The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  “I can’t help having to work, I run a business.”

  “I know that. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “When you get really busy, they barely notice, but with me, it’s a different story.”

  “Come on, that’s not true. They miss you, that’s all. I miss you. And you’re tired. You have a shorter fuse than usual.”

  It grew shorter still. “When the boys are clingy, they cling to me, not to you. Why is that? It’s suffocating sometimes. I wish you would read to them at night.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  His question walloped her right in the mouth. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t tell him the answer. She was angry because she had to be angry. In the midst of her various lies, she wanted one lie to be true: that Andrew had forced her, through deprivation, to this division between them. Hadn’t he? Hadn’t he forced her? She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to the lids. The tears, burning there, felt acidic, scalding. “I’m…I’m not angry.” Another lie. Was anything that came out of her mouth the truth anymore? “I’m exhausted.” There. True.

  “Then stay in bed and relax. The house is clean enough.” She felt him rolling over to look at her; his eyes touched her face. His tenderness made her feel sick. He asked, “Do you think it’s a disorder?”

  For a wild moment, she thought he meant her lying, or her attraction to women, to one woman in particular. But when she opened her eyes, Andrew was smiling at her.

  She should just tell him. Be honest. “Is what a disorder?”

  “All this cleaning. Maybe it’s OCD?”

  “I’m not obsessive compulsive, just…” Her brain searched dumbly for an acronym, while the rest of her—her body? her spirit?—experienced that nauseating dissonance, of another reality, another life unfolding alongside this one. “MWC. Married with children. Even if we clean up together in the morning, who’s going to wash the floor? All that rice from dinner. Jake still makes such a mess.”

  “Dear wife, you are not going to wash the floor at ten thirty at night.” He reached over and kissed her warm temple. “Do you want to…you know.” He smiled his flirtatious, come-hither crow’s-feet smile.

  “Now?” She couldn’t imagine anything worse. If they had sex, she would split open. “I don’t want to take you away from your book. You were enjoying it until I disturbed you.”

  He teased her. “You must be extremely stressed out if you’re turning down sexual advances from your husband.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  They turned toward each other, kissed, pulled away. “I’m not making fun.” He smiled, more handsomely still. “On the contrary, I’m heartbroken.”

  Eliza shook her head and flipped open her iPad; she would read online trade articles by flower sellers. That would calm her down.

  Andrew returned to his book, puzzled but relieved. He only skimmed the math that would eventually culminate in Turing’s Enigma machine. He was thinking about the appointment he’d had with his physiotherapist between his third-year class and his master’s seminar. The physio had spent forty minutes on him, releasing the facet joints on either side of his spine, studiously going through his new exercises, patiently making sure that he knew how to do them. As she had belted him into the traction machine, he had gazed at her bare athlete’s face with childish adoration. She could take away his pain! If she started a religion, he would join without hesitation. His back felt great; it felt normal.

  That was why he had to be careful. Whenever he was feeling good, he forgot about those two herniated discs. Two summers ago, when he and Eliza went away for a weekend to Niagara-on-the-Lake, they’d had energetic sex the Friday afternoon of their arrival. He’d felt the wobble in his lumbar spine, that indescribable shakiness. But the wine at dinner put him in such a wonderful mood that he went to bed without doing his exercises.

  The following morning, when Eliza sauntered out of the bathroom wearing her sexy black outfit, complete with black thigh-high stockings, he forgot about his back. But after their delightful acrobatics, he remembered, acutely, because he could not get out of bed. Muscle relaxants didn’t work; he couldn’t move without excruciating pain. Eventually, he managed to stand up and take a few hobbling steps, bent over like an old man.

  He felt a tapping noise as Eliza touched and re-touched a link on her iPad that refused to open. Her nudges at the screen were small, but passed, pulsing, through the bed. He glanced over just as her article appeared, topped with a photograph of a stainless steel flower fridge. She pulled the blanket up over her body; he did the same, without touching her. It was a relief, really; she was so busy with work that she had stopped complaining about their sex life.

