A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  I’d loved you for so long before we met

  I trained my soul for you so it was ready.

  You purged those highways of neglect,

  For all of this and life to come, I love you, Freddy.

  I lowered my head into my hands. There was a cascade of falling notes that bottomed out as she slipped into her lower range in the last line. There was a ‘skull’ note through ‘love’ and another through the first syllable of my name, which she stretched into two notes so you could hear a smile in her voice, as though she was chiding me.

  I believed Anya’s work would last for ever, and to find myself the subject of such a song was more than I could take in. The refrain was so melodic that it was on the verge of being a pop song until she switched suddenly into a minor key, making it more difficult, a little bleak, as though she had decided she didn’t want her private song too widely liked, or played to death on the radio.

  There were two verses, a middle eight, the chorus twice, and then the third verse, with the same meek, respectful quality as the first, like a girl talking to her father. And then it just stopped. There was no third chorus, no fade, nothing.

  It was perhaps the most beautiful tune she had ever written, it was sung by a heart with nothing but love in it. Why then did it sound so unbelievably sad?

  The third album was called No Turning Back. Anya allowed me much more freedom in the production and even suggested parts for brass and strings. Her idea of harmony remained to double-track herself, and I was happy with this because it gave a certain depth while keeping the focus on her. But for the first time, on three tracks, she also had female backing singers. The girl-and-guitar thing was over, though even with this new sound she remained clearly a ‘solo artist’. The words of the songs had become a bit harder to follow; not many were as simple as those lines from ‘Freddy’. There was no US tour this time, but she appeared on national television and in festivals in San Francisco, Britain and France.

  It was impossible for me to tell Anya that I didn’t think No Turning Back really worked. It was all very well to have writers in the national newspapers saying how great you were, and there were sublime moments on the album. But it was a bit of a mishmash. She could hear jazz rhythms, but she wasn’t a jazz player; her roots were in folk – and, to some extent, pop, from her years in her Brooklyn equivalent of the Brill Building. It was great that she was ambitious, but I didn’t want to hear a kind of anthology of influences, I wanted concentrated Anya King.

  I didn’t tell her any of this. We talked about which of the tracks might make a single. MPR had belatedly put out ‘You Next Time’ and it was a sleeper hit, though most people we knew tended to look down on the idea of singles. Anya had felt it cheapened a song to be taken out of context when we’d spent so much time sequencing the tracks and making the album work as a whole.

  With time, though, people change. One day at the farm we listened to No Turning Back and tried to figure out if any of the songs would stand up to repeated play on car radios and in clubs and bars.

  Anya came and sat on my lap, as she sometimes liked to do, curling up against me like a cat.

  ‘Do you think you really want a single?’ I said. ‘Do you want to go on television chart shows for kids?’

  She made a face. ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind a hit, Freddy …’

  We were getting on fine, thanks to my holding back my musical opinions, and in other respects we were honest; she had recently told me much more about her life before we met.

  At the age of seven, when her mother was still at home, Anya had caught rheumatic fever and missed a term of school. She had a high temperature, which they put down to a throat infection. It was only when she had pain in her joints that she was taken to hospital so they could look at her heart. Her mother was ashamed because she thought rheumatic fever was a slum disease, and although their home was poor it was respectable. A visiting doctor from Duluth said it was nothing to do with living conditions but was caused by being allergic to certain bacteria. Two years later, she had a second attack, which put her back in hospital. After that, as she put it, ‘the bastard fever cleared out of town’, though it left her underweight and frail in her teenage years.

  When she was fourteen, her father lost his job at the fibreglass factory and this dumped him into some kind of depression. Anya was expected to keep house for him when she got back from school. He’d be asleep in front of the TV, ankle deep in beer cans. She took to driving his automobile to escape, but could never get far enough in the time available. Eventually she had to find part-time work, serving in a hardware store in school vacations and babysitting for neighbours some weekday evenings. Most of the money she earned went into the housekeeping, but she saved enough to buy herself a ticket on the train for Seattle. She travelled only a few stations until she got to Wolf Point, which was the main town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

  ‘I just got out there because I liked the name,’ she said.

