Malibu Rising: A Novel

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  Her siblings were out there seeing the world while Kit was still slinging crab cakes.

  She wanted some of the glory, too. Some of the glamour of Nina’s life, some of the thrill of Jay’s and Hud’s. She had spent so much of her childhood following them all into the water. But she suspected that even if none of them had ever picked up a surfboard, she still would have.

  She was great on a board. She could be legendary.

  She should be out there, getting accolades, too. But she wasn’t taken as seriously as her brothers and she knew she wasn’t as gorgeous as her sister, so where did that leave her? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure if there was a spot in the limelight for someone like her. A chick surfer who wasn’t a babe.

  Jay pulled up in front of the garage and let Kit hop out.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “Wait, where are you going?” she asked. She had gotten a tiny bit of a sunburn on the apples of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. It made her seem younger than she was.

  “It’s going to take you forever to shower and I need to get gas,” Jay told her. He looked at his gas gauge to see whether he was even telling the truth. The indicator was hovering at just under half. “I only have a quarter tank.”

  Kit gave him a skeptical look and then left, heading into the house through the garage.

  Jay pulled the car back onto the road and put his foot on the pedal a bit heavier than he needed to. The car roared over the barely paved street. He checked the clock on the radio. If he sped, he had time.

  The Pacific Coast Highway was the most comfortable place on land for him and practically the only road in town. There were small offshoots of neighborhoods dotted along the highway, canyons branching out, shopping centers nestled in one direction or the other. But you could not go anywhere, could not do anything, could not visit anyone in Malibu, without your wheels hitting the pavement of PCH. Your ability to get to a restaurant, shop at a store, make a movie on time, claim your patch of sand, take your spot in the waves, all depended on just how many other people were pulling onto the same road as you every day. It was the price you paid for the view.

  Jay navigated traffic as best he could, sped up through changing lights, stayed in the left lane until mere seconds before he needed to be in the right one, and soon, he pulled onto Paradise Cove Road.

  Paradise Cove was a startlingly gorgeous inlet hidden from PCH behind palm trees and valley oak. Jay turned right onto the narrow road and slowed. Once his Jeep rounded the corner, a cove of blond sand came into view, surrounded by magnificent cliffs and clear blue skies.

  There was a community of mobile homes on the bluff looming over it all with land fees so outrageous that only the Hollywood elite could afford them.

  But the restaurant at Paradise Cove was the reason Jay was here. The Sandcastle was a beach café, where one could buy an overpriced daiquiri and drink it while looking out onto the pier. Jay parked his car and checked his pockets. A five and four ones. He had to at least go through the motions of ordering something.

  Jay walked into the restaurant, putting his sunglasses on top of his head, and approached the bar counter. He was greeted by a blond guy with a tan darker than his hair, whose name Jay could not remember.

  “Hey, Jay,” the guy said.

  “Hey, man,” Jay said, giving him an upward nod. “Can I get an order to go?”

  The man turned and Jay checked his name tag. Chad. Right.

  “Sure thing. What can I get you?” Chad took out a notepad.

  “Just a uh …” Jay glanced at the specials listed on the board and chose the first thing he saw. “Slice of chocolate cake. To go.”

  Jay tried not to look around too much, be too obvious. If she didn’t come out, he’d resolved not to ask if she was there. Maybe she wasn’t working today. Whatever. That was fine.

  Chad clicked his pen in a way that implied he was excited about Jay’s order. “One choco cake, coming right up, dude.”

  And Jay remembered that Chad was a dork.

  He sat down on a stool as Chad walked back into the kitchen. Jay looked down at his own shoes—beat-up slip-ons—and decided that it was time for a new pair. His big toe on his right foot was starting to peek out from a hole in the top. He would go into town and visit the Vans store next week, get the exact same pair. Black-and-white checkered, size twelve. No sense in messing with perfection.

  That moment, Lara walked out with a Styrofoam container she was putting into a plastic bag.

  “Chocolate cake?” Lara said. “Since when does Jay Riva eat chocolate cake?”

  So she was working today. So she was paying attention to him.

  Lara was six feet tall. Actually a full six feet, just an inch and a half shorter than Jay. She was skinny, all hard edges. And, if Jay was being completely honest, not particularly beautiful. There was a harshness to her, an oval face with a sharp jaw. A thin nose. Thin lips. Yet somehow, when your eyes landed on her face, it was hard to look away.

  Jay had not been able to stop thinking about her. He was infatuated and smitten and nervous, like a teenager. And he had never been lovestruck as a teenager. So this was all new to him, all uncomfortable and nauseating and thrilling.

  “Gotta change it up, sometimes,” he said.

  Lara put the bag down next to the register and rang him up. He handed over his cash. “You coming to the party tonight?” he asked. The words were out and he was satisfied with his performance. Casual, not too eager.

  Lara opened her mouth to speak, Jay’s entire day and night resting on her answer.

