Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

He couldn’t have guessed how exposed she felt, divulging what she knew he’d kept concealed from her. He couldn’t have guessed that she was asking for a place by his side politically. Nor could he have imagined that she would take any refusal to grant her entry into that covert world as a declaration of, if not war between them, a stalemate of a kind.

Or perhaps, by some ineffable sense of the soul that had already begun to pass into him long before, he glimpsed all that lay behind her question. But a darkness spread over his usually shining face. And he said, “Trust me,” and put the pistol back in its holster, and looked off toward the banana tree. Did he see something there, too, or was she just imagining that, in blasting its one stalk full of fruit, she’d wrecked something precarious in the universe, tipped an invisible scale the balance of which she and he, and maybe all the Karens, were dependent on?

Trust me . She wanted to trust him, but how to trust when she wasn’t entrusted with his confidence? How to trust when she was troubled by certain things he was doing in the name of trust?

On the night before the inaugural session of talks, when she was newly pregnant, she accompanied Lynton to the Government House, where, only fifteen months before, when their world had been a different place, she had last seen Katie. She had very nearly bowed out of going along with Lynton (the headache she’d been battling all day was less a convenient excuse not to attend the statehouse party than a manifestation of her dread of doing so), but Lynton’s firm look of gratitude when she donned the brilliant blue silk sarong he’d given her spoke of nothing but his trust that she would come through for him tonight. And, well, hadn’t she had her own reasons for regularly entering the viper’s pit in her previous life? And weren’t Lynton’s reasons far nobler than the self-protective and cowardly ones that had once been hers?

The headache, it turned out, was an early symptom of the sickness that swept over her as soon as she was back in the Ne Wins’ atmosphere. The smell of too much disinfecting fluid mixed with the perfume of cultivated flowers, the sour taste of fear on the air, the hysteric whine of false laughter — it all activated in her an old nausea that she’d thought she would never have to feel again. While Lynton charged through the Government House’s crowd toward some official-looking pair, she stood bracing herself in a corner, no more able to plunge into one of the overwrought conversations unfolding before her than she was willing to feign interest in the loud painting of Katie on one of the walls. Instead, she looked frankly at the real version of her hostess, theatrically holding forth across the glittering hall. From the way Katie evasively threw her eyes in Louisa’s direction now and again, it was obvious that the woman had noticed her and also that she wanted to pretend not to be interested in what she’d noticed. Was it only Louisa’s own coming-of-age that imparted a weary bitterness to Katie’s expressions, which appeared, instead of willfully playful as they’d once been, somehow obedient to her present circumstances as the wife of the country’s new dictator (who was nowhere to be found at his own party)? How hard, how final Katie’s face had become during this past year.

Abruptly, the woman spun around toward her with an unattractive smirk almost worthy of pathos. It seemed, that smirk, to admit to Katie’s fear that the rumors might be at least partially true.

“My dear,” she said when she had traversed the parting crowd and stood before Louisa. “What are you doing, gaping away at me as if we’ve never been introduced before? You’re very changed.” She eyed Louisa from head to toe with the bluntly appraising eyes of someone who had no reason to conceal her spite for others.

“I suppose I am,” Louisa told her.

“You’ve certainly lost your manners,” the woman said. “No doubt being married to a boor doesn’t help.”

Rarely had Louisa encountered such rudeness. Yet she seemed to hear something personal in Katie’s words — as though what the woman begrudged her was not so much her new boldness as the fact of her marriage to Lynton.

“I’m afraid I lost my manners even before marrying,” Louisa told her. “You remember my last boyfriend. ” The woman had never paid much attention to anything she didn’t care to notice, and now she looked at Louisa with glazed perplexity. “I brought him here with me — before the rumors.”

The smile that pressed itself into the corners of Katie’s mouth was almost moving — it so visibly attempted to erect a defense against the memory of what those rumors had reported. And all at once Louisa felt a pang of contrition.

But the woman said, “That simpleton? He must have been devastated to learn you ran off with our most famous womanizer.” She gestured toward Lynton, and the speed with which her waving hand located him in the thick of the crowd told Louisa that her interest also lay with him.

“He’s dead,” Louisa said, to redirect that interest. “He was in the student union building.” The student union building that was dynamited by your husband’s henchmen, she didn’t have to add.

The way the woman’s eyes blinked: it was as if her body were more compassionate than she was, or as if she were trying, with all her might, to stop that body from submitting to its innate capacity to feel for another soul encased in flesh. She was shocked — and appalled — that much was evident. But she couldn’t break out of the meanness that must have become her way of surviving.

“You’ve been invited here to enjoy , Louisa,” she said finally, “not to trouble others with your complaints. Take a lesson from your husband. He knows how to play nicely with the toys he’s given.”

That husband had clearly seen the storm about to break. Suddenly, he appeared at Louisa’s side and put his arm around her waist, peering at her so reassuringly that she was powerless not to want to trust him in his pursuits all over again.

“I see you two have started up where you left off,” he said with a laugh that was disarmingly sincere.

“I’ve always found your wife amusing,” Katie told him. “But you know what I find amusing, don’t you, Lynton?” And without giving him a moment to respond: “What was the name of that woman, Louisa? That doctor you wanted me to try to help — the one in prison?”

It was enough to take Louisa’s breath away, to make her wonder if she’d somehow misjudged everything about Katie tonight. “Rita Mya,” she stumbled. “From what I understand, she’s still being detained.”

There was a flash of something vulnerable and sad in Katie’s eyes. “What a shame,” she said quietly, before she turned her gaze to some cluster of guests across the room and made a show of urgently needing to speak to them.

As they watched her slip away, Lynton leaned in and whispered, “Don’t believe a word she says.”

Louisa watched the woman join the group of spontaneously laughing guests. Then she said, “It makes me sick to think of you talking to her husband.”

She couldn’t doubt Lynton, though. There was something almost spiritual about the way he proceeded to disarm himself. Even the way he stared up at the ceiling before turning out the lamp at night told her, over the next few difficult months, that his surrender was exactly the measure of his rebellion, that under the cover of this strained peace an action greater than any on the battlefield was taking place.

Still, she was surprised to find that one of his allies was American.

It was October, she was several months into her pregnancy, and she and Lynton were having cocktails at the Orient Club with a British embassy man named Tom Erwin and his handsome German wife, Hannah-Lara — two in a long line of Lynton’s “friends” to whom Louisa had recently been introduced.