Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

She was wearing a kimono, something silken and festooned with flushing pink orchids (something new, he anxiously observed), and she had just bathed. He seemed to feel heat coming off her skin in feverish waves, and when he turned to more fully take her in, he noticed she’d applied makeup to her eyes in the style she’d sometimes worn when they were young, with little black wings darting out from the far corners of her lash line. That gesture — toward her youth and away from their aging — touched him, as did the gleam of girlish embarrassment in those made-up eyes. He was reminded of the first time they’d stood alone together, when she’d bared herself to him with such complete submission to her new role as his wife, to the requirement of their spontaneous intimacy. And it came to him that all of her maddened activities of late might have been directed toward just this — toward a rekindling of something almost extinguished within her and between the two of them.

“Am I interrupting you?” she said softly.

“Not at all,” he told her.

“Would you make love to me, then?”

“Excuse me?”

What an idiot he was, asking her to explain what he all at once utterly wanted. She was still a young woman, not yet thirty-five, still luminous, still hungering for a contact he could provide. But as though to convince him of all of this, and as though to persuade him to give her what she needed (just as she had on their wedding night), she took the comb from her hair (the same sandalwood comb he’d given her then!), reenacting her initial gesture of seduction — the unraveling of her incomparable hair, which he’d always been powerless to defend himself against.

For a moment, he stood observing her, now cloaked by the hair that reached to her feet and seemed almost to want to protect her. Then he went and took her warm face in his hands, and kissed her, and found alcohol on her breath. And (shoving away the thought that perhaps she’d been less loosened than misdirected by that alcohol’s influence) he drew the kimono off her shoulder.

“Don’t stop,” she said, clutching the kimono and closing it again over her chest.

“Khin—”

“Don’t speak.”

“All right.”

He buried his nose in her hair, in the crook of her neck. It was like entering a deep and endless flower, his senses primordially awakened.

“Tell me you want me,” she said.

“I want you.”

Firmly again, he drew her closer and pulled the kimono aside (and then pushed away his confusion about why she was fighting to keep herself clad, drawing the kimono up over her shoulder again).

“I want to see you,” he said.

“Please don’t talk.”

“But you’re beautiful.”

“No.”

He reached within the kimono to try to take her ample breasts in his hands, but she jerked away, staggered back, wrapping up her fountain of mussed hair with one hand, clasping the kimono over her chest with the other.

“What is it?” he said.

With a desolate, panicked glance she took in the surface of his room — of his desk — where he spent so many of his hours away from her. She seemed to be looking for an outward cause of a festering inner condition.

“Were you writing a love letter?” she said. And there it was: the old accusation, a habit she couldn’t quit.

“Maybe,” he lied, because he couldn’t seem to quit the habit of their distrust, either.

“Who is she?”

“Someone I got to know in prison. Someone very dignified.”

Immediately, he was sorry. But it was too late. In her stricken face, he saw so much hurt he couldn’t speak.

Not even when she said, before rushing out of the room, “Why is it so hard for you to love me?”

Over the next few days, before the dreaded Miss Karen State pageant, Khin retreated behind the fog of their thickening estrangement. When they were in the same room, her glance would not penetrate as far as him, and he had the sensation of vanishing, of being vanished. He no longer existed for her. All that existed was Louisa’s beauty — or Khin’s refashioning of it. That was the lighthouse that promised to deliver her from the life she’d built with him.

She woke before dawn on the day of the contest — Benny heard her scurrying up and down the stairs — and by the time he came down for breakfast, she was dressed and almost calm, having her morning conversation in the kitchen with Hta Hta, while Louisa sat in her bathrobe at the dining room table, her own hair and makeup already done. There was nothing garish about that makeup, he saw as soon as he sat across from his daughter. On the contrary, the artistry typical of so much of Khin’s sewing and gardening — the delicacy, the naturalness — had been brought to bear on the girl’s lovely face, so that his next impression, when Louisa smiled sympathetically at him over the light morning meal of coffee and fruit she’d been permitted, was that somehow Khin had managed to clarify rather than muddy what was already there: the imprint of authenticity, of decency, and also of. of what? As Louisa continued to take him in, he became aware of being read by her intelligence, of being assessed . And there was something smoldering beneath the surface of her astute gaze, something that told him that she, too, was acquainted with inner demons. What she had survived (whatever she had survived, for Benny still didn’t really know what had happened to his children during their years apart) — what she had suffered and overcome — had made its mark and dignified her beauty, made it extraordinary.

All of this, Khin, too, must have seen. And it unsettled Benny. It unsettled him all that morning and afternoon, as he sat waiting, stupidly, for his family to return to him.

“I made the mistake of suggesting this stupid business to your mother,” he said to Louisa later that day, after she and her entourage had returned from the pageant, and Khin and Hta Hta with the little ones had disappeared upstairs. Louisa lay stretched out on the sofa across from him, smiling vaguely up at the ceiling, as though she were actually glad to have been named Miss Karen State.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, the blush of exertion — or excitement — on her cheek.

“How did you get through it?”

Now she turned her amused eyes to him, as if to say that there was nothing about the subject she had to avoid. “I pretended to be somebody else,” she said simply. “As somebody else, I could actually sort of enjoy it. Of course, the real me saw how funny it was — to be standing in a bathing suit with a bunch of other girls, in front of an auditorium of people who were fully dressed. Funny and embarrassing. To act the way the other girls seemed to want to act, silly and flirty, like you’ve never read a serious book, and you’re desperate to be looked at — like you think your body’s so interesting. ‘ Just look at m e! Don’t you love my big behind?’”

She laughed, and without a false note, he observed. And how reassuring that she’d found a way to cope, to lessen the pageant’s seriousness and power to demean her by casting herself as a player in a parody.

“Not so big,” he said with a chuckle.

“Yes, it is!”

It was marvelous, the way she could laugh at herself, laugh the whole thing off, not to shield an inherent vanity, but because too much vanity was repellent to her. He loved to watch her laugh, something she did more freely, he’d noticed, when they were alone together, and when she seemed to leave her body and her beauty — to leave it on a shelf — in order to more fully become herself.

“You can picture Mama,” she said, as Johnny ambled into the darkening room, a tormented look on his brow. “ ‘Tighten your buttocks! It jiggles too much when you walk! Tighten it!’ I was so worried about what she would think as I jiggled across the stage, I could hardly think.”