The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  He was losing his way in the conversation. This was supposed to be about the opposite of babies and miscarriages and pregnancy. This was supposed to be about freedom. “I do remember now. I do. But you know…the urologist said the pain usually resolves within a week or two.”

  “Naturally the urologist would say that. I don’t care about him.”

  “It’s a woman.”

  “Oh! Well, she doesn’t have sex with you.”

  At the sound of his laughter, Eliza jumped off her stool. He shook his head. Here it was, spreading before him, the swamp of emotions his wife experienced when it came to fertility. Quicksand everywhere.

  “I don’t want you to do it. When a man gets a vasectomy, he barely produces any semen.” She went to the sink, turned on the tap, squeezed out a rag. “What comes out is just a little trickle.”

  “How do you know that? I didn’t know that until I went to see the urologist.”

  “Oh, I read it somewhere. In a woman’s magazine, probably. And I don’t want you not to have any semen. I like it.” She wiped down the island.

  “But it doesn’t affect sexual performance.”

  “Unless you experience pain that doesn’t go away. That won’t help our sex life, will it?”

  “But the pain complication must be very rare. It’s a procedure that’s done all over the world.”

  “You don’t need to have a vasectomy. We’re already free enough. I’m practically menopausal, okay?”

  “Stop exaggerating.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re not having another baby.” He could hear her voice rising from an E-minor unreasonable into F-flat whine. “I just don’t want anything bad to happen. Any kind of surgery can go wrong.” An unusual stillness blossomed in the room. It billowed out and out; he felt like it was filling the entire house.

  He pulled his hand over his nine o’clock shadow; the wiry red and blonde hairs of his beard scraped his palm. The doctor had made it all sound so simple.

  Eliza had finished wiping down the island and had taken up the broom. She swept the floor slowly, diligently, collecting the detritus of the day. Then she suddenly stopped and fixed him with those blue laser-beam eyes. “I know this sounds weird, but I have a superstitious belief in your come.”

  “Eliza!” He felt embarrassed for being so flattered. In a baritone Wizard-of-Oz voice, he said, “Ah, yes, the great potency of my magical jiz!”

  “Not so much in its potency. Obviously the sperm does the job; we have two kids. But more I just…I just love it. You know, when you come on me. The mess of it. It is magical—there are a bjillion human seeds in that stuff!”

  He narrowed one eye at her, making a show of his doubt. She was being nostalgic; he hadn’t done that in a long time. But it was true. Before Eliza, he had never come on a woman’s breasts—but she’d asked him to do that. To say no to such a request would have been uncharitable. She even wanted him to come on her face. Again, he obliged, but it wasn’t his thing. It felt impolite to ejaculate on a woman’s face. Once he had got her right in the eye; hours later, it still looked as though she had conjunctivitis. He’d had no idea that semen could be such an irritant.

  One of his earlier girlfriends had found semen disgusting (the slimy texture, the smell), so Eliza’s delight in the substance came as a thrilling surprise. He remembered what a turn-on it had been to be with a woman who wasn’t repulsed by the physical evidence of male orgasm. “It’s true that the urologist didn’t spend much time talking about shutting down the flow. I have the pamphlets and everything. I’ll read them.”

  “Don’t turn off that tap! What if you leave me in five years and marry a thirty-three-year-old who wants a baby? It happens all the time.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “How generous of you to think of your future rival’s biological clock.” He chomped on a piece of apple. “I will not be leaving you in five years. And definitely not for a younger woman. Are you insane? Do you think I want to go through this all over again? I’m holding out for the peace after menopause. The nice old crone.”

  Eliza swept her way closer to him. “If you ever say the words old crone again, in reference to me, you’ll never get another blowjob. Got that? It will be mac-and-cheese and the missionary position for the rest of your life.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” She punched his shoulder. He caught her fist, turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist. “I had no idea you were so attached to my penis in its pristine state.”

  “Of course I’m attached,” she said. “Do not get a vasectomy. Ask Karl.”

