Great Big Beautiful Life(100)

She blinks them away and goes back to digging. “Laughing. Smiling. She looked happy. Sometimes she was holding his hand. I remember one where her hair was blowing out behind her as they walked down the street with all these bags of produce. In every single picture, she looked happy. It was a relief. And a dagger to my heart.

“After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t write to her anymore. Or I guess I still wrote, but I didn’t mail the letters. Every time I had something I wanted to say to her—which was all the time—I’d write it down and tuck it into a drawer. Pretty soon I had dozens, hundreds maybe, stored all over my family’s home, and Cosmo’s place in Nashville, and our house in Beverly Hills.

“Just seeing her happy like that…it gave me a lot of mileage. Sometimes I was happy too, almost unbearably happy, for weeks at a time. And then something would happen, and I’d think of my sister, remember I no longer had her, and I’d barely be able to drag myself out of bed.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”

“Cosmo had to go back on tour, and I started out with him, but I hated it. Really hated it. I loved traveling with my husband, but it was hard sharing him like that. It got lonely. Half the time all I could think was, I wonder if Laura’s written back yet. So finally, I went home.”

“Then what?” I say.

“The press noticed,” she says with a wry smile. “Every day it was something different. Articles suggesting we were splitting up. Photographs of him and every beautiful woman he so much as spoke to while we were apart, along with plenty of implications that speaking was the least of what he was doing.

“The worst part is, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to find out anything that could ruin our marriage, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to lie. I knew he loved me, and I focused on that. He’d call me every single day, sometimes twice, and a couple of times, I flew in to surprise him at shows. He was always thrilled. If there were other women waiting in his dressing room, they were always gone by the time he and I got back there.

“Sometimes we’d talk about having kids, but the first time we had a pregnancy scare…I’d never felt that kind of terror. I couldn’t have even told you why. Cosmo was great about comforting me. I more or less sobbed for six hours, until my period started, and once the relief set in, we had a fight.

“We almost never fought. It just wasn’t a part of our relationship, for good or bad. I never felt like we needed to agree on things, and he never pushed me to do anything I didn’t want to. But he was upset by my reaction, that I wasn’t sure if I wanted children.”

She shoots me a meaningful glance. “Probably would’ve been a more important question to ask before we got married than ‘What’s your middle name?’?”

“What would you have said?” I say. “If he’d asked that?”

She blew out a breath. “I would’ve said I don’t know. Because I didn’t. And after that fight, I felt even less sure. In a moment of weakness, I wrote another letter to my sister, and this time I sent it. I told her everything she’d missed. I told her about the baby that didn’t exist, and how conflicted I felt about bringing anyone new into this world. I even tried to butter her up by asking if Dr. David had any wisdom on the matter. She didn’t reply, of course, but after that letter, I felt like I found some peace with the situation. It never got easier being without her, but I got used to how it felt to carry that pain with me. I learned to put it on a shelf and live my life.

“We threw parties and hosted lavish dinners. We went to galas and award ceremonies and charity fundraisers. We fought and made up, fucked and made love. And he wrote me ballads so sweet that the first note could make your heart break.”

A bittersweet smile sweeps across her face, even as her eyes stay trained on the garden bed. “On Sundays, when we were in Los Angeles, we had family dinners with my parents and Roy at the house, and whenever my dad was in one of his divorced phases, Cosmo and I would stay there for weeks at a time. My grandmother had passed away, and my great-aunt Gigi had moved to Paris, so he needed the company.

“We packed a whole life into those short years together. Cosmo’s schedule had slowed down since the Beatles set foot in America, in February of 1964, but the paparazzi seemed keener than ever to catch him doing something scandalous or me doing something horrible. We did our best to shut it out, but I could see how it grated on him, the way his world had shrunk so hard and fast. Writers who’d fawned over him five years earlier were mocking him now. ‘The Boy Wonder of Rock ’n’ Roll’ was looking older by the minute.

“The more time went on, the less we talked about Laura. It was too painful, and Dad, as he got older, leaned more into his anger. Probably easier that way. To rage against how she’d turned her back on us instead of mourning that she was out of reach.”

“And your mother?” I ask.

“Eventually she admitted to me that she’d kept that private investigator,” she says. “Dad wouldn’t fund it anymore. He was too hurt and angry. So she couldn’t get as many checkins as she would’ve liked, but every six months or so, she’d get a new envelope of pictures delivered to her. And then one Sunday night, after dinner, my father set his silverware down and stood up and said, ‘Bernie, Margaret, I need to speak with you in the drawing room.’ A family meeting.”