  • • •

  Three weeks prior to that moment, Lara and Jay—until then only vaguely acquainted—had found themselves the only two people outside of Alice’s Restaurant. Jay had been walking back to the shoreline after smoking a joint at the end of the Malibu pier. Lara had been leaving the bar. Her lame date had left an hour ago and she’d been nursing her disappointment with Coronas.

  When Jay saw her, she was sitting down on a bench in denim shorts and a tank top. She was in the middle of attempting to retie her white Keds, fully buzzed.

  Jay spotted her and smiled. She pleasantly smiled back.

  “Lara, right?” he’d said, lighting a cigarette to try to hide the smell of weed.

  “Yes, Jay Riva,” Lara said, standing up.

  Jay smiled, humbled. “I knew your name was Lara. I was just trying not to seem like a creep.”

  “We’ve met at least three times,” she said, smirking. “It’s not creepy to remember my name. It’s polite.”

  “Lara Vorhees. You work at the Sandcastle, mostly behind the bar, sometimes waiting tables.”

  Lara nodded her head and smiled. “There you go. See? I knew you could do it.”

  “There needs to be some room to play it cool, don’t you think?”

  “People that are cool don’t really need to play cool, do they?”

  Jay was used to women that hung around and waited for him, women that made it clear they were available, women that laughed at his jokes even if they weren’t funny. He was not used to women like Lara.

  “All right,” he said, “I get your point. Tell me. If I’m cool, what do I say next?”

  “I guess, next you ask me if I’m doing anything right now,” she said. “And then I tell you I’m not. And you ask if I want to go finish your joint, which you clearly have because you’re high and smell like bud.”

  Jay laughed, caught. “Are you doing anything right now?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to go somewhere and finish my joint? I’m high and I smell like bud.”

  Lara laughed. “Let’s go to my place.”

  And so they did. Lara lived in a studio apartment in a complex a quarter of a mile inland at the foot of the mountains. Her place had a view of the water on a clear night. The two of them stood on her tiny balcony, nestled between two houseplants, sharing a beer and a roach, and looking at the moon over the sea.

  When Lara sai
d, apropos of absolutely nothing, “How many people have you slept with?” Jay was so disarmed he told the truth. “Seventeen.”

  “Eight, for me,” she said, looking forward, toward the horizon. “Although, I guess it kind of depends on what we are defining as sex.”

  He was surprised by her. Where was the shyness? The coyness? Jay was smart enough to know that these traits weren’t necessarily natural for women, but he was also bright enough to know that they were learned. That most women knew they were supposed to perform them as a form of social contract. But Lara wasn’t going to do that.

  “Let’s say we define it as an orgasm,” Jay said.

  Lara laughed at him. Actually laughed at him. “Well, then, three,” she said, breathing out the smoke of the joint, passing it back to Jay. “Men don’t give women as many orgasms as they think they do.”

  “I guarantee I would give you one,” he said, as he put the joint to his lips.

  This time she didn’t laugh. She looked at him, considered him. “What makes you so sure I’d let you?”

  He smiled and then pulled back, moving away from her, letting her feel his absence. “Look, if you don’t want to feel an orgasm that starts in your toes and shakes your whole body, it’s no skin off my back.”

  “Oh, this is impressive, actually,” Lara said, playing with the label on the beer bottle. “How you’ve managed to make sleeping with me seem like a favor. Let’s be explicitly clear about something, Riva. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested. But you’re lucky I’m interested. It’s not the other way around. I don’t care who your daddy is.”

  Jay figured it was then. That moment. When he fell in love with her. But there were other moments, too, that night. Moments it could have been.

  Did he fall in love with her when she took her clothes off right there on the balcony? Maybe it was when she touched his face, and she looked directly into his eyes, and moved on top of him.

  Maybe he fell for her as they interlocked themselves together, legs pretzeled, bodies pulled tight until there was no space left between them. They moved together like they knew exactly what they were doing. No fumbles, no mistakes, no awkward moments. And Jay thought, maybe that was love.

  Or maybe he fell in love with her later, when it was pitch dark out, and the two of them were pretending to be asleep but each knew the other one was also awake. She had lain there bare, no gesture toward covering up. And her skin was the only thing he could see in the dark.

  It was then that he took a deep breath and, for the first time, told someone else his big new secret. The one that was eating him alive.

  “I was just diagnosed with a heart problem,” he said to her. “It’s called dilated cardiomyopathy.”

  This was the first time he’d ever said the phrase out loud since he’d heard it from the doctor the week before. It sounded so strange coming out of his mouth that he wondered if he’d mispronounced it. The word repeated, over and over in his mind, until it sounded like nonsense. That couldn’t be right, could it? Cardiomyopathy? But it was. He’d pronounced it just like the doctor had.

  He’d been having chest pains for weeks. He’d noticed them starting shortly after he got thrown off his board and then caught in a two-wave hold down in Baja. He’d been underwater so long he thought he might die. He struggled and struggled against the current, trying to decipher up from down. He pushed himself against the weight of the water, desperate to reach the sky. But he just kept tumbling and tumbling, pulled by the riptide. And suddenly, he broke through the surface and there it was: air.

