PART FIVE

ANYA

1971
 
It was a hot evening in July, and I was sitting on the porch in a chair made from an old car seat. I had a six-string acoustic on my lap and was running my fingers up and down the fret board, gazing into the distance. There was a can of beer open on the deck. We didn’t count alcohol as a drug and American lager almost wasn’t beer. Lowri was inside the farmhouse, and through the closed insect door I could hear her singing. Janis and Grace, the dogs, were rooting around in the yard.

Times like this, I often used to just sit there and stare out towards the woods. And I liked the idea that Lowri would soon be cooking, and that Becky and Suzanne, the stray hitchhikers, would be there too when it got dark.

There  was the sound  of a car coming up from the village.  You could pick it out by the tower of dust as it snaked along the road, van- ishing outside the clapboard post office with its tattered flag on a pole, coming into view again on the low-hedged straight beside the apple barns. It was an old Chevy pickup,  painted green with a flower sten- ciled on the door, so I knew who it was before he even pulled over in front of the house: Rick Kohler with his kilo bag of white powder and the body panels of his truck stuffed with grass.

“Hi  there,  my man.”  Rick was a scrawny guy with glasses.  His hair always needed washing and the trousers hung off his nonexistent backside.  He  looked  like  the  chemistry  swot  from school.  He  cer- tainly knew a lot about drugs.

I offered him beer, but he waved me away. “I got something spe- cial for you, man,” he said.

“Christ, what next?”

Rick looked towards the Chevy. “Come on out, honey!”

The passenger  door on the far side opened,  and I saw a female head. Round the front of the pickup came a skinny girl about twenty- two years old. She had a floral cotton skirt, sandals and a white peasant blouse. Her dark straight hair was half tied back, secured by shades she’d  pushed  back  on top  of her head.  She  had  suspicious  brown eyes and she carried a guitar by the neck. Her high cheekbones made me think of a Cheyenne. She paused, unsure, and at that moment the sinking sun came through her hair from behind, through the short sleeves of her blouse, lighting her up. This was my first sight of Anya King.

She climbed the steps to the porch and awkwardly shook hands. Normally  at  a  moment  like  this,  Rick  would  be  talking,  rattling on like a typewriter. This time, though, he was as close to quiet as he could be.

Lowri came outside and Rick introduced her to Anya, who stayed kind of reserved.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Rick. “I asked a few other people to come up later on as well.”

“From the city?”  I said.

“Yeah.  Some.”

“Sure thing,” said Lowri. I knew she did mind, a little, but would think it wrong to say so.

“Guess  they’ll be here about nine,” said Rick.

I suggested  we go to Maria’s  place  to swim first, and Rick said that was cool. With the money from two platinum albums, Maria had bought the biggest  house in the neighborhood.  A refugee  from LA, she spent summers upstate with her husband, John Vintello, who was a lawyer with MPR Records  in New York,  kind of a straight arrow, not a shyster.

The pool was in the yard with apple trees round it. Maria put a Dave Brubeck record on the outdoor system. Rick came out through the  French  doors,  naked,  walked  through  the  hissing  sprinklers on the lawn and jumped in the water. Maria came out from the summerhouse  at the  far  end  of  the  pool,  also  naked,  the  skin of her breasts shining with suntan oil. I never much liked this commu- nal naked thing, but it was okay once you were in. I looked back to the  house,  where  Anya was sitting on a lounger,  sipping  a drink. She’d  put on a straw hat and looked  like she wanted to stay in the shade.

Rick leaned against the side of the pool, threw his arms back over the edge, and talked to Maria. His hair hung over his shoulders and drops  of water  fell  from his mustache.  He  was getting  up  to full speed now, yattering away, and I wondered if he’d had a quick snort indoors.