  It wasn’t even wedding season yet, and she was going to the studio on weekend afternoons. He understood how consuming it was to run the business. But he also worried that she was becoming a workaholic. Though she would never admit it, she liked being overextended because it gave her a powerful sense of being at the centre of things. When she was really focused on work, though, she wasn’t at the centre of her own family. These last few weeks, even when she was home, she was scarcely there. Sometimes she didn’t hear the boys when they addressed her. She played with them, but he could see how absent she was. And no doubt the boys could feel it.

  It will pass, he thought, closing his book. He switched off his bedside lamp and turned on his side. He still felt Eliza’s fingertip bumping the screen. He gazed into the shadows blooming on his side of the room: deep grey, purple-grey, tar-black tunnelling into the corners. He loved the darkness. It made him think of the deep interior of his own and Eliza’s body. How strange, he thought, that the human heart beats in utter darkness. He closed his eyes, imagining it, the beautiful, unfathomable dark in the heart of the heart.

  25

  The History of the World

  THE NEWS CAME THE NEXT DAY, AS IT ALWAYS DOES. Three blocks from the Institute, Shar was in a hipster greasy spoon on Dupont Street, eating a sandwich and skimming the notes she’d taken that morning in class. A muted TV flickered its images up on the wall; something made her glance up just as the familiar face appeared. She quickly read the words scrolling down the side of the screen and swore out loud, despite the sandwich in her mouth. Then she took her napkin and spat the food into it.

  Eliza heard much later in the day, driving home from Fleur. The person in the car behind her had to lay on the horn to get her moving.

  Andrew found out first, in the morning, moments after he turned on his computer at the university. His homepage was a popular newsfeed. Adele Tabrizi, the broadcast journalist with the great black eyes and pulled-back curly hair, had returned to Egypt to report on the election. During a street protest, a group of men in the crowd separated her from her camera crew and handlers. Dozens of men had torn the clothes off her body and sexually assaulted her. A group of old Egyptian women saved her life. She was recovering in a hospital in Paris.

  —

  Shar sits in the wing chair in front of the big front window. The last of the day’s light falls across her left leg, left shoulder. Her diary is open on her lap. But she writes nothing. She remembers. No one knows what happened in Marseilles. It is the secret that allowed her to reconstruct herself.

  But it is also a lie. True, the police never discovered what happened. But she had told her therapist everything, the one in Vancouver who helped her so much. And someone else knows, too. Someone else knew that night.

  After returning to her grandmother’s house, the elegant old lady had woken up and slipped out of bed, flicked on the light. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” she murmured. She stretched out her arms to take Shar in. “Qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait?” What happened? What did he do to you? She knew from the stance of the girl’s body, the way she hobbled down the passage, one hand on the wall, her face and her eyes altered. She had seen that face and those eyes in the mirror, decades before. When she was younger than her own granddaughter, a different man had raped her, beat
en her unconscious. She, too, had survived.

  Shar doesn’t turn on a light. Night walks into the room. She writes down one question.

  Why is the history of the world

  still the present?

  Together on the shore of evening, Eliza and Andrew eddied around each other in their bedroom, enacting a ritual not always maintained, the shedding of the day by changing out of their work clothes. Eliza undid the pearl buttons of her grey blouse.

  “You heard the news?” Andrew asked, and drew an old sweatshirt over his head.

  “On my way home.” She slipped the arms of the blouse off each shoulder and stood there in her bra. Below her feet, the boys whooped in their bedroom—laughing?

  “I thought you would be screaming about it.”

  She crushed her shirt into a ball and threw it across the bed, toward the laundry basket, missed. “What good would that do?” She yanked a T-shirt over her head.

  “Nothing. I just…It feels…” But he could not say what it felt like.

