The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  When Sam entered her room, she found Chloe lying on the bed, croaking along to a Cypress Hill CD she later left behind. Looking up at Sam, Chloe said, “Hip hop is so punk rock. I can’t believe it was missing from my life.”

  “Do they play hip hop where you work?” Sam asked, chucking her knapsack onto the floor and joining her sister on the bed.

  “Nah,” Chloe said. “My boyfriend got me into it.” “Your boyfriend?” Ah ha, the reason Chloe was all smiley-faced. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in ages. In fact, Sam wasn’t sure Chloe had gone out with anyone since she had broken up with James.

  “Yeah, he calls me ‘his lady’ He’s hilarious.” Sam could imagine him, a long-haired pothead with a bong and a toque matching Chloe’s, following her around like a puppy dog. Did Chloe love him? Had they been going out for long? Sam wanted to ask these questions but didn’t because Chloe hadn’t asked Sam about her love life, not even the obvious question: where’s Dyna these days? Since Chloe had moved, she had sent one lame postcard, saying she was living in a cool neighbourhood with a cool roommate. Sam, who was still mad at her sister, hadn’t responded. How do you fight with someone you love who lives somewhere else? It was easier to forget their earlier problems, except Sam didn’t entirely.

  A toke was held out to Sam who sucked the weed into her lungs. The beat of the rap song took over the space in her head. An MC intoned the lyrics in a nasal whine alongside a crush of bass, beats, and guitar licks.

  In the evenings, Sam and Chloe played Scrabble in the dining room with their father. Beneath the closed French doors leading to the kitchen, an aroma of fresh herbs wafted. Inspired by their recent trip to Tuscany, Steven was cooking Italian food. He was ten years younger than Dad and had been his student. In the beginning Steven was Dad’s pal, a gay guy their father hung out with, but then, after Chloe moved out and Steven moved in, Sam drew the now-obvious conclusion that he was her father’s partner. “So Dad’s come out,” Chloe said. “I guess,” Sam said, although he hadn’t discussed it with her. She wondered how long it had taken Chloe to work out that their father was gay, but before Sam could ask, Chloe did a swishy imitation of Steven adjusting his cravat. “Who am I?” Chloe asked, giggling. When Sam didn’t laugh, didn’t answer, didn’t do anything besides look at the wall, Chloe stopped.

  On Chloe’s last night, she proposed a game of poker, something else she had learned from her new boyfriend. Although Sam had never played before, she was a natural. Chloe was a dreadful player—she called too much and didn’t raise enough—while Dad was a shark. The three of them played for black olives. After half an hour Dad had a giant storehouse of them, Sam had a modest pile, and Chloe had a lousy three. Dad kept bluffing them on hands that weren’t very high. Then he said, “All or nothing for this round.”

  Sam decided to fold while Chloe matched her father. They turned their hands over: Chloe had three of a kind, Dad had a straight flush. A smug smile hovered on his lips while she handed over her remaining olives.

  Steven paraded into the dining room bearing pink glass dishes of tiramisu. Chloe glanced up at him, lifted her hand, and slammed it down on her father’s pyramid of olives, which rolled everywhere. One mushed olive flew into Steven’s gelled hair. His cheeks went red, but he didn’t say anything.

  Fuck, Sam thought. Up to now, Chloe’s visit had been refreshingly peaceful.

  Dad plucked an olive from his lap. “You’re being quite the poor loser.”

  Chloe squished olives into a tight fist, which she raised, and Sam wondered if her sister was going to throw the olives at their father, Steven, or the wall.

  The wall.

  Chloe amplified the drama. “Do you know why you’re so good at poker, Dad? It’s because you spent your life faking it, faking Mom was the bad guy, faking you weren’t a homo. Now you expect us to act like it’s just so cool you’ve got this… this gay concubine.”

