The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

Sam cleans her apartment. Scrubs the kitchen cupboards, the top of the stove, the counters. Mops the floors. She tackled the bathroom when she first moved in but not the bathroom cabinet. As she’s wiping down the drawers, she finds an old kaleidoscope. When she was a kid, she had one. Her father gave it to her for her birthday. She remembers lying on her back on the lawn with the kaleidoscope pressed to her eye, bewitched by the medley of colour. But when she peers through the kaleidoscope left behind in her bathroom, the glass inside is greasy, and the colours don’t give her the same thrill. Disappointing. During Chloe’s last visit, she played with Sam’s kaleidoscope. She was stoned and giggled like a kid; perhaps pot brings back the magic. Chloe must have taken the kaleidoscope because Sam hasn’t seen it since. If Chloe had asked, Sam would have given it to her.

  Sam spins the kaleidoscope-end around. Sees a volcano of blurring colour: a circle becomes a star becomes a pentagram. The light and colour are created by reflection, by a jigsaw of mirrors, which she knows because she did a grade school science project on kaleidoscopes. She continues twisting the end, shifting the perspective.

  During a break at work Sam reads a ratty copy of The Montreal Mirror. The classified section is full of ads for escort agencies, most of which seem to be hiring, and it gives her an idea. When she gets back to her apartment, she calls Arabian Nights and tells the woman who answers the phone she’s looking for a job. A Saturday afternoon interview is offered to her. After she hangs up, she feels her stomach do a free fall she remembers from fair rides: a cocktail of pleasure and fear. If Omar doesn’t interview her, she will at least know where he works. But if he does interview her, how will she pretend to be a prostitute? She slept with a woman whom people paid to watch on a webcam, but Sam has never met anyone who fucks for money. What is she going to wear to the interview? She doesn’t have anything besides shirts and jeans. She doesn’t need to thumb through her closet to check; she just isn’t the kind of woman who owns a little black dress.

  Arabian Nights is in Chinatown. Sam walks south on St. Laurent through sex trade central, an intersection of streets lined by taverns and peep shows. Pigeons coo, drunks panhandle, and hookers conduct their business in a combination of French and English: “Pourun blow job? Cinquante” The smell of fried onions and steamies from casse-croutes competes with the smell of decomposing vegetables. Asian groceries sell shiny eggplants and knobby lychees out of wooden crates. Walking under the imperial-style arches demarcating Chinatown, Sam reaches rue de La Gauchetiere, a crooked street paved with bricks where she passes noodle houses and vendors selling sunglasses and baseball caps. She finds the address of Arabian Nights in an industrial building on a side street.

  A freight elevator with a barred cage brings her to the third floor. She walks along a wide hall with hardwood floors and a pop machine. Several office suites emit a curious whirring noise. Sam peeks into an open doorway and sees a group of women varied enough to be a United Nations delegation operating industrial sewing machines. First World sweatshops. Is locating an escort agency next to them a recruiting strategy?

  The door is locked at the agency suite, so Sam rings the bell. A woman addresses Sam through an intercom, then releases the lock. Sam finds herself in a waiting room, where a trim East Indian woman clad in jeans and a silk tunic sits behind a receptionist’s desk. The woman doesn’t say anything, just motions Sam to an empty chair. Also seated is a chubby white girl who is wearing a ruffled denim skirt. I should have bought a cheap skirt, Sam thinks. Instead, she’s in her usual black jeans with a Bettie Page T-shirt, which seemed like the most sex-workerish item among her clothes. While the girl beside her reads Elk magazine, Sam picks up an English newspaper and scans the headlines. She feels as if she’s at the dentist’s.

  “Omar is ready to see whichever one of you has a three o’clock appointment,” the receptionist announces. Sam stands up, and the receptionist clangs an iridescence of bracelets in the direction of the hall beyond her desk.