John, Maria’s husband,  came back from the city, driving his sta- tion wagon up from the railway halt. He was starting a month’s vaca- tion and was in a happy state of mind. MPR had three acts in the Billboard Top 20 and they had six people from A & R out on the road scouting for new talent. John was planning to sail a boat with Maria and a couple of friends from Key West down to the Caribbean.  He’d asked a few weeks earlier if Lowri and I would like to come aboard, and we had both pictured storms blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico and Maria’s  pill habit in a cramped  space.  “But  you’re  a Brit,”  said Lowri,  “you’re  meant to have the sea in your blood.”  “And  you’re a Yankee girl, you’re meant to be a pioneer.” “Horses,  Jack. Covered wagons. We left the sea at Plymouth Rock and never got our feet wet again.”  After the two of us had spent an entire evening calculating what might be the longest period between landfalls we knew it wasn’t our scene.
There  was no swimming for John.  He  brought  out some beers
and a jug of margaritas. The sun was going down and I called Lowri from the phone in the hall. She said two of Rick’s friends had already showed up from New York—Denny Roberts, whose band Blue Ridge Cowboys  had had a Top 10 album in the spring (a kind of country rock thing with interesting harmonies), and his folksinger girlfriend, Tommi Fontaine.

We took two cars back to the farm, and I finally got Anya to talk a little. Her voice was rich and low. She told me she’d been playing in a coffee bar in the Village when Rick came up and spoke to her after her set. “I was, like, a little distrustful  of this guy coming on to me. I’ve been handling my own material for three years. Making my own bookings.”

“You  were still in a coffee bar?”

“Sure.  But a New  York  coffee  bar.  To a girl from Devils  Lake, North Dakota, a Village coffee bar’s as good as Radio City.”

“How  long have you been in New York?”

“Two years. I had a job in a kind of songwriting factory for a bit.”

“The Brill Building?”

“Yeah,  like that, only worse. In Brooklyn.  We were in a row of small cubicles. It was like a musical reform school. A state pen for tunesmiths. I sold two songs. Two B-sides.”

“And you left?”

“Yeah,  I’d started hearing songs on albums that weren’t made for commercial  radio.  Songs  with real words.  I saw you could  write  a song about . . . you know, anything.”

“Not just love songs.”

“Sure. And you could write for your own voice, to your own strengths.”

“Are we going to hear you play?”

She smiled—the  first time I’d seen her smile. It was a little lop- sided. “It’s a long way to bring a guitar and leave it in the trunk.”

“I look forward to it. Rick Kohler has great taste.”
She looked at the floor of the car, then back up at me. “I liked your
last record, by the way,” she said. Her eyes were flaring with light, but guarded.

“Thank  you. We’ve pretty much broken up. The band, I mean. I
didn’t like the production. I thought it was too West Coast.”

Anya focused on rolling a small cigarette with tobacco from a tin in her Mexican shoulder bag, as though she felt she’d given enough of herself for now. She felt no awkwardness in just shutting down. There were no fade-outs, no good-byes.

The farmhouse we lived in had once been little more than a barn and was still only half converted. In the music room at one end of the ground floor, there were a piano, three guitars, various harmonicas, maracas and tambourines, and a double-height window that gave onto the woods. At the other end of the ground floor, Lowri  had made a living space with sofas and a kitchen and a brick fireplace,  which we seldom used for fear of setting light to the whole building. There were red curtains at the window, cottage furniture and always jars of wild-
flowers. The two bedrooms  were upstairs, in what had once been a hayloft.

Two more friends of Rick’s showed up, plus Becky and Suzanne, and after we’d  all eaten we went outside and sat on the grass. Rick and I took guitars and played a bit just to set the atmosphere,  which was fairly mellow in any case, with red wine and some fat joints going round. It was still hot. We’d brought out a couple of hurricane lamps and some candles and you could see the moths zooming about crazily.

I remember  so well  how  Rick  laid  down  his guitar  and  stood up, smirking from ear to ear, like a kid who knows some stupendous news.

“Ladies  and gentlemen,” he said, bowing, his red cigarette-end arcing back in the flourish of his hand, “may I present to you some- thing the like of which you have never heard before in your life, the unique . . . Anya King.”

