The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  The mistake of not telling still haunted him. Had she continued abusing students? After he finished his degree at Harvard, he’d tried to track her down, but she seemed to have disappeared. Maybe she’d married, changed her name. Maybe she left the country. Maybe she died. Everyone does. He sat down on the bed, thick hands on his knees. “I’m so tired of it.” Yet the thought was sharp in his mind: I have to tell Mom. And Dad, too. I want them to know what really happened. How young I was. How they failed me. But could he do it? Was it possible to tell the truth?

  Andrew was standing at the closed door, but still he couldn’t leave. “It’s so strange the way this has all come up again.” Martin had closed his eyes, waiting for Andrew to go. Yet there he stood, wanting more from his older brother. As usual. “It leads me back to the place where this conversation started.”

  Martin rubbed his face and opened his bleary eyes. “Uh, what place was that?”

  “I said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ ”

  “And I said ‘no.’ Remember? Jesus, Andy, you’re like a dog with a goddamn bone.”

  Andrew stepped away from the door, lowered his voice, unable to help himself. “Have you seen Shar as a therapist? I have the feeling that you two have met before.”

  Martin started laughing. He laughed for a solid twenty seconds, during which time Andrew’s eyebrows slowly knitted together in embarrassment.

  Then Martin stopped laughing. “Did you hover in your own hallway listening to our conversation? Still spying on me, forty-five years later. I just do not get it. You’ve always been jealous of the way I am with women. It’s so fucking weird. Especially considering who you married.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You married a beautiful, fun, smart woman. You have two lovely kids, a lovely house, a job you enjoy. A perfect life. Okay, I know you have to do a shitload of marking. So, an almost perfect life. Why would you care what I say to a dinner guest over a glass of wine?”

  “You’re dodging the question. And I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just coming into the living room, and I heard her saying something about confidentiality. About how she doesn’t know you. Meaning the opposite.”

  “All right, fine. I met her a few years ago. In Ottawa.”

  “As a therapist?”

  “More or less.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We talked. It was talk therapy. I guess.”

  Andrew frowned. “You guess?”

  “Would you please let me go to bed?”

  “Did you have sex with her?”

  “Why? Are you weirded out by the idea that your wife clearly likes to flirt with a woman I’ve already had sex with?”

  Andrew tilted his head thoughtfully, moved his lips as though chewing this idea. Nodded once. “Possibly. It would be weird.”

  “Don’t worry then. I didn’t sleep with her.”

  “Really?”

  “Cross my heart. If you want—and only if you want—you can tell me about Eliza and Shar tomorrow. I didn’t need to snoop around to see that they’re into each other. Big deal, it’s just a phase.” He stifled a yawn. “You can tell me tomorrow. Right now, you will go back to the beautiful women, and I will go to sleep.” He closed his eyes, lifted his legs off the floor and lay down on the bed. “Have fun!”

  But Andrew did not budge. He was still the brat, still rooting around for more. He loved the problem.

  As though reading his brother’s mind, Andrew pressed on. “But—how did you meet her?”

  Martin gave a great, internal shrug. Fine. If his brother loved the problem, he could have it. “Shar used to be a call girl. That’s how I met her. High end, very classy. But we never slept together.” He heard the bedroom door open. “She was kinda doing therapy even then. On her clients.” The door slammed. Martin smiled to hear footsteps rushing down the stairs.

  He fell asleep to three human voices rising, louder, higher, the words unintelligible but passionate, like Greek, he thought, descending into sleep, or birdsong, a dream already coalescing—blue sea, island—in his mind.

  —

  Eliza thought, He sounds just like the boys, crashing down here like that. Out of habit, she almost yelled, Stop running! She and Shar turned to see Andrew stride into the dining room, his face alight, eyes flashing from Eliza to Shar, who was sitting across the table. Their smiles left them. He was a man involved in an emergency. “What’s happened?” Eliza began rising out of her chair; rose; stepped close to him. “Is Martin all right?” She put her hand on his forearm.

  She did not let go. He stared at her, searched her face. “Andrew, you’re scaring me, what is it?”

  Shar whispered something in French or Farsi. It was hard to tell through the silky crooning of Googoosh, the famous Iranian pop star. But Eliza saw the knowingness on her lover’s face. She saw regret. Or was it resignation? “Shar?”

  Andrew spoke loudly. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What she does.”

  Shar immediately said, “Did. And I am not ashamed of it either.”

  Andrew roared across the table, “Then why did you keep it a secret? Who are you?”

  Shar stood up so abruptly that Eliza thought she was leaving. But she just crossed over to the stereo and turned off the music. The sudden silence in the room silenced them, too.

  Various triangles of eyes formed, changed, and formed again. Shar was close now, a step away. Eliza thought, I could touch her so easily. But she didn’t. She looked at Andrew. Then she turned to Shar, and shook her head. “What secret?”

  “Let me,” Shar said, and faltered. She walked back around the table and sat down. “Let me tell you a story.”

