Malibu Rising

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  Oh, God, he thought a few weeks into it. I’m falling.

  They had been seeing each other during late nights and long lunches for three months when Carol told Mick she was pregnant.

  They had run into each other at Ciro’s. Mick had been having dinner with his producer. Carol was there with another man.

  Mick had lured her into the men’s bathroom and taken her right there in the stall, so overcome with jealousy seeing her with someone else that he needed to own her.

  Afterward, as he smoothed his hair and prepared to leave the bathroom, Carol fixed her skirt and made herself presentable. Then she said, “I’m pregnant. It’s yours.”

  He looked up at her, hoping she was joking. It was clear she wasn’t. And before Mick could say anything, she left him there alone.

  He closed his eyes and then opened them up to see his slack-jawed face staring back at him in the mirror. You fucking idiot. In an instant, he punched his own reflection, shattering the glass and cutting his hand open.

  He did not see Carol again after that night. He’d sent her money but stopped calling her, forced himself to stop thinking of her, and he had not bedded another woman since then.

  Now here he was, nearly a year later, barricaded from his own house. But he’d known from the very moment he punched the mirror that this was looming. Maybe he’d known long before that, too. Maybe he’d always known he couldn’t escape himself.

  • • •

  “Junie, I’m so sorry,” Mick said, starting to cry. It was so unbearable, to hate yourself the way he hated himself just then. “I tried to do the right thing, I swear.”

  June refused to be moved by the weak sound of his voice.

  It was not difficult for her to maintain her anger, but whenever she feared she might falter, she would think of herself being pregnant and retroactively change the memory, shading it with the knowledge that there had been another woman nearby, carrying another one of her husband’s children, almost as far along as she. How sad to not be the only one carrying your husband’s child at that very moment. It seemed to June that privilege was the very least you could ask of a man.

  “I was weak,” Mick said, pleading with her. “It was a moment of weakness. I just couldn’t stop myself. But I am stronger now.”

  “I don’t want you here,” June said, undeterred. “I don’t want you around these kids. I’d hate for these boys to grow up to be anything like you.”

  She’d said “boys.” Not boy. Boys.

  “Sweetheart,” Mick said. He saw it now. The way he could convince her to let him fix everything for all of them. “I’m Hudson’s father. If you want him, you have to take me, too.”

  June and Mick were silent for a while after this, June unsure what to do. Mick waited with bated breath. There was no way she was going to allow a baby to be handed over to Mick. He didn’t even know how to change a diaper. That baby needed June. That boy needed a mother. They both knew that.

  June opened the door. Mick fell into the house.

  “Thank you,” he said, as if she had granted him clemency. “I will make this up to you. I will do right by you every moment from this day forward.”

  At just that moment, Mick looked up to see that Nina had woken and found them there.

  “Hi, honey,” he said to her.

  From the bedroom, Jay and Hud started crying at the same time. June scooped up Nina and went to tend to her babies. Mick peeked over her shoulder, looking at the newborn son he was meeting for the first time.

  June was unable to bear it, witnessing Mick’s connection to this child. She swatted him away and he backed off.

  When she was done with the children, she went to the bedroom and saw that Mick had lain down on the far edge of the bed, as if the left side of it was still his.

  “Junie, I love you,” he said.

  She said nothing in return.

  But as June looked at him, she felt fatigue take her down. He was not going to make it easy on her. He wasn’t going to leave of his own will. He was going to make her scream it and shout it and force him to go. She was going to have to rage against him and even then, she might not win.

  Anger extracts such a toll and suddenly, June was so tired. She sighed, giving her body over to her breath. She could not fight him now because she could not fight him now and win.

  And so, she lay down next to him, saving her indignation for daylight, when she could think straight. All of this would still be there to fight in the morning.

  But in the morning, her anger had lost its edges. It had morphed into sorrow. She was now overtaken by the dull ache of grief, expansive and tender like a whole-body bruise. She had lost the life she had believed she’d been granted. She was in mourning.

  So when Mick turned over and put his arm around her, she could not summon the energy to shrug it off.

  “I promise you all of that is over,” Mick whispered, tears forming in his eyes. “I will never do anything to hurt you again. I love you, Junie. With all of my heart. I’m so sorry.”

  And because June had not shrugged off his arm, Mick felt confident enough to kiss her neck. And because she had not shrugged off the small request, she did not know how to shrug off the larger one. And on and on it went. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tiny twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree.

  With every move Mick made, as he held her, as he kissed her, June lost sight of the exact moment to speak up and then resigned herself to the pain of having never spoken up at all.

  And soon, on the horizon appeared a resolution—one that even June started to welcome if for no other reason than needing the return of normalcy, even if it was a lie.

  At midnight the following night, Mick whispered sweet nothings into June’s ear. June, despite herself, relished the feeling of his breath on her neck. And the two of them talked it through, in the hurried and hushed tones reserved for secrets.

  Mick would be forever faithful and they would raise Hud as one of theirs. They would intimate that Jay and Hud were twins. No one would dare question it. After all, they were about to enter another social stratum with Mick’s second album. They would have new friends, new peers. They would be, now, a family of five.

