Sunil Yapa - Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

* * *

Thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, finished with his reports for now, he was flipping the pages of a magazine, not really looking, just killing time, when he realized the woman he was looking at in the pages of the magazine was the same as the woman seated next to him.

He almost spilled his fourth cup of tea.

He couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at her.

He looked at her.

She was asleep, or feigning sleep, beneath a blue blanket embossed with gold feathers and an eye mask of the same.

He tried to recline his seat, turn it into a bed of his own. He’d take a nap. Close his eyes and avoid the embarrassment. There was a panel of control buttons to his right, but he couldn’t get the thing to go back even an inch. He fumbled. He didn’t get where he was by being flummoxed by every beautiful woman that ever sat down next to him. Goddamn it, man, why won’t this thing go back?!

He glanced again. Still asleep.

Don’t make a bloody fool of yourself.

He could smell her.

He looked again at his magazine. Devouring the details. She was an actress, young but not in her first youth. A string of romantic comedies. A failed action flick. A failed marriage to a Hollywood star.

She stared at him from the pages with a clear-eyed gaze.

You are the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning. Get ahold of yourself.

Then she was out of her own bed and leaning across him, blanket falling from her long cat’s body, revealing a sari of all things. Stretched across him, pushing the proper button to make the seat recline.

“These things…,” she said with a smile.

Stretched across him. God help him, were those her breasts pressed against his shoulder? Her famous breasts?

He looked at her in alarm as she returned to her bed and curled into it, legs tucked childlike beneath her.

“Thorry,” she said, and removed a piece of plastic from her teeth. She wrapped the plastic thing in a napkin and set it in a plastic container beside her.

“I wear this retainer? For my teeth? Stupid, I know.”

“No, no, no,” he said.

“A grown woman. I mean where’s my teddy bear? Where’s my blankie?” Blankie. She said the word philosophically, slowly, as if throwing it out into the world to see what deeper meanings would come echoing back and he liked her immediately — her presence, her humor, the honesty with which she presented herself.

The stewardess passed back through the cabin with the tray of champagne glasses and she was stretched across him again, a pale powdery flowery smell and was it necessary to stretch across him like this? She took the champagne flute and said to the stewardess, “And a little Chambord, too, please, if you have it.”

He was fully reclined, staring straight at the molded ceiling. His spine rigid. He rolled his neck to and fro, caught her eye. She nodded at the tray, as if to say go on, and he reached and gently took a flute of his own.

“Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers.”

They lay talking in their seats, pleasantly fuzzed, drinking their Kir Royales, the name of which of course he had just learned. Lovely drink. How lovely to drink it in bed. Why had he never tried this? What part of him loved this? They were a world of two, and he was a grandfather and a diplomat, a widower alone with his work, at peace with his business, his solitude; he had three grown children, two girls and a son, and he had experienced domestic bliss, or something like it, the warm encumbrance of a happy home, but he had never experienced anything like this.

“So, Dr. Wickramsinghe. Is that right? Is that how you say it?”

“Call me Charley. Please.”

He perhaps enjoyed the pleasures of the West a little too much. A good scotch. The tenderness of a filet, medium rare. Why was it a steak in Sri Lanka never quite tasted like a steak grilled in the States? And the women. He had always loved Western women, their beauty and ferocity, and yet they were a reminder of the foolish young man he once had been, when he had found fair skin to be more beautiful than brown. More beautiful than black. How strange.

“Charley. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where are you from? Originally, I mean.”

“I was born in Sri Lanka.”

A little happy shriek from her red mouth and heads in the business cabin were turning.

She stared back. Oh, the authority of a glance, he thought. The power of a famous face. The other passengers looked away.

“You’ve heard of it?” he said. “A small island in the Indian Ocean?”

“Heard of it?” She leaned over and squeezed his arm. “I love Sri Lanka. I was in Sri Lanka earlier this year. Oh, how lucky you are,” she said. “What a paradise.”

He nodded, and yet he didn’t know what to say. He was thinking of 1983. The riots. The war which had been raging for fifteen years since with no sign of abating. He thought of his house in Colombo behind two lines of concrete wall and wire. Of the two armed guards who manned the gate, M16 rifles at the ready. He thought of his neighbors’ homes which had burned in the rioting. Thought of his neighbors’ daughters who had burned in the rioting. A paradise, she says. What kind of paradise was this where young girls burned?

She was looking at him intently, her hand on his arm, and he liked her attention. An intelligent woman. God knows she was beautiful, and powerful, too, her opinion mattered, her good opinion of Sri Lanka as valuable as any tourist brochure, but perhaps it was better to tell the truth. “It is an extraordinary country in many ways,” he said. “We have much to be proud of. But paradise is not always what it seems.”

She was silent for a moment. But then she nodded, saying, “I know I’m not an expert. I put on a shirt and the tag says: Made in Sri Lanka. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just put the shirt on and go on my way. I know where Sri Lanka is, of course, but do I know what it is?”

He nodded and under the spell of an intuition, placed a hand on her blanket above the ankle.

“I know you probably think I’m just another self-absorbed celebrity. But I’m not. I’m a human being. I have thoughts. I have feelings just like anybody else. I know what the world is.”

He nodded and gently squeezed. She bent toward him, forgetting for the moment perhaps that she was wearing a sari. A shawl of blue and gold silk wrapped around her shoulders and across the chest, which left her stomach exposed. She moved her hand to brush hair from her face, and the effect was not so much erotic as evocative, the soft swish of the silk was a light whisper in his mind, a long echoing memory, and the years dropped away, and he was once again a boy in a musty schoolroom shaded by spindly palms, chalk dust in the air, and his schoolteacher, a nun from England, pondering aloud, upon seeing his mother and the other ladies waiting for their children outside the schoolyard gate. The nun clucking her tongue disapprovingly and saying, “Look at those bellies. Tell me, children. Have your mothers no shame?”

And the star student, the brilliant child understanding for the first time what the nun might mean. Feeling for the first time the shame of those exposed stomachs, the ridiculousness of how his mother dressed. What had they been trying to accomplish, those nuns, those English bureaucrats and their sprawling empire of oranges and tobacco? Two decades of education. Forever molded to be English, and yet not English at all because that was not possible. Like clay cast in an inferior mold, the products were forever breaking, forever found wanting. Forever cracked.

She pulled the blanket to her neck and smiled at him. She was more beautiful still, vulnerable and raw, looking him full in the face, searching his eyes.

“Charley,” she said, “2.9 billion people are going to make less than two dollars today. Do you know how much I made for my last movie?”