  Sam’s insides became her outsides. Did Chloe dislike Steven because he was a man or because he was their step-whatever? He was scowling at Chloe, which Sam could understand. She, too, felt as if she had just been attacked by Chloe. Sam swung her head in her father’s direction, but his expression was hooded. Any anger he felt he muzzled. In a calm tone, he said to Chloe, “I see you still like to toss tables.” Then he stood up, took a bowl from the kitchen counter, and began to clean up the olives. As was his way, he declined to play.

  Chloe slowly lowered her hand, letting more olives tumble onto the floor. “You’re a fucking hypocrite,” she said, stalking out of the room.

  The hypocrisy of adults had always been Chloe’s drum loop, a synthesizer riff she relentlessly played, even though she was now an adult. An adult who couldn’t quite hide her glee over the exposure of her father’s sins; payback, Sam thought, for all the ways in which her sister failed to measure up in their father’s eyes. Sam used to believe everything Chloe said. Now Sam knew better.

  Chapter Nine

  Downtown Montreal is an odd amalgam of the sacred and profane. Strip joints bump up against cathedrals, which are wedged between malls and stores. You can pray, as well as buy brand-name clothing, beer, and lap dances within a one-block radius. The pub where Chloe worked has a sign in the window: “Plongeur demande.” Sam remembers the word “plongeur” from reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; a dishwasher is needed. She enters Le Lapin Blanc and asks the bartender for an application. After she finishes writing down her not terribly relevant work experience, she tells the bartender her sister worked here. This information makes him regard her with more interest. He tells her to wait; he’ll get a manager. He presses buttons on a phone, and a thirtysomething guy named Jack comes downstairs and introduces himself to Sam as the general manager. After scanning her resume, he hires her on the spot, even though he didn’t know Chloe. He hasn’t been around long, he explains, and there’s a lot of turnover. No one seems to make a career out of this place, he adds. Then he frowns as if he is worried his frankness might lead to her refusing the job. Sam feels like telling him not to worry. She has her own agenda, and her limited French makes it impossible for her to work in an office. When he asks her if she can come in later that night, she agrees.

  He gives her a little tour. There’s a big kitchen; Le Lapin Blanc serves a lot of food. They are half bar, half restaurant, he explains. Enough of a restaurant to be known for their thick steaks and homemade french fries. Upstairs on the second floor people come to play chess. The manager points out the floor, which is tiled in black and white like a chess set. Both the upstairs and downstairs have framed pictures on the walls of the characters from Alice in Wonderland: the Walrus, the Cheshire cat, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Red Queen, and, of course, the White Rabbit.

  Sam barely has time to get back to her apartment, shower, eat, and return. As she steps out of Guy metro, she reads the graffiti written across a boarded-up building: “Montreal Equals Collective Alienation.” A little further on, there’s a picture of the federal Conservative Party leader with a bubble coming out of his mouth: “We’re Going to Party like It’s 1939.” Sam grins; she has a feeling she’s going to like living in Montreal. But why is the graffiti in English? Is it some sort of Anglo backlash against the language laws dictating signs must be in French? She passes Concordia, an English university, and realizes, no, the graffiti was just written by students.

  In the locker room at work, she puts on what the manager calls “kitchen whites”: a long-sleeved white shirt and apron, and black and white checkered pants. She has to roll up both the shirt sleeves and pant legs—there aren’t any women’s sizes. A white cap tamps her crewcut down.

  The manager brings her upstairs to the dishpit at the back of the kitchen, where she is introduced to her freakishly tall co-worker, Lemmy. His hair is pulled into a pony-tail and dyed shoe-polish black, which has the effect of enhancing the paleness of his skin. He is hunched over, scrubbing a pot with steel wool. His arms are so long that Sam can imagine him boxing with impunity, i
nflicting damage while remaining out of reach of his opponent.

  When he looks up, he tells her, “They’ve never hired a girl for the pit before.” He pauses, then adds, “I hope you’re not into Sarah McLachlan because I’m a metal head.”

  He shows Sam how to wash the dishes and run them through the Hobart machine. It seems straightforward. Then he gives her a tour of the kitchen: here’s the line where the food is cooked and you stock plates; here are the silverware bins; here’s the supply area where you get more rags and dishwashing soap; and here’s the walk-in fridge, but you don’t really need to go in there. Back at the dishpit, he puts a Slipknot CD into his boom box. Over the thrash of drums and guitar riffs, Lemmy expounds on his philosophy of metal.