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘Wandered around. You have to understand, Freddy, things were real different. It’s only a few years ago but it could have been the 50s. Low rectangular buildings on Main Street. Most of the men in cowboy hats. The badlands stretching out far as you could see. Wheat farms, cattle ranches. In town the pawn shops, thrift shops, the gas station with guys in overalls who’d pump the gas, check the tyres, wash the windshield all for thirty cents. Fifty cents was money. There was no rock ’n’ roll, no modern world.’

  She’d met a man there, some drifter. He took her off in his car to a place called Jordan, down the side of a huge lake. They went to a bar called Hell Creek, which had a neon sign in the shape of flames. They drank a lot and left. She wouldn’t say exactly what happened. I think maybe he raped her. But she didn’t want to tell anyone and she stayed with this man for a week or so, although she was only fourteen. I think she felt she had to grow up very suddenly, she was tired of being a child and her father needed her to be a woman now. I think she figured this brutal transition was what it took.

  She didn’t cry when she told me about it. ‘I’m not gonna tell you all the things that happened. But I’ll tell you this. I knew what I was doing. I thought I should get my pain over and done with.’

  We were sitting on the deck of the farm, looking down towards the trees that hid the Hudson.

  ‘Why? Why would you look for pain?’

  ‘I already knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind. I’d seen paintings in books at school and in magazines. On another vacation I hitch-hiked through Grand Forks to the big gallery in Minneapolis. I saw this Austrian guy called Egon Schiele. I couldn’t believe my eyes. You didn’t have to take the world at face value, you could see it how you wanted. I wanted to be a painter after I saw Schiele. But I wasn’t good enough, so I decided to put all my energy into music.’

  ‘What does that have to do with this guy in Wolf Point?’

  Anya sighed. ‘If you’re going to draw on your own life, you need to be authentic.’

  ‘So you wanted pain to write about it?’

  ‘No, I wanted pain to get it out of the way. So I could see more clearly what I was and what path I should take.’

  ‘And what did that mean?’

  ‘It meant I took decisions for my life on the basis of what they meant for the music.’

  I’d feared she meant something like this, and she must have seen the alarm in my eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry, Freddy, I’m not a masochist. I’m not insane.’

  Although she was laughing, I felt hollowed out. I hated the thought of Anya suffering at such a young age because her mother had run off. But there was more to it than that. The weird strength of her character would have emerged in any event, and in a cowardly way I was wondering what this kind of ruthlessness might one day mean for me.

  She left high school at sixteen to go to music school in Chicago, paying her way with evening jobs. She didn’t see it through, and by nineteen she was in New York City with now
here to live. She slept rough for some time in parks and doorways until someone took pity on her. It struck me with a sudden lurch that ‘Genevieve’ was her own story. No wonder it had been so hard for her to record in the studio with Larry Brecker. How stupid I’d been to take the songs at face value, assuming the third-person ones were about others and the first-person about herself. As she’d told me, it was almost the opposite.

  I volunteered not to produce Anya’s next record. I felt she needed a new sensibility and that I’d given all I had to offer. Rick Kohler and I were still managing her, the album sales were strong and all of us were comfortable – on the surface.

  But the more she became respected by the music press and the mainstream newspapers, the more her music seemed to me to lose direction. I blamed her ambition and her modesty about equally. The ambition meant she was always listening to new things, hoping to stretch herself. Every night when we were in New York we’d go to a club or a gig of some kind – African music, folk or classical as often as rock. She’d take in different time signatures and so on, then set to work on them. This was fine, but her modesty meant she always assumed that anything new she heard, especially if it came from some other culture, was superior to her own music.