  A howl and a string of angry words lifted up from below. The boys were not laughing, but fighting. She heard Marcus bark, “Shut the door!” As though acting of its own accord, the door closed with a sharp smack. Eliza and Andrew stood still to listen. Marcus’s words were muffled now. Jake began to cry. They could hear him right beneath their feet. “Stop!” Jake cried. “Stop it!”

  Marcus did not stop.

  —

  That night, they made love. It wasn’t their rare, customary rush against and through each other’s bodies; it was not fucking. Nor was it plain old friendly sex. It was the authentic, hungry, almost painful making of love, the breaking of a long fast. They had to be careful, as one who has known famine cannot gorge on food but must go slowly, taking in sustenance little by little. The fullness and tenderness hurt Eliza especially, because she felt guilty. She felt guilty about Shar; she felt guilty for being safe.

  Eliza touched Andrew’s face; he had his hand on her head, his fingers in her hair as they kissed. The opening and the thrusting were like eating, as though each part they touched was food that had been long denied and suddenly was given over, gift after gift after gift, the bounty of two bodies, the fingers with their precise, nicked gloves of skin, every handful of the aging, night-alive flesh, freely given, taken hungrily, back and forth, back and forth, Here, take this, eat, as though the sweetness might sustain a stranger, undo harm, repair the irreparable by extending a miracle so private that no one else could ever know what it was, what had happened here. It was magical thinking, impossible, yet that was the wordless benediction as they touched each other and moved through the well-known stages. As Eliza’s orgasm began, Andrew came inside her as deeply as he could, and remained there, held, locked into her body, his eyes closed as she moved against him.

  It hurts, she thought, tears rising in her eyes as she swirled down the vortex of her own pleasure. It hurts. She was coming. At the centre of that physical intensity was grief. For the suffering in the world, always there, undeniable. But she could not let go and cry. If she cried, her own mundane truth would pour out, too, her confusion, her wrong. “Stay,” she whispered to Andrew. “Stay on top of me. I want to feel your weight.” She did want that, to feel the physical heft of this body that loved her body. But she also wanted him to hold her down like a lid, to keep the lies inside.

  —

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Eliza paused in the landing of Shar’s apartment building. She shook her head to her own objections about being here. Walking up the stairs felt different. But why? Nothing in her life had changed. A woman she did not know—like millions of other women she did not know—had been brutally attacked, raped by a gang of men.

  She peered up the stairwell, then at the floor, made of terrazzo, concrete flecked with green rocks and glittering quartz. She didn’t know what to do. She was afraid that when she got into the apartment, Shar might start screaming about Arab men, or Muslims in general. It wasn’t too late to text an excuse; she could still leave. But her feet kept taking the stairs. She paused on the second landing, too, feeling unwell. Maybe I’m getting sick; I could be contagious.

  On the walls, she saw the familiar scuff marks, scrapes and dents of bookshelves and chairs, dirty fingerprints, marks made by the many lives that had passed this way. The building was old; hundreds of people had lived and loved here. Many of them were dead now. Dead and forgotten. As she, too, would die and be forgotten, along with her passion and her stupidity: her very own, as particular as those fingerprints. Yet so similar to other people’s.

  She shook her head at her own jumbled thoughts. Her hand closed on the wooden banister again; up she went. Shar opened the door; Eliza stepped in with her jacket already off (hooked over her arm at first, then dropped to the floor) as they spoke a few words of greeting, hugged. Eliza could smell wine. Shar’s chin knocked against her back as she said, “You heard about Adele Tabrizi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Infuriating.”

  “Yes.” Eliza wondered what else was coming.

  Shar pulled away. “But how self-righteous Canadians are about it. Already a bunch of articles are online, decrying violence in the Muslim world and the savagery of Islam. It’s pure racism.”

  Eliza said, “But I thought you were—”

  Shar pulled away, her eyes flashing. “What? I hate these white fuckers who pretend nothing is wrong here. Like Canada hasn’t seen its fair share of slaughter and rape! Hello, foundation of the Western world! Fucking white people!”

