A Possible Life (30 page)

I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘You know the words by heart, don’t you?’

‘Sure.’

‘So don’t look at the paper. Shut your eyes. Think of winter. Make yourself shiver. Raise a hand when you’re ready. Then get inside that girl’s skin.’

‘I’ll try. For you.’ She kissed me. I’d never seen her this fragile.

She stood with her hands on the headphones, clamping them to her head, while Brecker made ‘What’s going on?’ gestures through the glass and I was signalling him to hold fire. Finally, Anya raised her hand and I nodded to him to start the guitar playback.

The middle eight, on which the song turned from loss to hope, went:

She puts her nickel in the phone

Been six weeks since she called home

Frozen hands rake through her hair

In the doorways of despair

As she steps past sleeping men

Scribbles numbers with her pen

Says the city nights are hard and strange

But she knows this life is hers to change …

Anya kept her eyes tight shut, breathing deep through her diaphragm; she seemed to let go and there it was at last – the voice like frost crystals forming on the glass between us.

Over his console Brecker made a ‘Where did
that
come from?’ face. I felt proud of Anya, and I felt intense relief. Something of her talent was going to make itself known to the world.

* * *

God, those Sunset days. We’d get the cab to stop at the grocery store near the UCLA campus on the way home but were so tired when we got to the Pasadena Star that we barely had the energy to cook. Having so hated gin at first, Anya was now obsessed by it. ‘I’m gonna do this whole goddam album on gin and gin alone,’ she said woozily one night, stark naked on the bed, waving her greasy tumbler at me. When we went past the front desk, usually at about nine, Sammy Davis, Jr. would say ‘Good day in the studio, folks? You’d like a bucket of ice sent up with two fresh lemons, right?’

We developed a patter with him. He’d call us the Newlyweds and Anya would ask him how the other Ratpackers were doing.

‘Seen much of Frank and Dino lately?’ she said one night. I held my breath, but he laughed like a coyote, so I guess people had pointed out the resemblance before and he liked it.

We’d eat in the noisy front room and smoke some grass afterwards, then shift into 289 at the back, which we kept cool with the window open. I’d watch old cowboy films on the grainy black and white television while Anya lazed in the bathtub. By eleven we were fast asleep, naked, wrapped in one another’s arms.

The album was coming together, and it wasn’t just a run of songs, it had a shape. Some of this was down to Larry Brecker. He took me to one side early on and said, ‘This chick sings like a fucking angel, man, but from where I’m sitting, you don’t want two sharp instruments, her and that guitar, at the same time. We need bass notes, texture, some keyboards, whatever.’

I’d always known this. But there was that fragility of girl and guitar that was crucial, especially on a first record. There had to be that minstrel thing: here she is – one lonely woman travelling from town to town. The high point of the singer-songwriter fashion was over, but I didn’t want Anya’s tracks to sound overproduced. I had to find a middle way, or maybe both ways at once, the purity and the richness.

Another thing Brecker added was a conviction about certain
songs
. What to include was Anya’s and my choice, but Brecker made it clear that there were four songs we’d be insane to leave out. They were ‘Julie’, ‘Genevieve’ and two from the list of possibles – ‘The Need to be You’ and ‘I’m Not Falling’. The first, addressed to a lover, showed striking insight into a man’s weakness, and Brecker liked the second because it was an anti-love song, and as he put it, ‘They’re like hen’s teeth in this business.’

The session men also helped. Anya had no problem with a string bass on some songs, and the bass player was a jazz veteran called Tommy Hawks. The sax she positively liked – an English guy called Stephen Lee, who was part of a prog-rock outfit who seemed to more or less live at the Hyatt House, renamed the Riot House by local wits. You had to remember to call him Stephen all the time because their bassist was called Steve. Apart from that, he was fine – one of those annoyingly talented people who could sight-read and play any instrument. Anya liked him because he didn’t offer suggestions; he just played the parts. The electric guitarist, Elliot Klein, had a rough ride, though; she kept insisting on pushing him back in the mix. The drummer was a quiet guy called Joe Aprahamian. He’d also started out in jazz and had a light touch, but boy did Anya give him a hard time. One day I swear I heard her refer to him as ‘Old Irongloves’. In the end, he was restricted to three tracks.

One of the ways I convinced Anya to have backing musicians at all was by letting her have tracks that were hers alone. In my mind I divided the songs into those that were personal to her and those in which she reached out to others. Then I had a headache about how to order them on the record. I tried it about thirty different ways. Part of the headache was ‘sequencing’ – making that transition between the last note of one song and the first of another. But I was also trying to make the album a coherent emotional journey for the listener – probably a young woman but maybe a man – listening to the album alone for the first time.

* * *

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 back.’

‘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.’