  June felt, that night, as if she and Mick were mending their own broken bones together. Laying the cast perfectly in the hope that one day she would not even remember she had been broken.

  • • •

  And the crazy thing was that it worked.

  June loved her children, loved her older girl and her twin boys. She loved her house on the water and watching her kids play on the shore. She loved people stopping her at the market, two infants and a toddler in the cart, saying, “Aren’t you Mick Riva’s wife?”

  She liked the money and the Cadillac and the minks. She liked leaving the kids with her mother and putting on one of her smartest cocktail dresses and standing backstage for some of Mick’s shows.

  She liked hearing “Warm June” on the radio and having Mick’s attention when he was home. He always did make her feel like the only woman in the world, even when she knew—knew for certain now—that she wasn’t.

  So, despite the ulcer she was growing, June had to admit, she could stomach it all more easily than she thought. Vodka helped.

  Unfortunately, Mick simply couldn’t stop himself.

  There was Ruby, whom he met on the Sunset lot. And then there was Joy, a friend of Ruby’s. They meant nothing to him and so he saw no real betrayal.

  But then, Veronica. And oh my God, Veronica.

  Black hair, olive skin, green eyes, a body that set the standard for hourglasses. He’d fallen again, despite every attempt to keep his heart out of it. He fell for her crimson smile and the way she liked to make love in the open air. He fell for her slinky dresses and her sharp wit, for the way she refused to be intimidated by him, the way she made fun of him. He fell for just how famous she was getting, maybe more famous than him, when she starred in a hit domestic thriller call
ed The Porch Swing. Her name was above the marquee in big bold letters and yet still, in the quiet of the night, it was his name she called out.

  He could not get enough of Veronica Lowe.

  And June knew exactly what was happening.

  When Mick didn’t come home until four in the morning, when Mick had a tiny trace of lipstick behind his ear, when Mick stopped kissing her good morning.

  Mick started having dinner with Veronica in public places. Sometimes, he stopped coming home altogether.

  June had her hair done. She lost weight. She humbled herself to the level of asking her girlfriends for sex tips. She made his favorite roast beef. In the rare moments she held his attention, she tried to subtly remind him of the duty he had to his children.

  And still, he could not be torn away.

  Mick told himself he was nothing like his own father. His own father who would come home smelling like other women’s perfume, his own father who would leave for weeks at a time, his own father who would smack his mother for asking too many questions.

  He told himself he’d done right by marrying June, a woman nothing like his own mother, who would smack his father back. But he was lost in Veronica’s hair, the way it smelled like vanilla. He was lost in her laugh. He was lost in her legs. He was lost.

  And then one night, when the boys were ten and eleven months old, Mick came home at four in the morning.

  He was drunk but he was unconfused. He bumped into his nightstand pulling out his passport. The lamp crashed onto the floor.

  June woke up and saw him there, hair flopping in front of his face, eyes bloodshot, jacket draped over his arm. There was a suitcase in his hand.

  “What’s going on?” she said. But she already knew. She knew the way people know they’re about to be robbed, which is to say acutely, right at the last second.

  “I’m taking Veronica to Paris,” he said, before he turned and left for the door.

  June chased him to the driveway in her sheer nightgown. “You can’t do this!” she screamed. “You said you wouldn’t do this!” She mortified herself, begging for something she never wanted to beg for.

  “I can’t be this person!” Mick yelled at her. “Some family man or whatever it is that you thought I was. I’m not! I’ve tried, all right? And I can’t do it!”

  “Mick, no,” June said as he shut the car door. “Don’t leave us.”

  But that’s exactly what he did. June watched him back up the car. And then she crumpled down onto the driveway, heavy and dead, like an anchor tied to nothing.

  Mick drove away, headed to Veronica’s house in the hills, where, he told himself, he could finally get things straight. With Veronica, he would do better.

  He was not a good man. Not an honest man. It was how he was born, how he was raised. But a good woman could save him. He’d thought that was June, but he now understood, it was Veronica. She was the answer. His love for her was strong enough to cure him. He’d call his kids once things settled down. Years from now, when they were old enough, they’d understand.

  June cried in her driveway for what felt like a lifetime. Cried for herself and her children, cried because of how much of herself she had compromised in order to keep him, cried because it had never been enough to make him stay.

  She cried because she was not surprised that he had left, only that it was happening now, in this moment. And not tomorrow or a month from now or ten years from now.

  Her mother had been right. He had been too bold a choice, too handsome a man.

  Why were all of her mistakes that had been so hidden from her as she was making them so clear to her now?

  And then, for one brief second, she gasped and broke down, thinking of the fact that, if he was truly gone, there might never be another man who could touch her the way he did. He took so much with him when he went.

  The sun started to rise and June caught her breath. She walked back to the house, determined. She would not be shattered by this. Not in front of her children.

  She walked into the kitchen and put two cold spoons on her eyelids, trying to reduce the puffiness. But when she caught a glimpse of herself in the side of the toaster, she looked just as frightful a mess as she’d feared.

