“What’s the problem, Lulu?” Duncan said about a week later, “got TNT?”
“No, Duncan.” I sighed. “I do not have premenstrual tension, which is, as you well know, PMT, not TNT. I just feel really, you know, really . . .”
“Boring?” he said.
“No,” I said, “bored.”
“Right,” he said, “let’s go, then.”
“Where?” I said.
“Everywhere,” he said, and meant it.
One of the perks of having platinum tonsils was that everyone wanted them at their party, but Duncan rarely obliged, preferring to stay at home with whichever wife he was cohabiting with at the time.
Weekends were spent with all of his children from his various marriages at Lingalonga, his beach house on Willow Island, about two and a half hours away from the city.
Sometimes their mothers came, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes I went along too, piled into Duncan’s station wagon with Duncan Junior, Rhees, Jasmine, Jarrod, and Barney, his great big bullethead panting out the window.
I liked these weekends away with the various branches of my employer’s family tree, its own complications making my family seem almost normal, Rose’s quirks not withstanding.
Willow Island itself was beautiful, and I felt myself exhale the moment my bare feet touched its sands, the shock of the waves hitting my skin, shaking off the city.
Mostly, I liked being with Duncan away from the microphone. On Willow, he was a toned-down version of himself, less amplified, the relief of not having thousands of people hanging on his every utterance making him quieter, making him listen.
We had some of our best conversations walking along the island’s beaches, free-ranging, uncensored, never having to worry about when the commercial break was.
“Is Dad going to marry you?” Jarrod asked the first time I went away with them, little Jasmine’s hand sitting softly in my lap.
“Don’t be stupid, Jarrod,” Rhees said, “as if he’d marry Tallulah—her name doesn’t start with K.”
“Ha-ha,” said Duncan, “very funny.”
“Daddy,” said Jasmine, “Barney’s eating the picnic rug.”
Duncan loved weekends at Lingalonga, a name that both amused and appalled him but which he was stuck with because that was the name the old couple he had bought it from years beforehand had given it and, as Duncan said, “You don’t muck around with history, Lulu.”
Willow Island was reached by a car ferry, its captain Walter Prentice and his men in boiler suits shouting out unintelligible words to guide drivers up its ramp, their hair permanently stiff from working in the salty breeze, rolled cigarettes between their lips, which curled in smiles whenever they saw Duncan.
“G’day, mate,” they’d say as we all piled out of the car. “Coming back to the real world, are ya?”
Duncan would smile, shaking hands all around and instantly turning into the old man of the sea: “Winds up,” “Sou’easter, is it?” or “Have the mackerel been running? I’m thinking of taking young Rhees here out for a go.”
“They’ve got it made, those blokes,” he told me, “working outside, fresh air, no worries, no ratings, no mad bloody ex-wives, no phone stalkers.”
“No box at the cricket, no personal line to the prime minister’s office, no adoring fans begging you to tickle them with your famous platinum tonsils—you’d last about a week, Duncan,” I teased him. “Tops.”
Then we’d all climb the barge’s rickety old steel steps to the café perched like an eagle’s nest at the top, settle into a booth, order Cokes and hot chocolates and something for Barney under the table, and Duncan would look out the salt-smeared window and say, “Well, here we go, kids, off to paradise.”
“You always say that, Dad,” Jasmine said one crossing when the wind was so strong, it felt like it was blowing the barge across the water.
“Because it’s true, Jazzy,” he said.
But after I told Duncan I was bored, he gave up Lingalonga for the next two weeks, sending his wives in his place and squiring me for a solid fortnight to parties, balls, charity auctions, gallery openings, and concerts, until we both collapsed in the studio, exhausted.
“Tallulah,” he said one morning when he picked me up, having only dropped me off in a taxi a couple of hours earlier, “I can’t do this much longer.”
“But you said I had to get out there and meet new people; you said I was old before my time; you said, if I remember correctly, I had to scratch the itch before I forgot where it was.”
“I know,” he said, miserably, “but it’s killing me.”
The truth was, it was killing me too, I was just enjoying watching Duncan squirm every time we went out and he was set upon at the door: “Duncan McAllister, you old dog, where have you been!”; “Don’t tell me you’re still alive, McAllister, which wife are we up to now?”; “Oooh, Mr. McAllister, you’re even more handsome in the flesh than you are on the radio!”—encounters he seemed to relish and be repulsed by at the same time. I was watching him one night, standing by a wall at a cocktail party at a gallery he had insisted we go to—“Lots of arty types there, Lulu, you might meet someone vigorous”—when a man came and stood beside me.
“Hello,” he said to me, leaning his back against the wall, “do you mind if I share your wall? Nowhere to sit, of course, never is at these things.”
“No, I don’t mind,” I said, looking at him—blue eyes; short, wavy blond hair; open-necked checked shirt; navy pants, and wondered if you could call him vigorous.
“I’m Ben Moreton,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Lulu de Longland,” I said, taking it.
“Great name.”
“Thank you.”
“So, what brings you here?” he asked.
Not vigorous, I decided. “I came with my boss, actually,” I said. “I’m not sure why.”
Ben Moreton smiled.
“I came by with a mate,” he said. “I’m not sure why either.”
Not vigorous, but nice.
We both stared out at the party, watching as a shout of laughter and a ripple of shoulders erupted from the group where King Platinum Tonsils was holding court.
