The Story
THEIR VERSION: For Cosmo Sinclair and Margaret Grace Ives, it was love at first sight.
• • • HER VERSION: She hated him. She blamed him. She didn’t care whether it was fair or not. She went down to the library with the intention of eviscerating him. She threw open both doors, for dramatic purposes, and stormed into the room like a heat-seeking missile.
He’d been looking at one of the many shelves of Gerald’s unread books, and when he turned toward the sound, his quiet smile was disarming.
She stumbled, just for a second, before resuming her march.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said. “I’m Cosmo.”
The Southern lilt of his voice surprised her. She’d heard the accent in his stage chatter, of course, but much of it had been buried beneath thousands of screaming voices, and what she had heard, she’d assumed was
a put-on. An exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
“I know who you are,” she said. Then: “Why are you here?”
“I came to apologize,” he replied. At that point, she noticed the small bouquet hanging from his hand: a bundle of white lily of the valley, knotted
with twine.
“Apologize?” she repeated, befuddled.
He came toward her, his slick shoes clicking on the floorboards, and presented the bouquet, almost sheepishly.
Everything about him was a bit sheepish, actually. What could have passed for cool aloofness from a distance struck her now as shyness.
“I saw the paper this morning,” he said, letting the bouquet hover between them. “Felt awful about what happened to you and your sister, and everyone else. Things got out of hand.”
“Oh, I see.” She forced her shoulders away from her ears. “You’re here
to kiss the ring.”
His brows pinched. “Ma’am?”
“You can relax. Our family’s papers won’t have any vendetta against you,” she assured him, though personally, she couldn’t say the same. She wasn’t angry enough to try to tank his career, just angry enough to be rude.
He shifted between his feet, the bouquet falling back down to his side.
He seemed uncomfortable in his body, as if he’d grown too quickly, in stature or frame or both, and wasn’t quite sure how to move through the world. He looked younger than he had onstage too, so young that she couldn’t help but ask, in that seemingly random moment, “How old are you?”
If he was surprised or offended that she—someone fan enough to attend the concert—didn’t already know, he didn’t show it. Laura probably knew his exact birth date, his associated birthstone, what kind of car he drove, and what his dog was called. Not that Laura cared anymore.
“Twenty-three, ma’am,” he said.
Only three years older than her. It made his performance the night before all the more shocking. How could he look so at home on a stage in front of thousands, thrusting his hips and screaming his heart out, but become such a quiet, mild-tempered boy in this room with only her?
“I was raised never to ask a lady her age,” he said, the tiny smile on his full lips surprising her.
“I’m twenty,” she volunteered, for god only knows what reason.
He stepped a little closer. “Did you enjoy the show?” he asked in that hypnotic murmur. “Before all that hubbub, I mean.”
His dark eyes shone with an eagerness that surprised her, as if the answer mattered very much. She wanted to lie, but she wasn’t a liar.
She settled on an obfuscation. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
His smile twitched across his lips but faded quickly. He reached toward her, and she flinched for just a second before she realized he was merely brushing his fingers lightly along the edge of her bruised eye, a frown deepening the grooves in his forehead. His eyes flicked back to hers. “Will you come again tonight?” he said quietly.
Her stomach flipped nonsensically as their sudden eye contact jolted her back into reality. “What?”
“To the last concert,” he said. “Police will be there this time. Can’t promise it will be a good show, but it’ll be a safer one at least.”
“Oh.” She looked away, and his calloused fingertips fell from her face.
“I’m not sure.”
“Your sister too, of course,” he volunteered. “We can bring y’all backstage, where no one can see you. You can watch from the wings.”
Her heart soared, only to crash when she remembered what Laura had told her upstairs—was that really only minutes ago? It felt like days, weeks.
In a way she couldn’t understand and certainly couldn’t have expressed, Margaret felt as if the story of her life had been written onto a piece of paper she’d only just now realized had been folded in half.
Now it was open, a full second half of a page appearing abruptly, with a sharp crease dividing this new chapter from what came before.
Laura’s words dropped through her like a cold stone—all he’ll ever remind me of now is the night I lost my dearest friend—settling in the pit of her stomach.
“Laura won’t be able to make it,” she said.
“But you?” The way his eyebrows pitched up in the middle, tenting hopefully, made something in her stomach feel like it was unraveling.
“Fine,” she said.
A smile broke across his face, bright as dawn, and he lifted the bouquet
toward her again.
This time she took it.
He won her over that night. Truthfully, that was all it had taken. He’d come off that stage, drenched in sweat, and caught up in the thrill of it all,
when he strode purposefully toward her, she’d pitched herself into his arms, intending only to hug him, to praise the performance. But as soon as his strong arms came around her and his heat and scent hit her, it was as if she’d hopped universes. Moved parallel into one where the plan had always been to kiss him, just as his had always been to kiss her.
His band made a couple of little hoots and whistles, but the sound of the audience still cheering out in the dark amphitheater ate away at their teasing, and even if it hadn’t, she likely wouldn’t have registered it. She’d stopped registering anything but him. When he drew back, his fingers falling from her jaw, he took her hand and pulled her through the narrow backstage hallway, all the way to his dressing room.
“I don’t do this,” she said as, together, they pushed the door shut behind
them.
“I do,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, “I do too.”
Because of that, she thought she was safe. Insulated. This would be one more wild night, a private story that would belong just to her, in a life that she largely lived as a worldwide broadcast.
It couldn’t be more than that, if for no other reason than she refused to
subject Laura to Cosmo’s presence.
So it was just one night.
