THIS IS A TROPICAL STORY that takes place in a hotel in the tropics. But not really, because even though it was on the waterfront, it was the rainy season. Rain thrashed against the glass, and humidity made the outside world a cloud. We were all gathered there, along with our children. Brynhild’s children were also there, as was their father, who was a jazz trumpet player, but she wasn’t. I realized that she would arrive however at any moment, and arrive she did, while I was at the hotel restaurant getting a coffee. I walked back into the room and saw her, but only from behind. The jazz trumpeter was seated beside her. He was stroking her arm and talking to her gently. It was odd because they had been divorced for ages. She told me that he broke her heart. The old boy was in bright spirits. Said he was heading to San Francisco soon for a show. But Brynhild, she just sat there, staring through the humidity, in her tight shirt, with her red curly hair fastened in a clip. Brynhild sat there and never turned to face me.
After that, I went back to the hotel restaurant. There were two women having sandwiches at a table. They were older than me, maybe 10 or 15 years older, and were modeling the very latest in 1980s fashion. No one, it seems, had told them that it was the Twenties. One of these 1980s models was lighter, with golden hair. The other was a brunette. The lighter-haired one, who looked a little bit too much like Kylie Minogue in the ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ years, lifted her Benetton t-shirt and implored me to link her pink breasts, which I did with great haste. It seemed odd to me that I was licking a woman’s breasts in a hotel in the tropics while she conversed with a girlfriend over a club sandwich. That she looked like a young Kylie was, I guess, some kind of perverse bonus. After that, she asked me to come back to her suite.
A few days later, I went to a sweet shop in town. It had stopped raining and a rainbow was breaking over the harbor, I stopped in, and a young woman greeted me. She was dressed in the white uniform of a confectioner. The woman had red hair and looked nothing like the girl in the Benetton shirt at the hotel. But she claimed that she was the same woman. “Don’t you recognize me?” she said, taking my hand. “We’re in love.” We were? How could this be. It couldn’t be the same woman. Or could it? Maybe she was a shapeshifter. Kylie was also known for changing her style. It was rather odd that I had sucked on her breasts in a hotel restaurant. It was rather odd that she was still wearing Benetton. But stranger things had happened.
north! 