Malibu Rising: A Novel

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “No doubt, man.”

  “Let me get that address from you.”

  The second man laughed as he pulled the nozzle out of his gas tank. “Craig, you know if you don’t know the address you aren’t invited.”

  “So give me the address, what’s it to you?”

  “Everyone in Malibu is going to be there and you’re gonna be sitting on your ass alone ’cause you don’t know where Nina lives.”

  “Dude, give me the address. You owe me after I hooked that shit up for you with the girl from Gladstones.”

  After that, the second man spouted the address like money coming out of an ATM: “28150 Cliffside Drive.”

  There it was. Casey had come all that way and fate had provided. She had slept in her truck that night, parked on the side of the road on the coastline. And then this morning, she had gone through all of her packed clothes and pulled out the only decently cool dress she owned.

  And here she was.

  • • •

  “Who did you say your mother was?” Nina asked.

  As Nina had listened to Casey’s story, her mouth had gone dry. She started doing calculations in her head based on how old this girl was. She’d have been born after Mick left the final time. And Nina had no idea what messes her father had gotten into since then. So she was about as much of an expert about this as Casey herself.

  “I actually don’t know that much about her,” Casey said. “All I know is that her name was Monica Ridgemore. She died giving birth to me, I think.” Casey pulled her purse open and took out the photo, handing it to Nina.

  “She was really young when she had me,” Casey said. “I mean, she was as old as I am now.”

  Nina wasn’t sure what good the photo would do her, why she’d even asked about Casey’s mother. But still, she took it in hand and studied it.

  Monica, at least in the photo, was young and blond and pretty in a very conventional way. When Nina looked at the photo, she saw where Casey’s big eyes came from.

  But there was also so much about Casey that Nina couldn’t place. She didn’t have either Monica’s or Mick’s cheekbones or either of their coloring, neither of their noses. In fact, Casey didn’t look like Mick Riva at all except for her lower lip.

  She turned the photo and read the back. “Claims the baby is result of one-night stand with Mick Riva.” There had to be a lot of women who fantasized about an affair with Mick Riva, right?

  Nina hoped, for Casey’s sake, that the claim was wrong. She hoped there was a better man out there, waiting for Casey to find him and tell him she was his daughter. She handed the photo back and sighed with her whole body, resigning herself to the futility of this exercise. There was no way to know.

  Nina gestured for Casey to have a seat in one of the leather chairs by the window, and Casey sat down with such deference and appreciation that Nina realized she should have offered her a seat quite a while ago.

  Nina took a seat next to her and wasn’t sure what to say next. What did Casey want?

  “Quite a night,” Nina said.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Casey responded.

  The two were quiet for some time—both of them wondering what on earth they could possibly say next. In the silence, they simply watched the party unfolding on the lawn below them.

  Chaos was simmering. The music was deafening and people were in various states of undress. There must have been a hundred people in the pool. Someone had rigged the jets in the Jacuzzi to ricochet off of serving plates and spray people on the lawn.

  There was a young woman sitting by the grill, reading a book. Casey looked closer. “Is that the girl from Flashdance?” she asked.

  Nina nodded. “Jennifer Beals, yeah. Love her.”

  Casey’s eyes went wide for a moment. What a world.

  Nina spotted Jay talking to a very tall blond woman. He seemed to be showing her the ocean from the cliffside.

  “See that guy?” Nina said. “The tall one talking to the blond woman? There on the side?”

  Casey leaned in. “Yeah.”

  “That’s my brother Jay.”

  “Oh, OK,” Casey said, nodding.

  “So he might be …”

  “Might be my brother, too.”

  Nina looked at Casey, trying to process how bizarre this conversation was. “Yeah,” she said. “Might be your brother, too.”

  Nina looked for Kit and spotted her talking to someone on the far corner of the patio. Nina put her finger up to the window. “The girl in the crop top and Daisy Dukes talking to that skinny guy …”

  “Potentially my sister?” Casey asked.

  Nina nodded. And then she started looking for Hud. She scanned the area, cataloged every person she could see. She could not find his broad shoulders and barrel chest anywhere. “I’m trying to find my brother Hud, but … Doesn’t look like he’s down there.”

  As she kept looking, Nina thought of what would have happened if Hud’s biological mother had never left him in June’s arms. Would he have shown up? At some point? Wanting to meet them? Wanting to know about his father?

  Nina imagined feeling like a stranger to him, imagined him feeling like a stranger to her. What a loss that would have been—to have gone her whole life not knowing this person who felt like he owned one third of her heart. To not have been there during Hud’s obsession with Frisbee or to see how excited he was when he got his first camera, to not know Hud’s gentleness, to not know that Hud can’t eat too much vinegar or he starts to sweat. He was hers.

  Nina looked at Casey. Did some of the same blood run through their veins? Nina didn’t know. She was not sure if she thought Casey might really be her sister or not. But if Casey was, Nina was already sad for what they had lost.

  Casey continued to look out the window, stealing glances at Nina. She was trying to gauge just what, exactly, was going on in Nina’s mind. She was reminded that she did not know the woman whose bedroom she was currently sitting in. She had no basis for trying to guess at her inner thoughts.

