You've Changed, page 1
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2025 Ian Williams
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: You’ve changed / Ian Williams.
Other titles: You have changed
Names: Williams, Ian, 1979- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20250114445 | Canadiana (ebook) 20250114461 | ISBN 9781039012356 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039012363 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8645.I4448 Y686 2025 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781039012363
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following:
Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Lesley Rausch and Karel Cruz in Agon, choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust. 2013 Photo © Angela Sterling.
“Wake Up Alone,” Words and Music by Amy Winehouse and Paul O’Duffy, © 2006 EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD., All Rights in the U.S. and Canada, Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC., All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Text design: Lisa Jager, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Lisa Jager
Image credits: CSA Images / Getty Images
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Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Guests
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Guest
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Snuffleupagus
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Acknowledgements
About the Author
But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, ORLANDO
What’s age-old is that when we are asked—and ask ourselves—who we are, we are being asked what we are as well.
—KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY
—GEORGE BALANCHINE, AGON
Is it right to use people only for your own pleasure?
—ROY ANDERSSON, A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE
He swims in my eyes by the bed…
And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone
—AMY WINEHOUSE
GUESTS
CHAPTER
scrubbing dead skin from his heel, monitoring gas prices, cleaning the bathtub, hosing the truck, selecting the active wear cycle, shaking cereal boxes, returning shopping carts, switching internet packages, tapping screens, setting appointments, trimming his fingernails, tying his shoelaces, thumbing the remote, squeezing avocados, holding open plastic bags for grapefruit, getting married, growing a beard, dyeing a beard, shaving it all off, texting his wife, deciding which of six emojis best conveyed his present emotion, taking out the recycling on Wednesdays, unlocking his truck, sending e-transfers, pricing lumber, paint, blades, drywall anchors, soaking the frying pan, opening cans of chickpeas, declining spam calls, rinsing his mouthguard, sniffing the armpits of undershirts, sniffing the crotch of underwear, but the mumble of Beckett’s life paused when his wife announced that her friend from childhood, along with her husband, were coming to visit.
I have to work tomorrow, Beckett said. Don’t make me hang out with a bunch of strangers.
You’ll love her, Princess said, rattling a teaspoon around a cup of yogourt. Them.
I hate them already.
She was used to his half-empty glass. It’s only for tonight, she said. They’ll be on a plane to Orlando in the morning and you’ll have the rest of the day to be a sad, middle-aged Snuffleupagus.
* * *
When they arrived, the friend threw open her arms and greeted Princess theatrically: My African sister.
Oh, I’m just a white girl, Princess said, but she was beaming. African was the second-highest compliment one could offer her after athletic. Exotic was high on the list too, although she had friends who were offended on her behalf. Beaming. Beckett observed that her teeth were indeed whiter since the treatments.
Nonsense, my Ivorian Princess, Keza said.
Keza, my Ivorian Queen.
Dahling, you look fabulous.
No, dahling, you look divine.
Naw, girl, you tight.
No, you poppin’.
No you, no you, no you, and so they suffocated each other with compliments and collapsed on the couch, laughing and holding hands. They were girls again.
Princess and Keza hadn’t seen each other in thirty-five years. Princess had never met the husband who went by his last name, Wood, like he was daring everyone to make a dirty joke. As a couple, the Woods made a good nursery rhyme. Keza was dark and round and Wood was light and lean, so when they stood beside each other they looked like the number 10. Over the evening, every time Keza stood up, Wood stopped what he was doing and looked at her large derrière. Princess too. Beckett himself may have glanced once or twice. And Keza, knowing what was happening behind her, sighsmiled at her lot.
Keza’s voice broke through Beckett’s thoughts. She was pregnant. Our third, she said.
Princess’s mouth popped open.
Why didn’t you tell me? She spanked her friend’s wrist. We’ve been messaging for days.
Surprise, Keza said.
Princess asked the right questions about gender and due date and morning sickness and folate. She embraced Keza again then leaned over Keza’s thighs to squeeze Wood’s shoulder in a way that also assessed whether he was bone or muscle under his shirt.
I don’t know where we’ll put the baby, Wood said.
One of your kids is about to have a roommate, Beckett said, but he really wanted to say that they should pick a kid and tape an eviction notice to their bedroom door. When Beckett tried to establish eye contact with Wood to see whether he could handle the joke, the man looked away, and Beckett’s gut told him that the couple had secrets, maybe past miscarriages. Keza was forty-four now, same age as Princess.
