Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

And he couldn’t help thinking of just that word—“undesirable”—toward the end of the festivities, when he and Khin stood side by side before the chapel, she now donning the red-and-black sarong of a married woman, her lips splashed vermilion with betel juice. He hadn’t been permitted a taste of those lips. Karens, he was learning, showed no affection — at least of that kind — publicly. No shortage of attractive girls had taken Khin by the hand or squeezed her soft forearm in solidarity and tenderness; even the men strolled about the muddy square in front of the chapel with their arms around one another. But for Benny? Not so much as a touch from Khin. And now, posed with her before the chapel, he was told that they must ritualistically pay off a string of villagers blocking the boulder-strewn path that led to his Buick and by extension their new home, that private sphere created for the very purpose of satisfying their desire for closeness.

“Part of our culture,” the excitable preacher explained as he gestured toward the line of villagers. “You must give them your rupees.” Benny sought out Khin’s evasive gaze, and then took her hand and pressed into it a clutch of coins that she received with a calmness appearing almost burdened by effort, such that her serenity suddenly struck him as the effect of a tremendous harnessing of will.

Yet laughing lightly, she began to toss the coins in bright arcs to the merry villagers. And Benny chided himself for not being merrier, for feeling so very undesired, so undesirable, even as he made a show of pulling his pockets inside out to indicate his anxious poverty, to the general jollity of the villagers (why was he playing the imbecile again?). God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us, he reminded himself, and then he pushed the phrase out of his mind because it embarrassed him to seek such shelter from his loneliness with his new bride smiling beside him.

Yes, the wedding and its aftermath had presented him with a series of thorny disappointments. But then.

Then .

He had made all the arrangements for the flat on his own, selecting a few mahogany and teak pieces including a glass-fronted cupboard and a dressing table, on which he’d placed an artfully shaped, fragrant sandalwood comb. It was to this comb that Khin was initially drawn on that first night together, after he led her through the small living room to the bedroom, where he set down her bags. Immediately, her eyes searched the dim room — not in a panic, not for an escape route, it seemed to him, but to take in the proportions of what life had offered up to her. She lingered over the sight of the comb, then crossed to the dressing table and picked the comb up.

“For you,” he said, and she seemed to understand. She ran her finger over the comb’s scalloped edge, and he watched her in the act of perceiving it. Here he was, with a generous and utterly exclusive view of her engaged in this private moment of perception. He now had permission to watch; the last time he had been permitted that closeness was in the presence of Mama and Daddy, who’d expected him to study them as living examples of how to be human.

She didn’t smile, but the comb clearly touched her, and he saw her relax. The change was slight, starting somewhere in her shoulders. Not a forced loosening, but one he thought arose from her finally being apart from everyone else’s eyes but his own.

Without sitting, she turned to the dressing table’s mirror, set down the comb, and looked at his reflection behind hers. He watched her in the yellow lamplight, watched her watching him watching, watched his own astonished eyes, taking in the new and ancient pleasure of feeding another’s desire to be watched. He could see now, for the first time, what they looked like side by side: as physically different as human creatures could be from each other — he at least a foot taller than she and nearly twice her width, with features that appeared the inverse of hers (he’d never noticed how elongated, how tapered his face was, a perfect contrast to her flat, square-jawed one). The difference excited him, daunted him; he felt blood flow to certain places even as it drained from others, and he wanted to go to her, to watch her doing just this and just for him.

For a moment, her gaze lowered, and she pulled gently at the waist of her sarong. It fell instantly along with the lace petticoat beneath it, and he saw (because she’d worn no underwear!) the white curves of her backside and ample hips, and, reflected in the mirror, the generous thatch of her black hair. Swiftly, she raised her arms and removed her black embroidered top, and he saw the pucker of fat around her waist, the surprisingly heavy breasts, each focused on a petite dark areola. Now her eyes returned almost impassively to meet his — as though to communicate to him that she was in familiar territory, and expected that in this she had the upper hand. And did she? My God! This was not the nervously giggling girl he had encountered at the sessions judge’s house in Akyab! This was. a gift so unsurpassable, he was sure it would be abruptly retracted, that she would come to her senses and hide herself again in the sarong.

A shy smile tremulously lit up her face as she continued to watch him, pity and feeling passing like shadows over her eyes. She seemed suddenly vulnerable, suddenly afraid, as though she would cry, or as though this were in fact all new to her and she had only been fumbling for how to start.

In one sure step, he went and knelt before her and turned her around, and then he pressed against her damp warm scent, looking up past the pendulous breasts at her frightened, waiting eyes.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She couldn’t answer, but she held him with her eyes. It is enough that we are here, she silently communicated.

He was twenty, and she was eighteen. And they had discovered in each other a reprieve from loneliness beyond measure.

And yet their new intimacy was not perfect. Khin, he learned, spoke nearly fluent Burmese — the language of the Burmans (utterly distinct from the Karen language, he was learning, though apparently of the same tonal family). Soon he discovered that if he put some effort into cultivating his memory of Burmese, which had wilted after his Rangoon boyhood ended, whole branches of its syntax sprouted up in his mind. But it had never been his native language any more than it was hers, and there was something pathetic about the way he used it to draw closer to Khin, something disturbing about even their most harmless verbal exchanges. “You like?” he thought she asked one evening, when they were at the table and he started to wipe his nose and eyes while enjoying the smoky, spicy soup that she called ta ga poh —a mélange of rice, meat, greens, and bamboo shoots. “Tasty!” he chimed. Tasty. Like a Burman child. How he hated his swallowing, grinning self at that moment. As if to compensate for the deficiency of his words and praise for her, she pushed forward a little bowl of fermented fish paste (which she called nya u htee , but which he clumsily kept referring to as the similar Burman condiment nga pi ). Instead of helping himself to the savory paste, he took her hand, feeling alone and afraid he’d hurt her feelings. We will get through this, her steady, kind gaze seemed to communicate.

But would they? “I have been… move up!” he stammered some days later, meaning to tell her of his promotion to the grade of senior officer in the customs service. “Very good! Very… happy!” he caught her reply. And “We… baby,” he understood her to say a few weeks after, when he had returned from the wharves exhausted and she came to him in joy and timidity. Her hair was loose, and she had powdered her face, penciled in her eyebrows, and put on the small sapphire earrings that had been his wedding gift to her. “We… baby.” In Burmese. It was almost as though she were telling him that the pregnancy, the child, was already inadequate. “Very good. Very happy,” he found himself parroting. He had wanted to say everything . Instead he kept repeating “Very good. Very happy,” as he held her just inside the doorway, and she laughed without making a noise.