  “Headbangers are not devil worshippers,” he explains. “What metal is saying is we can conquer Satan with rock and roll.”

  “I don’t believe in Satan,” Sam says.

  “He wants you to believe he doesn’t exist. That way you don’t step up and fight evil. You’re just a poor fuck it happens to.” Lemmy snaps a pair of tongs in the direction of an older Asian man with thick glasses who is cutting vegetables across from them. “Right, Dang?” Dang grunts.

  While Lemmy sprays the dishes with water, Sam stacks plates. Lemmy asks her if she’s a student.

  “No, I just moved to Montreal and don’t speak much French.”

  “I’m what you call a yuffie,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “A young urban failure. I’ve worked here longer than any other person except the lady who does the bookkeeping.”

  Sam feels her heart pound. “My sister used to work here. Did you know Chloe O’Connor?”

  “Chloe?” Lemmy stops cleaning the plates. “Yeah, I remember her. She died, right?” He gnaws on his lower lip, revealing teeth that are like bent spokes in a wheel. “Busgirl who liked to smoke up. A couple times, me and her put our money together on payday to get some quality dope. Hey, do you smoke?”

  “Once in a while.” Because Sam thought Chloe overdosed, Sam made a promise to herself not to take drugs. But last year she broke her vow and tried ecstasy.

  “Man, no one will go in with me. Once I asked Dang, and you know what he said?” Lemmy pauses to wave the nozzle in Dang’s direction, gushing water onto the tiled walls. “In his country everyone grows pot in their backyard. Powerful shit. Thick like a tree. He bought some here once, and when the guy told him how much it was, Dang thought he was joking. Isn’t that right, Dang?”

  Dang is slitting lines of fat from a roll of veal and doesn’t slow his pace when he answers. “In Cambodia everyone smoke, even my grandmother. In the afternoon, when everyone have their nap, the only people who smoke were old people.”

  Sam doesn’t understand. “Why just old people?”

  “Because they been doing it so long they could go to work afterwards. Heh-heh.” Dang chuckles like an animated villain.

  “Wild, eh? Just talking about it makes me want to go outside and smoke a big doobie,” Lemmy says.

  A waiter lurches into the dishpit and grabs plates from a pile Sam stacked. He says, “We’re down a busboy and we’re in the juice. Two of the bus stations are empty. Help me bring out plates.”

  Sam gathers as many as she can. Staggering under their weight, she follows him into the dining area. He takes off while a busboy rushes over to snatch the plates from her arms. Someone else shows her where the bus station is, and she restocks it with various dishes. When she gets back to the kitchen, everyone is on fast-forward. Lemmy is sorting cutlery for anxious waiters, and he yells at her to run the dishes through. A manager comes in to announce they’re slammed, which Sam instantly grasps means busy. The order machine steadily spits out chits. For the next few hours, she works as quickly as she can. Her arms ache, but she doesn’t mind. She learns the rhythm of spreading a stack of plates apart like a deck of cards with her left hand while washing them with her right. She likes having her thoughts reduced to a single focus: making dishes sparkle. She’s living in the now, Zen and the Art of the Hobart. Cleaning up is not as meditative.

  Lemmy says, “I’ll get the mop and do the floor. You can do the sink and wipe down the machine.”

  “Sure.” Sam bends over water dotted with bits of noodles, which she examines as if she were reading tea leaves. Had Chloe liked working here? The only job Sam remembers her having was a position at the university admissions office, which their father found for her one summer. She was fired for being “brusque.” She didn’t mind losing the job, but Dad was furious. Dirty water slops onto Sam’s sneakers, pushing the memory aside, and she begins to scrub out the inside of the Hobart machine. When she finishes, she notices two small, square metal pans set in an unobtrusive corner. The dishes are encrusted with bechamel sauce.