Beckett probed instead about the layout of their house, which Princess later said was missing the point of baby news. They weren’t asking him for a consultation on renovations.
After a while, with the women talking nose-to-nose, Beckett turned on the TV, hoping to find a movie with explosions and watch it in silence with the other man. He already knew he couldn’t handle an evening of endless backstory, not to mention, Girl, you poppin’. Keza asked him to turn it off. They didn’t want to expose the in-utero baby to screens. Beckett tried to catch Princess’s eye—you said I’d love them—but she was nodding vigorously and off on a trail about radiation, brain development, a girl who got her first period at seven and a woman she knew who went through menopause at thirty.
So to adjust the silence between the men, Beckett put on one of his oldies playlists that began with Barry Manilow singing At the Copa, Copacabana. It made the white African, the Black African, and the American African in the room roast him until they couldn’t speak or breathe. Princess was both leading the attack and saving him from it. She got everyone up and soon they were sashaying their hips and shadowboxing. He had to admit that he enjoyed—I told you you’d love them—that part of the evening. Poor Lola, he always thought. And poor Beckett, because two songs later, during a song with one word, tequila, Princess attached herself to Keza’s hips to start a conga line and Wood attached to Princess’s and Beckett had no choice but to grip Wood’s hips and he wasn’t sure whether he was enjoying himself or simply co-operating. He was, most likely, suffering of happiness.
* * *
Dinner had no beginning or end. PB & KW leaned their elbows on the kitchen island and popped cheese and grapes into their mouths while a red sauce bubbled over on the stove and a chocolate cake defrosted. The day before, when Beckett shared that he was going to make a reliable pasta dish, Princess looked appalled that he would feed that processed, low-fibre, western slop to her people, so instead he cheated his way through a jollof recipe with tomato sauce, gril led some chicken and vegetables. But that night, everyone was insatiable. They shelled peanuts and mixed ice cream flavours and drank various juices in solidarity with pregnant Keza.
For Beckett, the volume of food compensated for the volume of talk. He was fond of big talkers because they relieved him of the burden of being a glittering conversationalist, but he perceived an imbalance between Princess’s thirty-five-year montage and everyone else’s. She went into detail about her continent hopping with her missionary parents, how the Spanish boys used to chase her then race her, her athletic medals, her United Colors of Benetton friends and boyfriends, an unusual life, no doubt, but it needn’t take up more time than Keza’s montage (sad girl boarding a plane from Côte d’Ivoire, studying hard at the library, shaking hands with white men to close deals, standing at the altar with Wood, soothing 2.5 children) or Wood’s montage (he once went to a funeral where gunfire broke out).
When Princess told people that she was African—because she did get a thrill at their reaction when she said she was neither South African nor North African, but born in Yamoussoukro—they eventually asked her questions about official languages, and animals, sometimes about the heat, and then could think of nothing else to ask, not a political question, not a question about her teachers. But now, she had her ideal conversational teammate. After dinner had dwindled to grazing and sipping, she and Keza settled back on the sectional, and were in and out of languages, reminiscing about the time the roads washed away, the passenger capacity of taxis, the distances they walked as girls, oscillating fans in classrooms, a game where they balanced objects on their heads like the women they admired, about how those women stacked fruit into pyramids at the market.
The side conversation between the men was simpler. They’d already established what the other did (construction, EDI consultant). Beckett hadn’t mentioned his dictator boss, the Mouth. Wood hadn’t expanded EDI into words. He’d also told Beckett that real estate in Orlando was reasonable compared to other major cities (Was it a major city, though? Beckett had wanted to ask), that he and Keza had started their consulting company during BLM, and that their two children (at home in Orlando with the grandparents) spoke no African languages. And although Beckett was a man so used to silence in childhood that he sometimes failed to complete his sentences, he had managed to make comments, or at least begin comments, about alligators, hurricanes, the Orlando Magic, and Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Wood, for his part, didn’t know anything about Vancouver, which he assumed to be like Seattle, so they talked about rain, grunge, Starbucks, and Frasier.
Basics covered, the men now moved on to things they could see in the room. Beckett followed Wood’s eyes then spoke about the oak flooring, the glass wall that separated the living room from the backyard, the TV, the sectional configuration, the various tools that littered the house like ornaments. Beckett gave him a tour while Princess was running her fingers through Keza’s windchime earrings. Half an hour later, outside the house, sharing a puffpuff near the compost tumbler, Beckett pointed with his pinky at all the visible things he’d built: the deck, the pagoda, the shed, the bench around the trunk of the apple tree.
