ she said. ‘Just as well, considering how much time I’ve spent doing it.’

  ‘What do you like about it?’

  ‘Figuring out where it all goes.’ She poked me in the ribs.

  ‘Have a French fry.’

  ‘No, thanks, but I’ll have another glass of wine. I didn’t sleep much last night. I want to make sure I get some sleep before the gig.’ There was a slight tremor in her hand as she took the second beakerful of Merlot.

  I tried to imagine what it must be like to see your inner life become common property. I’d sold a lot of records with my band and we’d been in the press a fair bit, but none of it was personal. With Anya, it was different. She’d laughed at most of the things in the papers, as though she didn’t expect them to understand and was happy they were just polite. I think a part of her was disappointed, though. You didn’t spend fourteen hours of your life recording ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’ to have it called a ‘mid-tempo closer to side one’.

  Then there was the response of the audience. Anya wasn’t a natural stage performer. She sometimes played as though she was in a conservatory or a recording studio. She was hypercritical, listening for the faintest flat or sharp, and the time she spent retuning between songs meant the set could lose momentum. When one of the songs had gone over really well – and it was often ‘Genevieve’ rather than one of the livelier numbers – she’d look puzzled. Occasionally she seemed to surprise herself by how much she’d enjoyed singing ‘Hold Me’, and she’d pause and smile broadly and wave at the end, but this wasn’t exactly working the audience.