  But Andrew didn’t want to talk to Karl about his dick. Eliza was right: he barely knew the guy. I’ll look it up on the Internet, he thought. His lovely wife was probably exaggerating, subconsciously angling to get what she subconsciously wanted. He could almost feel their third child hovering in the still, full air of the room, wanting to enter their bodies and become flesh.

  22

  Escape

  ONCE, WHEN JAKE WAS STILL A BABY—DURING THE early days of motherhood, with two small creatures constantly tugging on her, crying for her, drinking her—Eliza had tried to explain her anxiety to Andrew. No matter how much she loved her babies, and loved their love, and sought to fulfill their needs, she also found so much love and need oppressive. No doubt about it: she was trapped among diapers, little shoes, little socks, squirming little bodies. At times, she could barely move, and when she did, her (newly enormous) breasts leaked constantly. For two and a half years straight, the cries of any baby or toddler caused her milk to let down.

  Andrew had nodded, wearing his let-me-help-you-understand expression. “Honey, it’s all passing so quickly. They’re babies for just a blip in time.” She bit her lower lip; trust Andrew to think of eternity. If she were a fellow math geek, he would spout some algorithm of infinity, but because she was just a normal person, he said, “I don’t feel oppressed by fatherhood.”

  “Yeah, that’s because it’s always been easy for men to become fathers. How many sperm in one shot?”

  He gave her a dirty look. “I want to be a good father, too.”

  “You are a good father.” He was. “But fatherhood has made you…grander. The patriarchy is slapping you on the back. You have sons. There’s still lots of cachet in that.”

  “Oh, come on, there is not,” he protested, though his small, self-satisfied grin suggested otherwise. Jake, the newer baby, woke up and started to cry. They both jumped up to check on him. Eliza let Andrew go, and collapsed back onto the sofa. Motherhood weighed her down. And piles of baby gear.

  Though the kids were older now, and the physical burdens lighter, Eliza still thought of motherhood as a heavy cloak, a mantle similar to the ones worn by shamans and witches, except that this one was decorated with frayed shoelaces, bacteria-laden pacifiers, greasy birthday candles, and another lost permission slip for a field trip that required, inevitably, $23.75 (please enclose exact change).

  Who wouldn’t want to shrug all that off for an afternoon or two? Or for three weeks? She had been seeing Shar for that long, plus two days. Time had slowed down (Only three weeks? It feels like months) and sped up (Is that clock right? Jesus, I have to leave right now).

  Escape was wrong, yes. Yes, it was. She put the car into third gear and glanced at herself in the mirror. Smoky grey eyes today, encouraged by lots of eyeliner. Deep red lipstick; new. But escape was also fabulous. And real. It didn’t feel like escape. She had just left Marcus and Jake at a birthday party—a reptile-themed celebration that had cost the birthday boy’s parents at least $400. She knew because she looked it up on the LizardArt! website. The parents had invited her to stay but she could not flee the throng of hyper children fast enough.

  Which was wrong, she knew. Escaping demonstrated an inability to accept life as it was. What did a mother and a wife have to be? She had to be right there, helping her kids make cake into lizard art. Or art into snake cake.

  She parked a ten-minute walk north of Shar
’s apartment. Never too close. Fleur was only a dozen blocks to the northwest. She also had three regular clients on Queen Street. She kept herself from walking too fast. She didn’t want to be panting before she got there. At the building entrance, she stood and breathed in and out five times.

  It wasn’t escape. It was return. When she crossed Shar’s threshold, she came back to herself. That’s why she felt so guilty. And it wasn’t only the sex. Though the sex was ridiculous. She had never experienced anything like it. The sex was drug-like and occasionally terrifying, but the kind of terrifying that snatched the idea of terror away from serial killers and suicide bombers and gave it back to a girl-child with huge eyes screaming her head off on a roller coaster. She remembered how much she loved the fairgrounds as a kid—the good old Calgary Stampede—being thrown through the air and caught hard, howling with pure joy, pure fear.