When he had run out of constructed objects, Beckett asked, What’s EDI?
Same as DEI, Wood said and paused an unreasonably long time before continuing. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Right now we’re consulting with a school board about book bans. It’s all very political.
Cool, cool, Beckett said, but as a white man he turned off that road. Again, he couldn’t make the joke he wanted, which was, Let’s just ban literacy. He asked, belatedly, What about the screens on your cell phones? You guys expose the baby to those all the time.
Wood laughed. His eyes were red. Don’t take us so seriously, he said. I got myself eighty-five inches on Black Friday last year.
Until then, Beckett had been proud of his sixty-five inches. He left that subject too and told Wood about his plans to spritz sulphur on the leaves of the apple tree to get rid of the black spots. Then they talked about pears and inside the house Keza stood up and both men looked through the glass wall at the same time and Beckett had to turn off that road as well.
* * *
Beckett and Wood re-entered to Paul Anka making Puppy Love to the women. When Beckett’s dead dog was a velvety puppy, he cried whenever Beckett left the house. The women were stroking each other’s wedding rings and still talking about Africa. Then trees of green swept into the room, red roses too, music that made Beckett want to press Princess against his body and sway. Then they flew to the moon and by the time they were playing among the stars, Beckett felt, felt bonhomie, a French word via Princess. The women were still in Africa. The overhead lights were off. Beckett saw a speed square and a tape measure near a table lamp. I decorate with bikes, you decorate with tools, Princess had told him early on, without judgement.
The moon hit his ears like a big pizza pie. Wood sat on the rug, back against the couch, and manicured his toenails by ripping them off. He tested whether Beckett even knew the seven events of a heptathlon, Princess’s sport in university, but even that parallel conversation couldn’t get the women’s attention. They were still deep in girlhood.
Beckett yawned loudly and smacked his wet lips together, as he always did, and Princess snapped.
Enough with the white boy music, she said. Occasionally she spoke as if she herself were not white. She was also a year older than Beckett and a maternal or bigsisterly dynamic sometimes arose.
Her sudden irritation caused Keza to turn to Beckett, more politely than sympathetically. The two of them had spoken the least to each other over the evening. He saw it in her eyes. She was going to indulge him. It was his turn to vomit his life.
But he couldn’t package himself as the others had. He had nothing but a trade, a truck, a house, a dead dog, and a wife—no thirty-five-year friendships. Plus, as was common when he was in a room with African Americans, he felt alert. The EDI experts were waiting to judge him—on the flight back, they would savage him: Did you see how he yawned when his wife was talking about Africa? Beckett wanted to apologize for everything from the yawn to Wood’s people to his own ancestors to the ships, the whips, the water fountains.
Maine, Beckett finally said. Rural Maine. I won’t bore you with details.
It’s not boring, Princess said to the guests, and waved him onward, but he could tell she wanted to return to her own life.
You look like you should be in a Western, Keza said. Doesn’t he?
Or a Viking, Wood said.
He used to have a beard the size of a founding father, Princess said. He’s a Quaker.
Beckett opened his mouth to protest.
Was.
Opened it again.
Not Quaker, Princess adjusted. What do you call it? The Society of Friends. He was a Friend. Hence the beard.
Beckett knew—had been told by Princess—that his skin was rough, his face was leathering, his fingers were blunt, his lips opened on a dark cave, little red bumps had arisen on his neck and chest like he had been plucked of feathers. These days he hid much of his face under a light beard to cover nasolabial folds—vocabulary picked up from Princess. His whole face was carved out of wood, his eyebrows were a ridge from Utah, his nose had an hourglass shape from the front that Princess occasionally pinched and put on a Muppet voice to call him Snuffleupagus. A face for black and white. He used to apologize for looking dirty even after a shower. Princess corrected him. He wasn’t dirty, just disorganized. When he pulled his hair back into a bun, wisps escaped over his ears and down his neck. His body was also carved, but simpler: tall and lean, like Wood’s. Sleeves always rolled up. Princess variously described his body as one that got beat up as a kid, flatpacked, Mick Jaggery, built for triple jump, and once, he overheard her joking, as like a crack whore’s.
Tell them, Princess said. You were like an original Puritan.
I’m just a white guy from Maine, Beckett said, imitating Princess from earlier.
