Great Big Beautiful Life(85)

Even Margaret got caught up in the energy of the crowd. The whole first half of the show was dedicated to a series of opening acts, and while the audience didn’t seem interested, she noted the way the entire crowd kept their eyes bouncing between the stage and the wings.

She caught herself doing the same, watching for Cosmo, wondering how he could ever live up to the myth and legend.

How would thousands of people not leave here tonight disappointed?

She couldn’t imagine it ending any other way.

Every time one of the openers asked some variation of the question “Who here’s excited about seeing Mr. Cosmo Sinclair?” the audience response rivaled the roar of a jet engine. The floor trembled.

When the last group had played and left the stage, the lights dimmed, as they had between each of the acts, and then the dim melted into outright jet-black darkness.

The screaming of the audience started up again. This time, it didn’t sound so much like excitement as sheer desperation, as if the need had grown too much to bear. A joy that verged on terror.

Her whole body erupted into goose pimples.

And then a fierce white light flared out, and a coyly smirking man in all black came into focus at a microphone dead center of the stage.

Margaret had never heard anything like the overwhelming screech of the thousands of people in that room. She realized Laura was screaming too, her eyes saucer wide, one splayed hand pressed over her lips but doing nothing to stop the sound. Margaret let herself join in.

Laughing and screaming and laughing some more. She felt as if they’d all been caught in the same riptide. Like her emotions didn’t belong to her, but she didn’t mind. It was fun, to feel so much.

Behind Cosmo, the band started to play, and she marveled that she hadn’t noticed them, when they were dressed in vibrant red satin, whereas he was little more than a shadow in his black suit.

She and her sister hung on to each other.

He opened his mouth and the first note came out. For a split second, it was as if the audience had been turned off, just the flip of a switch, to let his low clear voice ring out, and then the screaming was back, ratcheted up.

Margaret could barely hear a word of that song, or the next. It hardly mattered. She was swept away in the magic, the charisma of the man at the center of it.

Entranced.

The opening ballad melted into a raucous, playful number, his careful restraint giving way to a frenzy of movement. At one point, he ran down the length of the stage, still singing, then stopped, tossed the microphone up, caught it behind him, and whipped it back to his lips to pick up singing like nothing had happened.

Margaret waited for the energy in the room to wane. It didn’t.

Every time Laura looked at Margaret, her eyes alight, her wig slightly askew and cheeks flushed, one or both of them burst out laughing. They danced ferociously, sweat blooming under the synthetic fibers of their department store dresses. Margaret had brought a flask in her bag, and to her utter shock, Laura took her up on a few gulps when she held it out in offering.

Once, when Cosmo did a particularly salacious swirl of his hips, Margaret leaned over and shouted against Laura’s ear, “ROY,” and that alone was enough to set them off again. She couldn’t hear her little sister’s laughter over all that noise, but she could feel it in her chest. Like an animal rousing from hibernation.

How long had it been since she’d seen such reckless joy on Laura’s face? Had she ever?

Laura leaned in, arms around her sister’s sweaty neck, and kissed the side of her face. “THANK YOU,” she shouted, and suddenly, Margaret thought she might cry. Not those little leaking drips that came with laughter either.

She thought she might crack open and sob, but she couldn’t let herself, so she just danced, hand in hand with her little sister, screaming and laughing and passing the flask between them as the best night of her entire life unfolded around her.

Eight songs in, Cosmo finally played the song everyone had been waiting for. His biggest hit yet. “A Girl Back Home.”

Margaret had never seen anything like the fever that spread through the room as he danced and thrashed and yelped the song:

    Ain’t got no girl

back home

No place in this world

to call my own

But darling

For tonight

Maybe we don’t

have to be alone.



He slid forward on his knees, right to the edge of the stage, and those first few rows erupted, gushing up toward him like a volcanic blast, their arms outstretched to him. Somehow, the screaming amped up further. Laura and Margaret pushed up on tiptoe, trying to get a look at what was happening.

Cosmo had taken one girl’s hand and was holding it in his while he sang. He lifted it and rubbed it against his cheek, and suddenly, all down the length of the stage, people were trying to climb up to him.

In an instant, the energy in the room changed. There was a swell in the crowd behind them, like a typhoon moving from back to front, bodies pushing in tighter, people clamoring to get closer to him.

Laura was knocked off balance, her shriek disappearing into the wall of sound. Margaret tried to move sideways to catch her sister by the arm, but there were already people moving between them, trying to shove their way closer to the stage.

Anxiety knotted up her throat as she tried to push through. Instead she was caught in the stampede, half carried deeper into the writhing throng. She screamed her sister’s name as the tide of bodies pushed her farther from where she’d been. An errant elbow connected with her eye, and pain flared through her head, her vision blurring behind tears, all sense of balance lost to the dark.