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.
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.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve seen many incriminating photos of me, Mr.—”
But Lynton came bounding back, more agitated than even before. “You haven’t gotten her to dance yet?” he reprimanded the American. “The song’s almost over!”
Lynton was up to something, she knew—something that might have been as simple as his wanting the American to shut up and pretend he had nothing to hide in this very unprotected sphere. And all at once the American did seem as though he had nothing to conceal or fear. He smiled that awkward boyish smile again, looking bashfully at her—almost as though he, and not Lynton or the crooner, were pleading with her for the last time to come hold him tight, to be his tonight. And suddenly she felt apologetic about her pregnant figure, her rebelliousness, all the indelicacy she’d just shown him.
“Come on,” she said, sliding out of the booth. “We have our orders.”
“I can’t—”
“It’s now or never,” she threw out with a laugh.
Only when they were fumbling into each other’s embrace did she notice the identical, cheap, government-issued sarongs and suits on almost everybody scampering across the dance floor. She and Lynton had been followed by spies before, though never by this many—at least thirty, forty . . . Of course, Lynton must have seen immediately that they were spies and trotted her out—to deflect their attention from him.
“Lynton?” she said instinctively.
She found him standing in the light of their table. But he wouldn’t meet her gaze. Wouldn’t dodge her fear and accusation with one of his frustratingly gallant smiles. Wouldn’t look at her at all. He was staring, searchingly, at the man locked in her arms
.
19
Conspiracy Theory
It wasn’t so unusual for Lynton to show up alone at the door with a few cartons of cigarettes or bags of rice (as if in guilty compensation for what he’d robbed Benny and Khin of—and what he’d robbed them of appeared to have too much pride to tag along during these visits). But right away when the man appeared in late December, a few days before Christmas, Benny knew—from the steeled look in Lynton’s eyes—that something had happened.
“Is it Louisa?” he asked the general when Hta Hta had left them alone in the living room (Khin was still too proud or ashamed to show her face to the man who’d chosen Louisa this time, and she’d scurried upstairs as soon as Lynton’s car had appeared on the drive). “She’s—” Benny sputtered, meaning to mention something about Louisa’s delicate state. He’d heard from Grace that Louisa was well into a pregnancy.
“She’s all right,” Lynton said, and held up the bottle of whiskey he’d brought with him. “May I?”
Benny sank breathlessly into his chair while Lynton poured them out generous doubles.
“A little nausea, that’s all,” Lynton went on, in a way that made Benny doubt him. He came and pressed a glass on Benny, along with a forced smile.
“Isn’t it late for nausea?”
Lynton shrugged as he sat, as if to indicate that such things—women’s things—were neither of interest nor comprehensible to him. Then, for a minute, he drank and stared at the wind-ruffled trees beyond the window. How out of place he seemed, poised tensely on the chair in this dilapidated old house where no action had occurred for years, other than that which was hidden, internal.
“Have I ever told you,” Benny uttered, surprising himself and trying, he realized, to put off whatever blow Lynton had come to deliver (and also trying to reclaim something else that Lynton had stolen from him?), “have I ever mentioned how it was I came to marry Khin? I was a preventive officer in His Majesty’s—the King of England’s—armed forces. It was my job to inspect the ships and seaplanes coming in and out of the port.” He could have been boasting, but he found himself gazing down into his glass as if not comprehending the clear liquid it contained. “One afternoon, after I’d searched a plane, I was crossing back to my office when I saw the most astonishing woman at the end of the jetty, dressed all in red, and accompanied by a child. Khin was a nanny, then—did you know?”
Miss Burma Page 30