  “Sorry for crashing your party,” Casey said.

  Nina shook her head. “Everyone’s invited. Sounds like you might even belong here.”

  Casey gave a downcast smile. And Nina did, too. And their smiles were completely different, nothing alike.

  “My mother died, too,” Nina said. “She was the only parent I had. We had. So I … I’m sorry. No one should have to go through that. What you went through.”

  Casey looked at Nina and felt like she wanted to melt into her arms. Maybe this had been all she wanted. Just someone who understood, someone to tell her she didn’t have to pretend to be OK.

  Nina reached out and took Casey’s hand for just a moment. She squeezed it and then let it go.

  And then the two of them—somewhere between strangers and kin—watched the party in silence from the second-floor window.

  Midnight

  Mick Riva was standing in front of the mirror in his bedroom straightening his tie.

  He looked good for fifty and he knew it. His once jet-black hair was now more salt than pepper. His once smooth face now creased at his forehead, eyes, and mouth. His good looks had not faded but instead had grown roots.

  He was wearing a black suit and thin black tie—the look he had been known for for decades, the look he had perfected.

  Beside him, on his vanity table, was the demo of three songs he’d recorded for his new album. All of them had been softly rejected by his record company. They’d sent a mostly sycophantic note that included the very unsycophantic kicker “We worry these tracks are too ‘classic Mick Riva.’ But what excites us is looking forward: Who is the Mick Riva of the 1980s?”

  Just looking at the thing made him mad. How had it come to pass that someone like him—a luminary—was expected to listen to the musings of a twenty-something A & R guy with pierced ears and a preoccupation with synthesizers?

  Angie would have fought back and made them release the tracks—and any others he decided to record. But
unfortunately, they were no longer together.

  Angie, as both his manager and his sixth wife, had always understood that Mick just needed to be allowed to do his thing and the world would come running. It had been working for the past thirty years. Angie always got that.

  He wished he could go back in time and warn himself not to cheat on her, or not to let her find out, or maybe, perhaps, not to fall for her back in 1978, when she was just the young new redhead in his manager’s office. Because now he was not quite sure who was supposed to fight his battles for him.

  When you fall in love with your manager’s assistant, fire your manager, promote his gorgeous assistant, marry her, and then divorce her, you’re left with no wife or manager.

  Which is how Mick got to be fifty years old and living alone with his butler, Sullivan. Just him and Sully in this white-brick and ivy mansion that Angie had picked out and decorated. She had loved the oversized eat-in kitchen. Now Mick refused to let Sully make him dinner because he didn’t want to feel pathetic sitting at the table all by himself. It was a table for six.

  The other day he’d had the thought that it would be nice to have a big family, have all of his kids come over for Sunday dinner. They could fill the place up, make it feel alive in there again. He thought about calling them. Nina, Jay, Hud, and Katherine.

  They were young adults now. He could understand them, maybe offer them advice, or be useful to them all. Maybe they would like that, too.

  He had been considering picking up the phone.

  But then he had received a handwritten letter in the mail.

  • • •

  Despite the fact that there were no invitations for the Riva party, Kit did actually send one invitation every year.

  Sometime in mid-August, she would take a piece of notebook paper and write down the date and the time and the address. And then she would write, “You are cordially invited to the Riva party.”

  And she would address it to her father.

  Mick Riva

  380 N Carolwood Drive

  Los Angeles, California 90077

  After decades on the road, he had settled down in a home in Holmby Hills, less than thirty miles from his children. Five years ago, Kit had tracked him down. And since then, every single year, she addressed that envelope the exact same way.

  This year was the first year he’d noticed.

  • • •

  Mick slipped his dress shoes on, grabbed his keys, and walked out the door.

  He got in his brand-new black Jaguar and put his foot on the gas. He sped down Sunset Boulevard, toward the ocean, with a handwritten invitation sitting on the passenger’s seat.

  It was just after midnight when Wendy Palmer took off her dress and slipped off her underwear. She stood there, bare, in the backyard, just to the side of the Jacuzzi, and then began to slowly step down into the steaming water.

  The far corner of the Jacuzzi was in the far corner of the pool, which was in the far corner of the lawn. So only a few people saw her, at first.

  Soon, Wendy was submerged in the bubbling water, floating over to the only other people in the Jacuzzi at that moment.

  The two men stopped talking to each other in order to look at her. She smiled and raised her eyebrows ever so slightly. “Hi.”

  Stephen Cross and Nick Marnell both stared at her, instantly intrigued. They were the bassist and drummer of a British New Wave band with the number three song in the country.

  This was not the first time they’d found themselves in a Jacuzzi with a naked woman.

  “Hi,” Nick said.

  “Hello,” Stephen said slowly.

  Wendy kissed Nick first. And then Stephen. And then moved them all into a spot where people could watch before continuing with her plan.

  “Are we really doing this?” Nick mouthed to Stephen.

  And Stephen shrugged.

  And so it began. Just as Wendy wanted.