  Acknowledgements

  August 22, 2016, 7:58 AM

  Toronto, my messy office/bedroom

  surrounded by paper, undone taxes, camping gear

  (at this rate, we’ll make it out of the city by midnight)

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you. Your book clubs, your discussion groups, our email exchanges—in Canada, the U.S. and other places around the planet—have nourished and challenged me as a writer, thinker, and citizen. By responding to my written lives, you have often shared and illuminated the rich complications of your own. You inspired me to write a book about Everywoman, and Eliza Keenan was born.

  Dear Todd Kjargaard, gifted creative director at Jackie O Floral Affairs and Event Design in Toronto, my gratitude to you (and the flowers) for letting me hang around your studio and pester you and designer Jen. Your insights about creativity, freedom and les fleurs are priceless. Of course you are located on Liberty Street. Dear Carlyle Jansen and company, of the fabulous sex shop Good For Her, thank you for introducing me to strap-ons and explaining all the ins and outs. With patience and professionalism, you put more joy, acceptance and sweetness into sex of all kinds.

  Dear HVs of Tallinn: I am indebted to you all for the vodka and the advice about The Change Room’s ending. And to the marvellous Head Read Festival in Tallinn for making it all possible. To Kätlin Kaldmaa, fellow writer and preeminent translator, bless you for your passion in a cold country, and for giving me an example not to follow, re. the Typical Estonian Sex Scene: They went into the room and closed the door.

  Dear Anne Collins, my editor and publisher at Random House Canada, and intrepid Jackie Kaiser, dedicated agent, I appreciate how you scarcely blinked an eye when I told you I’d cancelled The Depressing Novel and instead handed over fifty pages of orgasmic sex, flowers, and housecleaning (in order of importance). I thank you both and everyone at Penguin Random House Canada for making this book and sending it out into the world. Waiter, a bottle of champagne to Jennifer Griffiths for the perfect cover image!

  Dear friends on Lesvos, whose lives and work I have adapted shamelessly and genderbendingly to my own novelistic ends: filia kai kouragio. Mireille, Panagos, Yiorgos, Eleni, Maria, Andoni, Patricia, your children: part of me remains with you. May the sufferin
g on the island and beyond it end soon. To Anne and Soren, euxaristo for our fascinating discussions about marriage, sometimes quoted here almost word for word, including Soren’s assertion, some forty years after the wedding: “The secret to my happiness is my acceptance that I do not understand her.”

  To Robert Chang, my husband, who could say the same thing every morning, I adore you for asserting the opposite (at least once in a while): that you do understand me. I am blessed that you and Timo Chang, our wonderful son, make a home with me, love me, let me go and call me back to a house full of light. Thanks for all the fights, too, pillow and otherwise.

  Shar wouldn’t exist without the real women and men who inspired her creation: Amelia Perkins, for the harrowing tale of a woman who left Marseilles; poet, lawyer, and lover of rivers, Tessa Manuello; my Iranian friends, especially Ghazal M; the late, great Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, for his pictorial tribute to the women of Shahr-E No; fellow writer Zagros Chiya, who introduced me to Googoosh and other musicians in Iraqi Kurdistan, and who translated Shar’s quotations of Baba Taher and Omar Khayyam; my beautiful sister-niece Jennifer Kochis, who shared her stories and reminded me to be careful with my words.

  Shar is the fictional sister to those brave, fiercely intelligent people at the forefront of the battle to decriminalize and humanize sex work. I salute you for declaring the irrefutable truth, and lending it to a recent Amnesty International campaign: sex workers’ rights are human rights. I am grateful for interviews in person, on the phone, by email, for our exchanges on Facebook and Twitter, for your generous websites and blogs (safersexwork.ca, POWER.ca, Maggiestoronto.ca, Kitty Stryker, TitsandSass, Nathalie-Lefebvre.com, Maggie McNeill’s WordPress blog The Honest Courtesan, postwhoreamerica.com and many more). Your courage, honesty, and sense of humour are a constant inspiration. I am also indebted to the fearless scholar and advocate Caroline Newcastle, for sharing her research on sex workers’ lives and relationships.

  Just as I was finishing this novel, tragedy struck, as it sometimes does, for no good reason. Many generous, kind people donated the blood and money that saved my brother David’s life and allowed my sister Mara and me to bring him back to Canada. We will always be grateful for your help. Life is, indeed, a gauntlet of momentous change. And love is the only way through it.

  And you! My close ones, dear and distant friends, family born and chosen and found again after long silence: you know who you are. You help me to live this precious life. I love you so much. Where have you been? Come for dinner. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go swimming! Soon, while we still have time.

  xok

  KAREN CONNELLY is the author of eleven books of bestselling nonfiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being Come Cold River, a family memoir in poetry. She has won the Pat Lowther Award for her poetry, the Governor General’s Award for her nonfiction, and Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Fiction for her first novel, The Lizard Cage. Published in 2005, The Lizard Cage was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and Mandela, and hailed in the Globe and Mail as “one of the best modern Canadian novels.” Burmese Lessons, a memoir about her experiences in Burma and on the Thai-Burmese border, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Nonfiction in 2009. Married with a young child, she divides her time between a home in rural Greece and a home in Toronto.