  Sam points the pans out to Lemmy, who has just returned from putting the mop away. “I didn’t see those.”

  Wiping his sweaty cheeks with his apron, Lemmy says, “No problem. Grab them and come with me.” He motions towards the exit door, which is propped open with a broken broom handle. Sam follows him down an alley to a blue Dumpster with an attached trash compactor. He reaches his hand out to her and she gives him the metal containers, which he tosses into the compactor. The compactor makes a hideous grinding sound and shakes back and forth but manages to destroy the pans.

  “I can’t believe you just did that. Are you trying to impress me?”

  “No, I do this all the time.” Lemmy takes a mashed pack of cigarettes from his front pocket and holds them out. “You want one?”

  Sam shakes her head, and Lemmy lights one for himself, leaning with his back against the Dumpster. His cigarette doesn’t quite mask the pungent and competing odours of bleach and rotting garbage. The sky is clouded over and no stars are visible. Goosebumps break out on Sam’s arm, and the sweat on her back grows slippery and cool. It is April, but the menace of winter has not yet left.

  Sam shoves her hands into her pockets. “Did my sister have any close friends here?”

  Lemmy inhales longer than Sam thinks is possible. “She used to go out with Omar.”

  Omar. The name seems faintly familiar. Was that the name of Chloe’s boyfriend, the one who liked hip hop? Sam asks Lemmy if Omar still works at Le Lapin Blanc.

  “Nah. He used to be a bouncer here, but now he runs an escort agency. Least that’s what he told Joe last time he was in.”

  “Who’s Joe?”

  “Bartender who works the day shift.” Lemmy suddenly squints at Sam, his focus tightening like a camera lens. Before he can ask her why she’s asking him so many questions, she tells him she’ll see him inside. She hurries back into the kitchen, then goes to get changed into her street clothes. Omar’s name ricochets through her head.

  When she emerges from the locker room she finds Lemmy still in his kitchen whites, sitting at the bar with a pint in front of him. He invites her to join him, but she tells him “another time” and hopes he won’t ask again. Instead of taking the metro to her apartment, she decides to walk. She wants to be by herself, not packed in beside other people.

  An icy wind whizzes through her black bomber jacket. Montreal is colder than Toronto. White teenage punks who have their hair fashioned into tropical cockscombs approach Sam with their hands out, calling “un peu d’change, un peu d’change.” She gives a girl a dollar and heads south to an industrial area, empty of people, even the homeless. When she turns west on Wellington, she sees the first signs of gentrifi-cation: a few refurbished Victorians among low, square brick buildings. The shadowy presence of the middle class is disturbing rather than reassuring—a bottle thrown across the barricades of class warfare. A man with hair the colour of old teeth stands in a doorway drinking a quart bottle of beer. He watches her without moving his head, only his eyes. Because men assume she’s a guy, Sam usually doesn’t have to feel scared when she walks alone at night, but this man frightens her. His eyes are empty, eerie. Her gender and sexual orientation are less
important than the fact that she’s smaller than he is. She forces herself not to run, not to show fear. When she reaches Verdun, which is much busier, she realizes she’s half-holding her breath. She lets out her breath but still feels edgy. She hurries by dollar stores, pawnshops, and still-open pizza joints. A couple of young thugs walking a pair of bull terriers shuffle by her without a glance. They just roll past. When she gets to her apartment, she runs up the spiral staircase, unlocks her door, then locks it from the inside.

  Sam finds out from Joe, the bartender, that Omar runs an escort agency called Arabian Nights. After work she checks the name in the Yellow Pages at a pay phone. Only a phone number is provided, no address. She dials the number. “Hi, can I speak to Omar?”

  A female voice replies almost automatically, “He’s not here right now. Would you like to leave a message?” Sam leaves her first name and phone number.

  He doesn’t call. She tries again but he’s not there. Apparently he’s never there. After her fourth call in four days, the voice on the other end asks Sam what her business is with him. “Uh, personal,” Sam says. A frosty pause follows. This time, Sam leaves her first and last name.

  Days trickle by. No phone call.