  June poured herself a glass of orange juice and then popped the top of the vodka she kept in the cabinet and tossed that in, too. She smoothed her hair, tried to summon the dregs of her dignity.

  “Where Daddy go?” Nina asked, standing in the doorway.

  “Your father doesn’t know how a man’s supposed to act,” June said, walking past her. She grabbed Mick’s albums off the record player and threw them into the trash, his cocksure face staring back up at her.

  She poured the rest of the carton of orange juice over it all. “Wash your hands and get ready for breakfast.”

  June and her three children ate eggs and toast. She took them all down to the sand. They spent the day in the water. Nina showed June she could sing the alphabet all the way through. Jay and Hudson had both started pulling themselves up. Christina came by around lunchtime with tuna melts and June pulled her aside.

  “He left, Mama,” she said. “He’s gone.”

  Christina closed her eyes, and shook her head. “He’ll come back, honey,” she said, finally. “And when he does, you’ll have to decide what to do.”

  June nodded, relieved. “And if he doesn’t?” she asked. Her voice was small and she could barely stand to hear it.

  “Then he doesn’t,” Christina said. “And you have me and your father.”

  June caught her breath. She looked at her children. Nina was building a sandcastle. Jay was about to eat a handful of sand. Hudson was sleeping under the umbrella.

  I will be more than just this, June thought to herself. I am more than just a woman he left.

  But when the lights went out that night, and all of them lay in their separate beds, staring at the ceiling, June knew that she, and Nina, and Jay, and Hudson all had lost something. They were now living with a different-sized hole in each one of their four hearts.

  Noon

  Nina stood in the packed kitchen as the three cooks managed the oversized grill and two fryers. She quietly began what was arguably her most important task at Riva’s. She grabbed a few handfuls of fried clam strips, a bowl of cold shrimp, a bottle of tartar sauce, three slices of cheese, and four rolls. And she began making each one of her siblings what they all called “the Sandwich.”

  It was a mess of cold seafood, smooshed between bread. One for each of them, hers with no cheese, Jay’s with extra sauce, Hud’s with no clams, Kit’s with a lemon wedge.

  The Sandwich didn’t exist without Nina. When Nina was sick, she still went in and made the Sandwich. When she was out of town on a shoot, no one ate the Sandwich. It would never have occurred to Jay, Hud, or Kit to make the Sandwich themselves, to make the Sandwich for Nina.

  Nina didn’t mind. She took care of her siblings and they thanked her for it, loved her for it, and they all left it at that.

  When the Sandwiches were done, Nina grabbed four red baskets and four pieces of parchment paper. She nestled each one in and filled the remaining space of the baskets with fries. Except for hers, which she filled with salted sliced tomatoes.

  She checked her watch. Her brothers and sister were late.

  “Party tonight, right, girl?”

  Nina looked up to see Wendy coming into the kitchen. Wendy was an aspiring actress who took shifts at Riva’s Seafood between driving into Hollywood for auditions. So far, Wendy had done a recurring role on a soap opera and been featured in a music video.

  “Yeah,” Nina said. She liked Wendy. Wendy showed up for all of her shifts, was kind to customers, and always remembered to clean the soda fountain. “Are you coming?”

  Wendy raised an eyebrow. “Do you honestly think I would miss it? The Riva party is the one time of year that you truly never know what you’ll end up doing.”

  Nina rolled her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said. “You make it
sound so …”

  “Rad?” Wendy offered.

  Nina laughed again. “Sure, rad.”

  “I’ll be there, with bells on.”

  “I’m coming, too, by the way!” Ramon shouted from the fryer.

  Nina laughed as she put the fried clams on each of the rolls. “I will believe it when I see it,” she said to him.

  “Psssh,” he said, waving her off as he pulled two baskets of shrimp out of the fryer. “You know I’ve got a life. I can’t go to some Richie Rich party, spend my time bumping elbows with some famous assholes. No offense.”

  “I would expect nothing less than for you to decline my invite,” Nina said. She was pretty sure Ramon was one of the only people who didn’t consider being invited to the annual Riva party a perk of the job.

  Meanwhile, she was positive the kid currently manning one of the grills, Kyle Manheim, a local surfer just out of high school, had taken the job this summer just to get the invite. She could practically sense his resignation coming next week.

  “Where are your good-for-nothing siblings?” Ramon asked. And just as he did, Kyle lit a grilled cheese on fire. The kitchen erupted in controlled chaos and Nina put the baskets of sandwiches on a tray and slipped out. She made her way to the break room in the back.

  Nina sat down and picked a magazine up from the desk behind her. Newslife. She flipped through the pages. Reagan and Russian dissidents and MTV is ruining children and should she buy a videodisc player?

  There were ads for the Chevy Malibu and Malibu coconut rum and Malibu Musk body spray. Nina wondered for the millionth time why everyone outside of town thought the place evoked something exotic and preternaturally cool, as if it were a sun-bleached utopia.

  Sure, your neighbor might be in a few movies, but Malibu was a place to live, like any other. It was where you brushed your teeth and burned dinner and ran errands, just with a view of the Pacific. Someone should tell them all, Nina thought, paradise doesn’t exist.