And in the morning, when he sent her dozens of bouquets, each one a different flower, with a note that read Didn’t know what you liked. —C, she told herself that was just an addendum to the night itself.
Laura continued her grieving. Gerald had left her his father’s old journals, and all day long most days, she sat in his favorite chair, reeking of his cigar smoke, and read about the past, closing herself off from the future.
Margaret continued her life out on the town once her bruises had healed, and while some astute members of the press noted that the spark seemed to have left Peggy Ives’s eyes, this change was always attributed to the recent loss of the “beloved patriarch of the Ives family.”
Margaret passed as much time as she could with her sister, but all Laura really did, aside from read, was sleep, with the aid of the pills the family
doctor obligingly prescribed.
Once the coverage of Gerald’s death had dissipated and the news cycle hit its first lull, the pictures from the so-called Rock ’n’ Brawl made a renewed appearance in the papers. Margaret knew this because she’d become obsessed with tracking them since that night. But she never brought the papers home. For once she was grateful that Laura was housebound, protected from the unkind things people were writing about her.
Still, one night, Margaret had walked past another of her father’s secretive phone calls and heard him whispering, “Laura’s not like you, Bernie. She’s not tough. She can’t handle this kind of scrutiny,” and the shame filled her up from her feet to her head.
Three months passed since her night with Cosmo.
Occasionally he sent Margaret letters from his home in Nashville.
Letters might’ve been an overstatement. They were more like notes, short missives about things that had reminded him of her, or mentions of vague plans to be back in Los Angeles, well-wishes for her and her sister. He always included Laura, which cracked Margaret’s heart a bit deeper every
time.
She kept every letter.
She replied to none of them.
Gradually, Laura emerged from those first stages of mourning. She’d finished reading the journals and moved on to new territory. Books about physics, biology, philosophy, religion. Sometimes, she could be coaxed outside to read on a blanket alongside Margaret, with the makings of a tea party spread between them.
Margaret kept waiting to stop missing the man she’d spent one night with. But when the letters stopped coming, she felt like a melon that had had its insides scooped out. She ached. She was…lonely, like she hadn’t been since Ruth died, and before that, in those dark days when her parents’ anger with and mistrust of each other had been so great that there was no room for anything else, even in a castle as large as theirs.
Three more months of silence went by. Margaret read about Cosmo turning twenty-four years old, about the raging, star-studded party thrown at
Chateau Marmont, and thought she might break in half at learning he’d been so close to her.
It terrified her. That one person could have so great a pull on her. That she could feel so much. That she could miss a person she didn’t know. She wondered if something was wrong with her.
Laura had become obsessed with a young, controversial psychologist whose book she’d read. She’d excitedly spout some of his nonsensical theories at Margaret, one being that people were always the source of their own pain.
There was no logical reason Margaret should’ve felt this kind of loss at being disconnected from a total stranger like Cosmo Sinclair, which for the first—and, frankly, only—time made her think Dr. David Ryan Atwood might not be completely full of shit.
But time moved on and she thought of Cosmo less and less, until finally she stopped thinking of him at all.
In 1962, four years after Margaret’s grandfather’s death, one of Bernie’s films was nominated for an Academy Award. Margaret’s stepfather, Roy, never liked attending awards shows, so sometimes Freddy would step in to escort his ex-wife, but that year Bernie took Margaret as her date.
Margaret wore a silver gown, her hair piled glamorously atop her head, while Bernie wore simple black, as was her approach every time she found herself in a situation where a dress was more appropriate than her usual slacks.
Margaret felt more like herself that night than she had in a long time. It was promising. She and Laura would recover from the last four years, and things would go back to normal. That page would be refolded along its crease, and she would continue wandering through her sumptuous, extravagant, fun life.
She talked, she flirted, she drank, she laughed. She and her mother rolled their eyes at the inane stage banter and roared their applause for their favorite films, actors, writers of the year. Or Bernie did, and Margaret followed her lead, happy to bask in the glow of her lovely mother.
She felt filled back up by the time the night was over. She even decided to stop by the Board of Governors Ball, the after-party that had started up a few years ago. Their driver took her to the doors of the venue, and she kissed her mother—who’d decided to head home—good night, then stepped out into the line of paparazzi fire, smiling prettily. She paused to pose for several who called out her name. Just ahead were Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who wore a beaded gown and long white gloves. They chatted with Margaret for a moment before heading inside.
When she moved to follow them, her hem had been snagged underfoot by whoever’d stepped out from the latest car to arrive.
She turned, her reflexive apology whizzing back down her throat before it ever reached her lips.
“Hello,” Cosmo said, his dark eyes glimmering, his mouth quirked in that funny, almost-sheepish, heartbreakingly sexy smile of his.
The smile that launched a thousand teenage tears, and plenty of shrieks of excitement around them now, even from a crowd of seasoned celebrity journalists.
The flashes went off all around her, like distant stars exploding, imploding—significant, sure, but not to her, not then.
She was barely aware of the actress on Cosmo’s arm, an ingenue who’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actress earlier that night and lost out to West Side Story’s brilliant Rita Moreno.
Cosmo didn’t seem too aware of his date either, his eyes glued to Margaret, his smile just for her.
His date, for her part, was relatively unbothered, waving and posing for the cameras in a ruby-red Dior.
The next day those pictures would be everywhere.
Two-Date Peggy and Two-Timing Cosmo? one headline asked.
Stars Collide at Governors Ball, another article’s caption began.
There were dozens more, but only one felt right to her. One, she thought, was true.
Cosmo Sinclair Spots Margaret Ives and the World Stops.