  Eliza tried not to flinch. Adulterous wife. Distracted mother. Now she had to feel guilty about being white. She decided not to say that to Shar. Instead, she said something worse. “But…aren’t you white, too?”

  Shar turned and swept down the hallway, shouting back, “Oh, I can pass, but if I decided to wear a head scarf, I wouldn’t be so white anymore, would I?”

  Eliza didn’t respond. She quietly followed Shar into the sitting room. The bottle was half-empty; Shar poured her a glass and kept drinking her own. She needed to vent, and vent she did, in a voice that Eliza had never heard before, by turns full of rage, then disgust, then sorrow. She didn’t cry—Eliza knew that Shar rarely cried—but she made Eliza want to. Despite what she’d said earlier about racism and anti-Muslim sentiment, she railed against the attack, then she talked about Tehran and a place called the Citadel, and they burned it down with most of the women and the children trapped inside the walls. Eliza had no idea what she was talking about, but she murmured and nodded and they drank the rest of the wine and opened another bottle. Then Shar went back to her university days in Vancouver, her activism as a student, so many women there, lost, murdered. And here, too, right here!

  Eliza did her best to follow the convoluted thread of her outrage, and she glanced around, trying to find the ghosts in the room, but her eyes kept coming back to Shar’s face.

  —

  Eliza pulled the window blinds shut and flicked on the green-shaded lamp. The bedcovers and sheets were blue; it was like standing at the edge of a pool of water. They stripped off each other’s clothes and went in together, slowly at first. Shar’s hands fanned out over her ribs, tracked up her spine to the base of her skull, jaw, chin. Her fingers were in Eliza’s mouth when they started to kiss.

  This betrayal is worse, Eliza thought. The worst.

  Because it was not fucking. It was lovemaking. Eliza was making love for the second time in twenty-four hours but for the first time with Shar. She didn’t want to make love; it meant too much. Yet they had begun, irresistibly, and irresistibly, they continued, with a tenderness that neither of them were accustomed to with each other. It was like speaking another language, though with words they said almost nothing, certainly none of the intimate smut they both liked. Shar’s eyes were huge, dark, all pupil, and Eliza met her steady gaze and went into it. They did not say love, yet it was there, glowing, rising to the surface like phosphorescence in the ocean at night.

  T
he silence held, roiling with words, histories, secrets, every world contained inside the body, two bodies, two skins and millions and millions of pores, Eliza thought, her hand sliding down Shar’s long, muscular back. She admired the different flesh tones of their bodies; they both looked so smooth. But we’re made of openings. The world comes in.

  Eliza felt as though she were scattering into the woman who was now hovering above her. It confused her to be so naked with someone who had already exposed her completely. How many layers were there to nakedness? If she was disintegrating, she was also expanding, filled with declarations she couldn’t make.

  They declared through kissing. They translated directly through the tongue, until Eliza got on top and slid down the bed and licked Shar stem to stern, ass to cleft, over and over, until it was time to narrow her focus and slide her fingers inside. The phrase flesh of my flesh kept rising unbidden to her mind. What she did to Shar she felt in her own body. Flesh of my flesh. From where, those words?

  Shar was just starting to move her hips faster when Eliza remembered: Genesis. Adam’s words to Eve, oft-quoted in marriage ceremonies. Had the phrase been part of her own marriage vows? She hoped not. “Flesh of my flesh,” she whispered, so quietly that Shar could pretend she didn’t hear.

  —

  After, Eliza dressed as quickly as possible. It was almost like the first time she’d been here and rushed away, afraid of what she had done, afraid of her own delight. Now she lied, “I have to get to a meeting,” and left without a kiss, thoroughly flayed by love, by feeling love, by loving Shar. She rushed up the street, her eyes already filled, blurred enough to make her fumble the keys at the car door. She sat down in the driver’s seat, put her hands and head against the steering wheel, and cried.

  26

  Hiatus

  THE NEXT DAY, ELIZA WENT SWIMMING AS USUAL AT ANNIE’S.