  I went with her to Los Angeles to record her fourth album, Atlantic Palisades, because she asked me to, and because we were inseparable. The title was a play on Pacific Palisades in LA, of course, but also a reference to America’s East Coast and what lay beyond – Europe. Yet for all the new melodic influences, the words of the songs looked backwards: it was as though her present life was no longer providing inspiration. There was a catchy song called ‘Don’t Talk Spanish’, which drew on her feelings about Lowri and me. ‘Kalimera, California’ was a political song about Americans abroad with a re-creation of that night in the Greek taverna. ‘City on a Hill’ was an affectionate account of our hotel in San Francisco, with humorous words: ‘Tramcars shake the window frame/Travelers see no lovers’ shame,/Tongues on frosted glasses sing/My darling, is this now la vie bohème?’ In other songs, the lyrics were vague and hard to understand, and I had a bad feeling that sometimes this was not because they were saying something difficult but because she was trying to disguise the fact that they weren’t saying much at all.

  We did a few dates to support the new album, all of them in places Anya liked. Her stage fright had made major tours impossible, but with careful preparation and a good rest between dates, we were able to agree to two nights in each of seven venues. Hoffmann, Daniel and La Roche were lined up and off we went.

  On 2 May we were in Austin, Texas. Anya looked out from the wings ten minutes before we were due to start. She saw the audience gathering, turned and ran back to the dressing room, where she began dry-retching.

  Back on stage, it was humid and hard to breathe. Halfway through her set, she began to choke. The band played an instrumental while I took her off stage to get water, washed down with plenty of Jack Daniel’s. We stood under the bright lights of the dressing room, face to face. Her pupils were dilated from diazepam and marijuana. She leaned over the basin (our dressing rooms were better equipped now), splashed cold water in her face and turned round to me with black runs of kohl and mascara down her cheeks.

  ‘What the fuck am I doing, Freddy?’

  I held her trembling hands in mine. I remembered as a kid being given a rabbit to hold and feeling the captive flutter of its heart. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. You don’t have to do all this. I mean, we have to finish the set. But next time … Just do a TV thing. Playing live is only worth doing if you’re trying to make a name. Or if you enjoy it.’

  She scrubbed her face dry with a towel, which she then threw down on a chair.

  ‘Can I go home now?’ she said. ‘I want to be back at the farm. It’s my favourite time of year.’

  ‘It’s almost hay-fever time too.’ I was trying to keep it light. ‘We’ll be back in two weeks. We can’t pull out now.’

  I knew MPR had insurance against no-shows because we’d had discussions with their money men after Anya’s previous difficulties. But I felt we had to complete the tour, especially the two dates in Los Angeles, which had sold out within minutes.

  Anya looked at me hard. ‘Who are these fucking rednecks out there anyway?’

  They were in fact a good audience, they knew their music, it was just a bad evening. The sound mix was not that great, she was exhausted.

  ‘Do you want me to go out and say you’re unable to finish? I will if you want.’

  She looked at the floor. When she turned her face up to mine again, my heart filled with love. She looked so mournful, so proud, so wrecked.

  She said, ‘I don’t know why I have to do this thing. I have to kill myself to do this fucking thing. I literally shat blood last night. Did you know that? It’s like I’ve scoured my heart with steel wool and I’m bleeding out of my ass.’

  I kissed her and held her for a moment. Then, without a word, she turned and began to walk back along the corridor towards the stage. My heart was aching as I followed. On some level, I must have sensed what was coming, any day now.

  Anya sat at the piano. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said into the microphone. ‘Unforeseen … Stuff. I hope the band kept you entertained. This is a song from the new album. It’s called “Kalimera, California”.’

  There was no tremor in her voice. You would have thought she’d merely gone to the bathroom.

  The next day we flew the short hop to Denver. I always like arriving there. It’s at altitude and the air is fresh and cool, especially if you’ve come from the South. You feel better at once. We were staying in a nineteenth-century hotel in the middle of town, a triangular brownstone with a pointed nose like the Flatiron. I was so pleased to be there I just peeled off some dollar bills for the bellhop and flopped down on the bed. Anya went to tidy up in the bathroom.