  But it really wasn’t only the sex. Shar fed her. She loved P.D. James and Proust, as well as Irvin Yalom and a bunch of French feminist writers Eliza had never heard of. She loved to lie in bed and read out loud. She wrote almost daily in a journal and called it her diary, a word that Eliza had not considered in any serious way since she was fourteen, when she’d burned her own diaries in a back alley in southwest Calgary, banishing childhood from her life forever. Shar was a rare individual in that she seemed to have enough time for life. Eliza tried to figure out how she managed it; partly, she just did not do, or want to do, too much.

  It wasn’t that Shar had no ambition. She often talked about finishing her never-ending education, and hanging out her shingle as a therapist specializing in sexuality. Early on, when Shar had told Eliza that she was training to be a sex therapist, Eliza had laughed out loud at the joke—then quickly discovered that Shar was serious. She had come to Toronto to attend the Klippert Institute for Sexual Therapy and Research—a prestigious facility that trained only a small number of grad students and established therapists every year. Eliza had never heard of it, but a quick online search showed how well-considered the Institute was. Shar had received a generous grant that covered the tuition and living expenses for her training year; it came with an almost guaranteed therapy practicum once she was finished her studies. So, yes, she was dedicated to her professional goals, but she was equally ambitious about enjoying her life.

  Midday, in a cascade of sunlight from the west-facing window, the two women sat cross-legged in silk kimonos on the sitting-room floor. The carpet was dotted with plates of Camembert and baguette slices, rice dolmades, a bowl of pomegranate seeds that Shar had firked out of their honeycombed husk with the dexterity of a monkey. Pomegranates were her favourite fruit. Eliza asked, “How did you arrive at this ‘I must have a sweet time’ philosophy?”

  Shar met her eye, stared into her in the unnerving way she had sometimes, a gaze that demanded Can I trust you? then answered itself with equal force I will trust you! Eliza felt as though an oath were being extracted from her even when she said nothing. Shar stood up abruptly and tossed herself down in the wing chair by the window. “When I was a teenager, I almost died. Bonne nuit, c’est fini! It’s not something I like to talk about.” By now, Eliza understood not to push when Shar said don’t push. “The experience changed me. Fundamentally. For a while I could only think how it divided time into before and after. So it divided me. I found a good therapist. I was already a psychology major, but working with that therapist turned me into a serious student.

  “Most of all, what happened swept everything away but life. Life, life, life. Even now, sometimes, I…” She looked out the window, searching for the word in the cold bright blue day. “I still can’t believe it. I was so close to losing mine. But I didn’t. I have this body in this time. We all have these bodies in this time. The usual fucked-up things make us feel separate, the violence we do to each other, to the earth. Our fears. But we are closer than we know.” She sat in the same sunlight that turned the pomegranate seeds into a bowl of glittering rubies.

  Eliza asked, “Closer to what?”

  “To each other. To nature. Closer to whatever we need.”

  “That sounds pretty New Agey. And too easy.”

  She huffed a laugh. “It’s not easy. And I’m not saying it’s like that for all people. I am privileged. I survived. I don’t live in any kind of prison. I am lucky. So I try to make a point of not fucking up my freedom. I don’t want to waste the sweetness. It is here. In us. It’s in the world.”

  “Edoni!” Eliza suddenly remembered the word in ancient Greek. “Of course. It was a whole school of philosophy. Hedonism.”

  “Ethical hedonism. Sweetness for all, without causing pain to others. Have you read Michel Onfray?” Shar jumped up to find one of the hedonist philosopher’s books.

  That day, and other days, the two women talked. They talked and talked, not touching at all. The restraint was erotic. Talking and not touching was foreplay. But they also talked while they were having sex. Sometimes, naked, entwined, one of them said something funny and they ended up laughing so hard that they had to untangle themselves until they had finished, then begin again. Like musicians interrupted by a joke about the conductor, they returned to the score still smiling. One would follow the other to the bathroom, and talk through the slightly open door. Shar talked about Marseilles, where her grandmother still lived. Eliza talked about Fleur, and her clients, and her children. She didn’t talk much about Andrew. Shar told stories about the kayaking she’d done on the West Coast, and the trips she’d taken to Italy, where she had an ex-lover-now-dear-friend named Francesca Frangipani. “A tropical flower,” Eliza remarked. “Plumeria. Sacred in the Buddhist temple grounds of Southeast Asia.”

