Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Settling into the club had meant navigating the hullaballoo that still followed Louisa in public: one or two people — this time a soldier with a rifle near the entrance — would recognize her and from there the attention would swell like a wave that she tried to crest or dive under with as much good humor as possible. Now, with that first great swell past them, and only ripples of persistent interest pulling at them, she concentrated her attention on Tom and Hannah-Lara and the shamelessly optimistic band playing on the other side of the dance floor by which Lynton had stationed them.

“But listen—” Lynton was saying to the table as he flagged down a waitress and gestured that he wanted another round. “Listen to what my refined wife did last night with a mosquito net.”

“No, no — first you have to tell them what you did,” Louisa insisted. “There we were, about to go to sleep, and it was hot, and our tempers were high—” It was almost as if they were a normal married couple, out to banter and intoxicate themselves with another lightly frustrated couple.

“And let me point out that this woman can shoot a banana out of a tree from a hundred and fifty feet off, ” Lynton interrupted her. “Enough to threaten my masculinity.”

“—and suddenly,” Louisa persisted, “he yanks down the mosquito net and throws it at the door and barks at me, ‘This one’s torn! Get me another!’”

“What a pig!” said Hannah-Lara. As if to reassure Louisa of the authenticity of their friendship, she’d been shining smiles across the lamplit table all night — graceful, unguarded, generous smiles that Louisa couldn’t help interpreting as reminders of Lynton’s isolation. They seemed to say, each one of those smiles, how regrettable it was that the West was indifferent to the Karens’ plight.

“I’m staying unaligned on this one,” Tom muttered, fingering his empty tumbler. “Never comment on marital spats. That’s my motto.”

“But you haven’t heard the best part,” Lynton returned. “Louisa bounds from the bed, pounces like a deranged cat onto the mosquito net, and lights the bloody thing on fire.”

Now Tom and Hannah-Lara began laughing (in confused dismay, it seemed) while Lynton’s eyes, Louisa noticed, darted across the congested dance floor. He couldn’t have been surprised that the swaying couples kept casting them glances, she thought. Yet she saw a strain of apprehension in his gaze when it fell on her.

“You must adore me to have been so incensed,” he said to her.

“I’ve never been so ashamed.”

“One of these days, you’ll learn that shame is useless.”

“Isn’t that Will ?” Tom cut in.

When Louisa turned, she spotted a Westerner entering in a stiff suit and overcoat. He’d come in from the rain, still wiping his glasses. That she’d never laid eyes on him, never even heard of him, was inconsequential; just the way he froze when he put on the glasses and caught sight of Lynton told her that he was significant to them.

And Lynton — if only for an instant — looked all at once disarmed by the man’s appearance in the club. When the stranger approached their table, Lynton jumped up and threw an overeager arm around his shoulders. “You know Hannah-Lara,” he said. “And this is Louisa.”

Like Lynton, the man could have been somewhere in his late thirties or early forties; his hair was all gray yet he smiled the bashful half-smile of a boy — a smile in which his peculiar combination of deference and remoteness seemed to melt and become embarrassment. His eyes landed on Louisa’s slightly distended abdomen, and, in the low light of the bar, she could see him color. He stepped back — to reel away from what he’d noticed, perhaps. “The general speaks highly of you,” he said to her, in the monotone accent she instantly recognized as being American.

She took the hand that he thrust out at her and was struck by the cautiousness of its clasp.

“Sit!” Lynton commanded him, as the waitress appeared. Lynton grabbed a Scotch from her tray and handed it to the American, while the astonished girl proceeded to set down the rest of their drinks. “My friend Will here,” Lynton told the table, “he never ceases to be fascinated by the question of whether or not the end justifies the means. I keep arguing my point that amusement with friends justifies the abundant consumption of liquor.”

“That better be all it justifies,” Louisa said.

Lynton gave her a playful wink, which seemed to scandalize the American, though he tried to laugh along with Hannah-Lara and Tom.

“I’m determined,” Lynton pressed on, “to use whatever substance I can to keep Tom away from the subject of Vietnam.”

“You can’t keep me from discussing the Burmese economy with him,” Tom jumped in. “You’re a businessman, Will — what do you make of the mass exodus from the country of all the foreigners who were holding the economy up? With the export-import businesses nationalized, with Ne Win’s demonetization of the currency — I daresay the situation’s hopeless.”

Only a Westerner could speak with such openness, Louisa thought, an openness that presumed to exist in a protected sphere.

“Sometimes it strikes me,” the American ventured after a tentative sip of Scotch, “that the hard times — the way everyone’s savings have vanished with the demonetization — it’s all had the effect of fueling the various insurgencies. Everyone is angry, disenfranchised, and that must have a relationship to the new movements springing up — like the Muslim National Liberation Party.” His eyes moved to Louisa’s. “Of course, it’s true that the economy is a shambles, which is why certain people are exiting, as you say. But others are fighting harder for a Burma whose face could look very different. I see hope in that—”

“And I see a wife who needs to dance,” Lynton interrupted him. He’d been drinking at a fever pitch, and now he wiped his own brow with his sleeve and gestured toward the band’s crooner, who had launched into an endearing interpretation of one of Presley’s hits, “It’s Now or Never.”

The American looked humiliated. He stared down at his knees, waiting, it seemed, for Lynton to do Louisa the honor, while Tom took a cue and drew Hannah-Lara out onto the dance floor. Then Lynton spotted someone he recognized across the room and sprang up after him.

A minute passed as they, who had been left, adjusted to being closed in together around the diminished cocktail table. “Are you an embassy man?” Louisa asked, at the very moment that the American blurted out, “Did I hear you met Zhou Enlai in China?”

She laughed as he fell visibly into his embarrassment again, and in their questions’ reverberations she heard all the tension of two people trying to make sense of a system of alliances in which little was knowable. His question, like hers, had been uttered offhandedly, yet the swiftness with which it had fallen from his lips betrayed that he had come to the table with it. It also revealed what Louisa took to be the American’s desperation to position her within his worldview, divided as it surely was between the Reds and all the rest. And something in her wanted to rebel against him (as she hadn’t been able to against U Nu, when he’d insisted through Katie that she join his delegation of celebrities to China, and as she hadn’t entirely been able to yet against Lynton, with all his secret alliances); something in her wanted to refuse this American, with his wish, no doubt, to declare her exclusively one of his or one of theirs .

“Not an embassy man, then?” she said to his increasingly worried expression.

“I’m sure I saw a photograph of you with the premier,” he said, flashing her a strained, false grin.