Great Big Beautiful Life(2)
It’s beautiful. I’m already mentally drafting how I’d describe it. The only problem is, I’m still not convinced I’ll have a reason to describe it.
Because so far there’s nothing to indicate this is Margaret Ives’s house. No photos of her illustrious family. No copies, old or new, of any of their dozens of magazines or newspapers. No framed illustrations of the opulent “House of Ives” where she’d been raised on the California coast, and none of her late husband’s Grammys on the mantel either. Nothing concrete to link her to the now-collapsed media juggernaut, or the joys and tragedies the Ives family’s competing publications had so loved to catalog back when Margaret was still on top of the world.
The door swings open again, and I spin to face Jodi, working myself up to demand answers about who exactly invited me to do eleven hours of air travel plus forty-five minutes in a rented Kia Rio for this meeting.
But then I see the woman standing just inside.
She’s shrunk a few inches, gained some weight—much of it muscle, I’d guess—and her once jet-black hair is now a mix of mousy brown and silver.
She’s been scrubbed clear of any glamour, or air of money and power, but that sly sparkle in her blue eyes is exactly the same as in every photograph I’ve seen of her, the elusive, unnamable something that had turned her from heiress to a newspaper fortune to princess of the cover page.
“Well, hello there.” The warmth in Margaret’s voice surprises me, just like it did during our few brief phone calls in the weeks leading up to this trip. “You must be Alice.”
She shucks off her gardening gloves and tosses them across the arm of the nearest white rattan chair as she strides barefoot toward me, dusting her hands off on her caftan before stretching one out to shake mine.
“You’re her,” I say. Every eloquent or even serviceable sentence I’ve ever put together has been typed out slowly, over time. The ones that come directly from my mouth usually sound more like this.
She laughs. “I was under the impression that was the point.”
She gives my hand a little squeeze, then drops it and gestures for me to sit.
“No, it is.” I lower myself to the couch. She takes the chair opposite me. “I was just trying not to get my hopes up! It didn’t work. Never does. But I keep trying.”
“Really?” She sounds amused. “I tend to have the opposite problem. Can’t help but expect the worst from people.” She flashes a smile. It’s both dazzling and sad. Sazzling.
That, for example, would not make it to a typed-and-edited sentence. But the point is, I can see it hidden back beneath those sparkly irises of hers somewhere: the truth. The one we’ve never heard before.
What it was like to be born into a world of silver spoons and golden platters, of actors drunkenly swimming fully clothed through your indoor pool and politicians making handshake agreements across your antique dinner table.
How it felt to fall in love with rock ’n’ roll royalty, and for him to love you back, wildly.
And, of course, about the other things. The scandal, the cult, the trial, the accident.
And finally, twenty years ago, Margaret’s disappearance.
What happened, but also why.
And why now, after all this time, she’s open to finally telling the story.
Behind Margaret, the door squeals open and Jodi reenters the house, toting a bucket of lemons. “Thank you, Jodi,” Margaret calls, without turning around.
Jodi grunts. I could not begin to guess whether the two women are friends, romantic partners, an employer and employee, or mortal enemies who happen to be roommates.
Margaret crosses one leg over the other. “Cute nails,” she says, jutting her chin toward my hands in my lap.
The moment of connection makes me near giddy. “They’re press-ons.” I lean forward so she can get a better look at the little strawberry-printed designs.
“I’d bet you’re the kind of person,” she says, “who tries to find beauty in everything.”
“Don’t you?” I ask, intrigued by the soft, sad smile that feathers across her lips.
She gives a half-realized shrug that reads less like I don’t know and more like I don’t like that question.
Then, like the Ives she is, she neatly reroutes the dialogue: “So how exactly would this work? If I agreed to do it.”
I don’t let the if discourage me. I know she isn’t one hundred percent in just yet, and I don’t blame her. “However you want it to,” I promise.
She arches one brow. “What if I want it to work how it would usually work?”
“Well,” I say, “I haven’t done anything exactly like this before. Usually I’m doing features and profiles. I spend a couple days, or weeks, with a person. And I write about my observations, crack some jokes. It’s an ‘outsider looking in’ perspective. This would be different.
“It’d be about getting your experience onto the page. ‘Insider looking out.’ That would take a lot longer, months probably, just for the first round of research to be able to write a draft and figure out where my holes are. I’d rent a place nearby, and we’d have a schedule, times for sit-down interviews, but also time for me to just shadow you.”
“Shadow me,” she repeats thoughtfully.
“Follow you around in your normal life,” I clarify. “See what you grow in your garden, who you spend your time with. Hang out with you and Jodi, and any other friends you’ve got in town.”