  “In Sicily, it’s everywhere. It’s Palermo’s flower. That’s where I met Francesca. In Palermo. She was travelling with Ettore. Her husband.”

  “Her husband? Did you…Was she…Wasn’t that…complicated?”

  Shar slid her hand through her hair, twisted a thick lock of it around her index and middle fingers. “Not really. It was…convenient. There’s nothing like making love all day to a sexy woman then having her husband bring you really good wine at sunset.” She clapped her hands, delighted with both the declaration and the memory it evoked. “I highly recommend it.” She had been in a relationship with both of them, she explained, though Francesca was the one she wanted. “Ettore was a bonus,” she said. “He was a great cook. And he loved to watch.”

  Sometimes she told Eliza about her studies at the Klippert Institute. Against Institute rules, she recorded and later played her the entire lecture by the great French doctor and scientist Dr. Pierre Foldès, whose study of the internal structure of the clitoris had helped him to restore thousands of women to sexual health after genital mutilation. Eliza gazed down at Dr. Foldès’s sonographs: inside a woman’s body, connected to the little clitoral nub, an enormous butterfly of tissue spread its wings around and beyond both sides of the vaginal canal. She couldn’t believe it. “All that stuff is the clitoris?”

  “Isn’t it beautiful? The erect clit has as much tissue as the erect cock. But it’s inside the body. So much for penis envy! Until the last decade or so, medical science has ignored the only organ of the human body designed exclusively for sexual pleasure. Because it happens to belong to women, of course. Do you remember all that controversy—in the eighties, maybe?—about the vaginal or clitoral orgasm? It’s both. It has always been both.”

  Shar fed her literally, too. There was always something delicious to eat in her apartment. She presented the food on beautiful ceramic plates, a cloth napkin close by. Eliza was too embarrassed to admit how much she enjoyed this. No one else in her life treated her this way. Even if Eliza brought good food to the apartment, Shar insisted on getting it ready, bringing the offerings into the living room, where they sat and nibbled on Shar’s beloved pomegranate seeds, plates of roasted almonds and raw walnuts, homemade hummus with pita, Portuguese tuna in olive oil with dried tomatoes. Even the air was nourishment. The apartment
was almost never silent. Music was like air to Shar and they breathed it in: Sri Lankan pop, American jazz and blues, soul and hip hop, old country, a bunch of Finnish rockers who sounded like Johnny Cash, Turkish rock inflected with German cabaret, and a lot of Middle Eastern stuff that reminded Eliza of Greek music, and Lesvos, and Thalia.

  —

  Eliza stood at the door, waiting. It was always like this, the thudding heart, her stomach fluttery as she knocked again. The door opened and there she was, the whole long, lean delight of Shar, smiling.

  23

  Scheherazade

  THE HALLWAY WAS FILLED WITH THE SMELL OF CINNAMON and sugar. Eliza followed Shar into the kitchen. A piece of pie was waiting for her on the table. Apple. Still hot. “That smells so good. You never told me you liked baking!”

  Shar put the kettle on the old gas stove. “Ah, chief among my secrets. Master baker.”

  “Really?”

  “No. But I like making pies every once in a while.”

  “You’ll make a good wife someday.”

  “Not! ‘Married people’ is not a club I want to join.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “No way. That’s what my last girlfriend was all about. Marriage and babies.” Shar shuddered. “Marriage is a powerful institution. Powerful institutions give me the creeps.”

  “This pie is so good. You should open a pie shop.”

  “That’s a big compliment, coming from you.”

  “Don’t you ever feel…lonely?”

  “Sure. Sometimes. Don’t you?”

  “I suppose I do.” Eliza broke off a ledge of flaky, delicate pastry, popped it in her mouth, considering. “But not the way I did when I was single. Unsalted butter?”

  “Of course. Even if we cure cancer and end war, and wife-beating, and child abuse, and hunger, loneliness will still plague humanity. But marriage seems like an extreme solution to an existential problem. Surely people could just…take up…volleyball. Or roommates.”