Miss Burma by Craig Charmaine

Author:Craig, Charmaine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

He had been afraid that, up close, Rita’s soul would be less recognizable to him, or that, on the contrary, their recognition of each other might be so complete that he would have no choice but to call an end to his marriage. But as soon as he was led into the visiting shed, nine months after his release—as soon as he saw Rita sitting in the failing light—he knew he had no reason to fear. There was a kind of silent declaration of being emanating from her skin. It filled him to bursting with compassion. It made him want to shout with regret, with rage over her aloneness and constriction. But not with passion.

For a while they just observed the unexpected awkwardness of sitting together. He sank into the rickety chair across from her and allowed her to take him in: middle-aged (could it be he was really only thirty-two?), wrecked of body, somehow surfacing from a grief as profound as any he’d succumbed to in his life. And he confronted the realness of her face, her extraordinary thinness, which seemed to have something to do with the faint lines over her thickly lashed amber eyes, with the knot of her wiry hair, and with the dryness of her fine fingers resting on the lip of the table. He didn’t want to notice her dissimilarity to what he’d imagined, her slight and innocuous imperfections, but, yes, the animal in him confirmed what it had sensed the moment he’d walked in: that he was safe from chemical interest in her, and just as helpless not to give off cues that would tell her as much. Would she be disappointed?

As if to prove to him that she was beyond either baseness or judgment, she broke into that familiar expression of generous ­kindness—her smile!—and he had to look back at the door for a moment in order to conceal his sudden rush of emotion.

“I don’t see Zay,” he muttered stupidly.

“Who?”

Her voice! Even with this simple, banal question, it resonated with gentleness, centeredness.

He turned back to the vision of her still smiling searchingly at him. “I tried to come before,” he stumbled. “Several times. But they were intent to have me wait only to turn me away. Once I brought a cake—a pineapple cake Khin made—”

Was he imagining that a subtle change came over her face at the mention of Khin’s name (which he hadn’t meant to mention), a diminishment of her smile’s generousness, a closing of her eyes’ vast reach? Or was it only that he was seeing her through the lens of his own intensified embarrassment—about being sorry for recklessly mentioning his wife, about having lied to that wife by repeatedly claiming to be visiting an old business colleague, about knowing—knowing, now—that he did belong to Khin.

“One of the guards,” he persisted, “had a fine time turning the cake into a pulp with a rod, looking for razors or some such thing. And then today, they waved me in with no trouble at all.

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