  Ever since, these pains appeared from time to time, as a tightening that took him by surprise, arriving out of nowhere and stunning him silent and then passing on, leaving as quickly as they came.

  The doctor wasn’t sure what was causing them until suddenly the doctor became very sure indeed.

  Lara put her hand on his chest, moved her warm body closer to his, and said, “What does that mean?”

  It meant that Jay’s left ventricle had been weakened and would not always function the way it should. It meant that anything that might cause overexertion and adrenaline, especially something like being thrown underwater, was no longer in his best interest. Putting his heart into overdrive by almost drowning had triggered it, but the underlying condition was hereditary, given to him by all of the people who came before him, lying in wait in his blood.

  Jay spared Lara any more of the details, but told her the worst part. “I should stop surfing. It could kill me.” His glory, his money, his partnership with his brother … One little defect in his body would take it all.

  But on hearing that, Lara said, “OK, so you’ll find something else to be.” She had made it seem so simple.

  Yes, Jay thought, that was when he’d fallen in love with her. When she made what had felt like a fatal blow seem easily overcome. When she’d cracked open his bleak future and shown him the light shining in.

  When Jay woke up the next morning, he’d found a note from Lara saying that she’d had to go to work. He didn’t have her number. Since that day, he’d been down to the Sandcastle three times, trying to find her.

  • • •

  “I wasn’t sure how it worked,” Lara said, handing him his chocolate cake. “With the invites, I mean.”

  Jay shook his head. “No invites. It’s a pretty simple system: If you know about the party and you know where Nina’s place is, you’re invited.”

  “Well, I don’t actually,” Lara said. “Know where her place is.”

  “Oh,” Jay said. “Well, luckily you know me.”

  He wrote down his sister’s address on a napkin and handed it to her. She took it and looked at it.

  “It is OK,” she asked, nodding toward the other server, “if I bring Chad?”

  She was into Chad? Jay started burning up from the inside, on the verge of humiliation and heartbreak. The drop was so long, so treacherous, when you started from this high up.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Lara said. “I prefer men who don’t spend four hours a day sunbathing with a foil reflector.”

  Relief came to Jay like ice on a burn.

  “He’s depressed because his even-more-orange girlfriend dumped him,” Lara continued. “Somebody at your party’s gotta have a thing for pretty boys, right? Can we pawn him off on someone?”

  Jay smiled. “I think we will have a lot of options for getting Chad laid.”

  Lara folded the napkin with the address and put it in her apron pocket. “Guess I’m going to a party tonight.”

  Jay smiled, pleased. There it was. What he came for. When he left, he forgot to take the cake.

  1959

  June had been due with Jay on August 17, 1959. Smack in the middle of Mick’s tour for his debut album, Mick Riva: Main Man.

  June and Mick had fought about the tour dates all through her first trimester. June had insisted Mick reschedule the second half of the tour. Mick had insisted what she was asking was virtually impossible.

  “This is my chance,” Mick told her one afternoon as they stood out on the patio, watching the tide pull away. Nina was napping and they were trying to keep their voices down. “You don’t get to just reschedule your chance.”

  “This is your child,” June said. “You cannot reschedule your child.”

  “I’m not asking to reschedule my child, Junie, for crying out loud. I’m asking for you to understand what’s at stake here. What I’m building for our kids. What I’m building for this whole family. I can’t do all of this alone. I need your help. If I’m going to go out there and be great, I need you to be here, keeping things together, being strong. This life we want …” Mick sighed and calmed down. “It requires things from you, too.”

  June sat down, resigned. This reasoning made sense to her, as much as she hated it. And so somewhere in the time that Jay went from the size of a lime to the size of a grapefruit, they found
a compromise.

  Mick could perform wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, but when June called him home, he had to come.

  They shook on it one night when they were going to bed and as they did, Mick pulled June’s arm toward him and pulled her on top of him. She laughed as he kissed her neck.

  When Mick took off for his Vegas shows four days before June’s due date, he promised to head home the moment she called to say she was in labor. “And I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said as he kissed Nina’s forehead and June’s cheek. He put a hand on June’s belly and then made his way out the door.

  But when the time came—June’s mother called him an hour and ten minutes before his Saturday night show began—Mick didn’t run to the airport like he’d promised. He hung up the phone and stood there, backstage in his suit and tie, staring at the bulbs around the mirror.

  It was his last Vegas stop on the tour. And impressing the guys at the Sands meant a lot of things. It meant he could get booked out for whole months at a time, which would mean some financial stability. This was his last booking for two weeks. Two weeks! Just like Junie had asked.

  Think of all that time he’d have to be home. Junie and the kids would have him all to themselves. He’d pay full attention to their every waking need.

  And so, he turned away from the mirror, straightened his tie, and finished his sound check.

  June’s second labor developed with lightning speed, her body kicking into gear, remembering with precision exactly what it had done only a little over a year before.

  Mick was in an impeccable black suit, leaning over and winking at a young woman in the front row, at the very moment that his first son, three hundred miles away, cried at the shock of the world.