  Wendy had come to the party with the intention of having sex with two hot guys while people watched. She didn’t want people to watch her for their sake. She wasn’t trying to entertain anyone. She was not there for anyone’s amusement but her own. This was something she’d always wanted to do. She’d thought about doing it from time to time when she got a little too drunk or found herself pressed up against a man, wishing they weren’t alone. But she’d known when she woke up that morning that if she was ever actually going to do it, it had to be tonight.

  Because the Riva party was Wendy’s last hurrah.

  It was time to leave Los Angeles. She had made the decision to give up on her acting career, quit her job at Riva’s Seafood, and end the lark once and for all. Soon, her partying days would be over, too.

  She’d grown homesick for Oregon. And she had finally decided that it was time to go home and marry the son of her father’s best friend.

  His name was Charles and he had loved her since they were children. She, a waiflike blond girl with a headband. He, a brown-haired, round-faced sweetheart who always picked up his toys. Now, Wendy was small-town gorgeous in a big city. And Charles was losing his hair at the age of twenty-six.

  Last Christmas, Charles had confessed to Wendy that he still loved her. “If you told me to wait, I would …” he’d said in the hallway of her parents’ house on Christmas Eve, just as her mother was setting the ham down for dinner. “I’d wait if there was even a small chance.”

  Wendy had kissed Charles on his cheekbone. And they’d both walked away from it suspecting she would make her way back to him.

  When she returned to L.A. right after New Year’s, she could smell the smog the second she landed at the airport. Her studio apartment depressed her. She kept being called in to audition for the roles of nagging girlfriends and nagging wives. She kept losing the parts to Valley girls who raised their voices at the ends of their sentences as if everything they said was a question. The only part she scored was to writhe around in a bikini on top of a sports car. They had teased her hair with so much Aqua Net, she had to wash it four times afterward.

  When her agent told her that at the age of twenty-six she was too old to play Harrison Ford’s girlfriend, Wendy knew she was going home.

  She would marry the sweet man with the thinning hair and the money. And she would have kindhearted children, whom she would love with all of her heart. And she would probably gain some weight. She would lose herself for long stretches of time, when the rush of dance recitals and sleepovers and basketball games took over with such force that her own personality began to drift away. But that was all OK by her. That life now sounded sort of wonderful.

  This morning, she had booked a one-way ticket to Portland. She was leaving L.A. for good next Tuesday.

  But first, she needed to fuck two rock stars in a Jacuzzi while everyone watched.

  Lara had gone to the bathroom at least ten minutes ago, so Jay was killing time. He was by the fireplace in the living room talking to Matt Palakiko, a retired surfer. As a teenager, Jay had idolized Matt. He’d even stuck some of the photos of Matt’s greatest waves on his bedroom wall. But now Matt was a father to twins and lived back home on the Big Island of Hawaii. He was in L.A. for the week taking meetings about licensing his name for swimwear.

  Jay was listening to Matt talk about how the purity of surfing had returned to him when he stopped competing.

  “But that’s a ways off for you, man. You have a long career ahead of you,” Matt said. “Everybody’s saying so.”

  “Thank you,” Jay said, nodding.

  “And, look, if you play it right, a decade from now you could be doing some of the shit I’m doing, putting your name on stuff, taking paychecks. Everyone’s throwing money around now. It’s like there’s too much of it all of a sudden. It’s all just gonna get bigger and bigger. And I’m telling you, sometimes the financial security and the peace is even sweeter than the victory. I get up every day and surf because I want to. Not because I have to. Do you know how long it’s been since I could say that?”
>
  “Right,” Jay said. “I bet.”

  “When it’s just you and the wave, and you’re not thinking about stats or training or …”

  Jay was half listening, fixated on his uncertain future, the one he still could not bear to say out loud to anyone but Lara. His retirement wouldn’t be like Matt’s. He had to retire and give up the act itself. There was no real “purity” to exchange for what he was losing. He was just losing everything.

  Jay had only begun to be considered one of the best—his career was just taking off. It had been for only a couple years he’d even had all of this attention. But it had not taken him long to acclimate to the adulation. And now, his heart was going to cost him the very thing that made him feel exceptional.

  He was the eldest son of Mick Riva—wasn’t he supposed to be the best at something? For a moment, Jay considered the idea that he would rather die being great than live being ordinary. He wasn’t sure he could bear the stain of obscurity.

  “Look, I gotta head out,” Matt said, looking at his watch. “I got a flight back home in the morning. If I miss it, my wife will kill me.”

  “All right, man, take care,” Jay said, and then he added, “I’d love to come out there and pick your brain sometime. You know, about the boards you’re shaping. What you’re up to now that you’re, you know …”

  “Old?”

  Jay smiled. “Retired.”

  “Sure thing, man. Talk soon.”

  Just as Matt walked away, Jay felt a hand intertwine itself with his.

  “Sorry, the line took forever,” Lara said. “There are way too many people at this party. Is it always like this?”

  Jay looked around, taking note of the bodies in the rest of the house. People were starting to pack themselves tight into small spaces. Couples had taken refuge on the stairs and girls were sitting on the floor. Through the windows it was plain to see that the front lawn was as packed as the back.

  “Actually,” Jay said. “This is a lot. Even for this party.”

  “Is there somewhere more quiet we can go?” Lara asked.