Ben said, “That’s the radio bloke, isn’t it, Duncan McAllister? I really can’t stand him, can you? He’s so, I don’t know, predictable.”
“Actually, he’s my boss.” I smiled.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” said Ben. “I really don’t know why I was going on about him like that, I mean I don’t even know the man, I expect he gets that a lot.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Duncan’s that sort of person—people either love him or hate him.”
“What about you?”
“I love him,” I said, watching Duncan blowing smoke rings across the room and poking his fingers through them.
“Then I take back every single thing I said about him, Lulu de Longland.”
Not vigorous, but very, very nice.
Later, as Duncan, Ben, and I walked to the car—Ben’s mate was long gone, but Ben had stayed on, offering to drive us home—there was a flurry at the door of the gallery as Annie Andrews walked in just as we were walking out.
“Platinum Dick!” she cried—Annie, hair graying, kohl a little thicker, perfume a little more cloying, but still unmistakably Annie.
I had not seen her since I had run from her house that final day of senior year, except once, on television, accepting the 1985 Archibald Prize for her “raw, intimate, and engaging portrait of Fergus Andrews, documentary maker and brother-in-law to the artist.”
Now, there she was, right in front of me, her eyes widening as she realized who I was.
“Tallulah!” she said, “you’ve no idea how much we’ve all missed you.”
Annie, drunk, grabbing at me with her jeweled hands.
I couldn’t see anything except those hands scrabbling at me to take me back to where I did not want to go, her purple mouth saying, “This is amazing, this is amazing, Annabelle will be so pleased I saw you,” until Ben somehow stood between us and shut the door, dragging Duncan and me with him.
“Time to go, I think,” he announced.
“Our hero,” Duncan simpered, then collapsed in Ben’s arms.
“Right,” he said, “let’s get old Platinum Dick home.”
I giggled.
“Then maybe you could tell me who that woman was, or maybe not, or when you’re ready.”
Very, very, very nice.
Ben worked in his family’s shoe company, Moreton’s Shoes—“Keeping Australia on Its Feet Since 1967”—mostly in the import department, which meant he traveled to Asia frequently and that by the time we moved in together exactly twelve months later, I had amassed a ridiculously large shoe collection.
“Lucky you’ve got such tiny feet, Lulu,” he would say, kissing my toes. “So many great styles fit you.” I loved Ben kissing my toes, but I didn’t love him saying, “So many great styles fit you,” just like I didn’t love him telling people that between his family keeping Australia on its feet and mine plumbing the depths of excellence, we had the nation’s best interests covered, or the way he rang me at work when the show was on to ask things like, “Are we still set for Tony and Kate’s on Saturday night?”
“Uh-huh,” I’d say, keeping an eye on the flashing phone lines, “six thirty.”
“Great,” he’d say. “Great, do we have to bring anything? I could do that rocket-and-feta salad if you like.”
“That sounds good,” I’d say. “I really have to go now.”
“Okay, Lulu, sorry to interrupt, see you at home later.”
“ ‘Rocket-and-feta salad’?” Duncan’s voice boomed through my cans. “How very Martha Stewart of him.”
“Shut up, Duncan,” I said, “and stop listening in on my calls.”
“They’re my calls, actually, Lulu,” he said. “Remember Mornings with McAllister, the name of the show? You’re actually meant to be answering the phone for moi!”
“Fine,” I said, and put Peter the mad postman from Hobart through to punish him.
Ben was twenty-nine to my twenty-three when we met, but he still had the baby-faced cheeks of his youth, making him look like a schoolboy in his suit, and he was an excellent shoe salesman; women, in particular, were unable to resist buying once he had their heels in his hands.
His father, Jeremy, looked just like him, except for some graying at his temples. He was a quiet, solid man who worked hard, played tennis two nights a week, and wrote thoughtful letters to the papers about import tax.
I liked Jeremy Moreton very much; I liked Ben’s mother, Fiona, too, a pale, blond woman with an excellent shoe collection who always had a whiskey and soda at five o’clock.
Ben had three older sisters—Maria, Gwen, and Lois—who adored him and had always been vaguely suspicious of his girlfriends, the three of them hovering around me at family functions and asking questions like, “What do you think we should get Ben for his birthday this year, Lulu?” to see if I knew the answer.
But I liked them, especially Maria, who was an animal lover and, despite her family pedigree, absolutely refused to wear leather. The Moreton girls seemed to like me too, accepting my presence by their brother’s side pretty much seamlessly.
Seamless.
That was the thing about Ben and me: after the night we met, and he called the next day to see how Duncan was and to ask me out for lunch, our lives blended neatly one into the other with no messy edges.
We went out to dinner together, he started swimming with me one night a week, he sent me funny postcards when he went on buying trips, and when he asked me to move in with him I did, my furniture fitting neatly into all the empty spaces in his apartment.
I left for work while he was still sleeping, would get home a few hours before he did, so I would have some time to myself before we had dinner together. Then I would go to bed early, Ben padding around the apartment carefully in order not to wake me.
In between, our lovemaking was easy, unhurried. Not what you’d call vigorous, but nice.
Sometimes, however, when Ben had tucked me in and kissed my forehead with a “Sweet dreams, Lulu,” I would close my eyes, and another man would whisper, “Hello, Tallulah-Lulu,” and I would know every inch of his skin.