  It was an off day. There was time for lunch and a sleep before we’d even need to think about the soundcheck. We decided to go downstairs to eat. It was kind of an interesting place. You could look up from the lobby straight to the sky through a big glass dome eight floors above. There was a fancy restaurant and an upmarket pub with a baseball game on television, so we sat on stools at the bar and drank wine and I ate grilled shrimp with salad and Anya had a cigarette.

  She looked shaken and pale, but I put this down to the strain of performing. I tried to talk to her about the set lists for the next day and the day after. I thought if she played more early songs she’d feel less like she was trying to thrust this new album down the public’s throat.

  She just nodded and kept saying, ‘Maybe you’re right, Freddy. Maybe you’re right.’

  At one point she put her hand on my thigh and looked lovingly at me, but in her eyes there was something else as well.

  ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘We have a whole day of doing nothing. Let’s go and sleep. Tonight we’ll go out and I’ll find you the best dinner in Denver and a club to go to afterwards and we’ll get back not too late and have one little joint of that grass Rick gave me and sleep till nine in the morning.’

  She nodded, but seemed unable to speak. We went upstairs, pulled the blinds, kicked off our outer clothes and curled up together under the cover. I must have fallen asleep at once.

  I awoke bewildered in a late-afternoon light. I couldn’t work out where I was. The farm? The Seventh Street apartment? Austin? I kept pressing buttons in my mind and they kept coming up blank.

  Then I went to the window and raised the blind. Denver. Of course. Anya King. My love. I remembered now. My pulse quickened at the thought of the gig tomorrow and dinner out tonight.

  The bathroom door was open, but Anya was not inside. I looked round the room and there was no sign of her anywhere. I went back to the bathroom and saw that her toothbrush, which I’d seen her use before lunch, had gone.

  I walked round the room about five times, wondering if I was losing my mind. She had been there, surely? We’d had lunch toge
ther. I wasn’t hallucinating or anything. Then I saw it. An envelope with the hotel’s printed name and mine written in pencil in Anya’s hand: Jack Wyatt.

  Well, I didn’t want to open it, but I didn’t let myself admit that. It was a short note, and the writing was shaky. ‘My Darling, You are the most wonderful man I ever met. I don’t want to, but I have to travel on. One day I can maybe explain, but don’t try to reach me now, let me do this awful thing I have to do. Don’t grieve for your little girl. For all of this and life to come, I love you, Freddy. A x’.

  The fallout from the cancellations was horrific. Some of the venues threatened to sue. I had Vintello’s people in my ear for weeks, though I must say Rick Kohler was fantastic. He had our lawyer in New York go in and read the riot act to MPR. He was a litigation partner from a London-based firm. His name was Cheeseman and when he could be torn away from reading the cricket scores on the Reuters tape, he was afraid of no one. ‘I thought he’d be a typical old-style Brit,’ Rick said on the phone, ‘but he knows Anya’s songs by heart, man!’ This Cheeseman guy threatened a million-dollar counter-suit for mistreatment of the artist, for all Anya’s medical expenses and for knowing underpayment of royalties – or words to that effect. Apparently his last words to their lawyer were, ‘You fight me on this and I guarantee you’ll never hire a female artist again.’ He then had an accountant go in and do an audit and discovered an underpayment of $140,000 over four albums. We made a one-off ‘goodwill’ gesture of $20,000 to MPR to cover the incidental expenses of Anya’s disappearance and they settled with the venues from the insurance payout, so no one lost – financially.

  When the business side was sorted out, I took the train upstate to be alone. The person I most wanted to talk to was Lowri, but I felt it would be a cruel thing to call her. It was only when I’d got up to the farm that I allowed myself to think about what I’d lost.

  Then I guess I went a little insane. I remember one afternoon lying naked under a tree, a tall tree with thin branches and leaves a grey-green colour like olive or birch. The wind made a restless, metallic sound in them. I thought I could hear Anya’s voice in the rustle, then if the wind veered even a tiny bit, the human words were lost, only to come again a few seconds later. It was driving me frantic with despair that I couldn’t hold on to that voice. I could sense her presence so strongly it was as though I could see her. I don’t think actual vision would have added anything to the power of her presence there, in the leaves.