Anya, cross-legged and unsmiling, took up her own guitar and began to finger a few notes, stopping to tune the strings. She had a delicate picking touch with the right hand, and the sound of the in- strument was ethereal. It wasn’t the metal six-string tone we were all used to. I wondered whether it was the guitar itself or the tuning.

“Okay,” she  said.  “I’ll  sing four  songs.  This  first  one’s  called
‘Genevieve.’ ”

For a long half minute, the fingers picked with fussy precision, seeming to use the top three strings only. At last the thumb flushed an arpeggio, bringing the lower notes in for the first time, then it was back to the home chords, minor, frosty. And then came the voice. It was high and clear, much higher than her speaking voice. She went through the middle of each note like someone bursting soap bubbles with a pin. There was this terrible purity. The song was about a girl lost in the city, trying to make her way, and it was set in the dead of winter. And out there on the hot summer grass, all you could feel was the ice in your fingertips.  You  could feel the bone-freezing  cold of the back alleys, hear the trash-can lids roll and the rattle of old fire escapes where the homeless sleep. In her song she built this fragile world, but hard, cold, made real by the force of her imaginative be- lief in it. She ended with a minor chord struck slowly down through all the strings, and lightly smacked down with her palm to stop the ring.

I had heard nothing like it in my life. Most of our group, sitting on the  grass,  were  looking  at their  laps,  fumbling,  as though  they didn’t want to be the first to offer an opinion.

Anya coughed and plucked the A string, twisting the tuning peg, perhaps  for something to do. “Okay,” she said. “The  second song is called ‘You Next Time.’ ”

Where “Genevieve” had been sideways-on, like a short story about someone  else,  this song was so direct,  so confessional  it made you flinch. It was in the first person and it sounded as though it had been channeled that morning direct from her own experience.  She’d loved a man she couldn’t  have,  had  given way to a cruel  separation,  but vowed  to  meet  him in another  life.  “No  mistake  the  second  time around, / I will die and rise, the shadow on your wall, / My name will be the only one you call, / Oh, my darling, you next time.” The emo- tional openness, the lack of self-protection,  was a little frightening.

In  the  break  between  songs,  Anya  smiled  her  thanks  for  the friendly clapping, but didn’t really seem interested in our response. I didn’t like the third song so much. It was called “Reservation  Town” and had a social edge. There was folk and protest music, a tinge of bluegrass,  and it was less purely original. It had ancestry. What I did hear in this song, though, was the range of her voice. It wasn’t just the three-octave  span, it was the variety of tone when she went into the lower register. Here, the cold purity was touched by something warmer and more womanly. It was a beautiful  sound. I’d always felt the best soul and pop singers, women more than men, had a few notes they needed  to hit as often as possible.  Anya had two or three of those notes where her mid-range met her lower that you just wanted to hear again and again. The word she sang could have been “toothpaste,” it wouldn’t have mattered; the sound was so exquisite it sent shivers through your skull.

The silence after the song was easier to live with this time. Anya looked round the circle, a smile twitching the corner of her lips, as though she was thinking, What is it with these people?  She retuned again. She was a fussy, fussy musician. “This  song is really meant to be played on the piano, but I’ll play it on the guitar. It’s called ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams.’ ”

There was another slow, finger-picking introduction. The song began as observational,  a little like “Genevieve,” with an open com- passion for the girl it was about. You felt how protective Anya was of this imagined Julie, and maybe of all women. Then the music opened out. The voice lowered and Anya brought herself into the song, with that sudden rushing confessional we’d had on “You  Next Time.” She somehow managed to fuse her true self with this invented  girl and make it universal. It was a huge thing to do, but it seemed modest— and that was what was so moving. By the time she played the third verse, the melody had already become familiar. It sounded like a song that had always been there, yet like nothing you’d ever heard before.

When she finished, she laid the guitar down on the grass beside her and said, “Okay,  I’m going to get a drink now. Someone else can play.”

But no one moved.