  Omar’s office is the only room at the end of the hall. He’s sitting behind a substantial desk, which appears to be made of solid oak. When Sam enters the room, he stands up. He has dark eyes, dark hair, and skin shaded just deep enough to announce he isn’t white. Chloe said her boyfriend was a hip hop fan, yet Sam expected him to be white. She’s not sure why. Is it just hard to imagine her punky, petulant sister dating someone so different from herself? Sam continues staring at him. There’s a fullness to his face, a pout to his cheeks and lips, a dollop of femininity, which makes him much more attractive than average. He’s medium height with shoulders that tell her he has a gym membership and a belly that suggests he skips the cardio machines. While he appears to be in his early thirties, he’s dressed in baggy nylon sweats and a Lakers jersey with the sleeves pushed over his elbows. Before sitting back down on his padded black leather chair, he gestures to Sam to park herself in a flimsy wooden chair in front of his desk. Folding his sinewy arms across his chest, he asks, “Have you worked as an escort before?”

  “Nope.” In fact, she guesses she has less experience than anyone who has walked through this door—she’s never had sex with a man. She braids her legs together under the chair.

  “Why do you want to work here?” Omar mad-dogs her. He is trying to intimidate her and is succeeding.

  “To make money.” Sam attempts to sound hard, like she’s been around the block, but she knows she just sounds like a bluffing kid with the wrong answer to a math question.

  Omar leans back in his chair, lifts his hands over his head, and clasps them together. “Is there a special reason you need money?”

  “Um, no.” Sam supposes most women don’t like prostituting themselves so Omar wants to know what will keep them at the job. Although she has been hired at places where she didn’t want to work, this is tough. She feels as if she’s taking an acting class: what’s my motivation?

  Omar places his forearms back on his desk. “I’ll be real. I hire light-skinned black women, Asian girls, and goths.”

  Sam stares at him. “Goths?”

  “You know, white girls who dress like vampires. They’re popular with the leather-and-chains crowd. But I don’t think I can sell you. From what I can see of it, your body’s fine. I have females who would want to get with you, but you aren’t their husbands’ type. Masculinity in a woman is hard to live up to. Personally, I like the idea of sleeping with a woman who could beat me up, but I’m not most guys.”

  Sam blushes. No one has ever evaluated her sex appeal before, and she’s never known a straight person to do anything besides slide around the fact of her being queer. “I’m not here about a job.”

  Omar gets up, walks to the door, and closes it before returning to stand over Sam in her chair. A penetrating aftershave surrounds her. Maybe he won’t notice she’s sweating.

  He flashes white teeth in a smile. Claps a hand on her shoulder, hard, and asks her in a perfectly cordial tone: “What the fuck do you want then?”

  His tough guy routine is out of a Hollywood movie, but the performance is practised, almost ironic. The intelligence and detachment in his eyes warn her this is just his warm-up act, and that gives her the creeps. She decides not to lie to him.

  As she looks up at him, her story rushes out. “I already have a job. I wash dishes at Le Lapin Blanc where you used to work with a woman named Chloe. I’m her younger sister, Sam.”

  Omar’s grin evaporates, water turning to steam on a hot grill. “That was a bitch move. Why weren’t you truthful?”

  She lowers her gaze. “I left you a couple messages, but you didn’t call me back.”

  Omar scowls. “If I want someone to get a hold of me, I give them my cell.” He pauses. “I forgot Chloe had a sister named Sam. I didn’t put it together.”

  “If you had, would you have agreed to see me?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Omar strides to the window at the back of his office and gazes out at the market stalls along the streets of Chinatown. He looks as though he’d rather b
e among the coloured baubles from Hong Kong, the gelatinous buns, and the funk of fish. But then he wheels around and stares at her, his face rigid. “So why’re you here? Tell me. Now.”

  Either he’s a volatile guy or talking about Chloe gets to him, Sam thinks. In a gentle voice she says, “I just want to know what Chloe’s life was like in Montreal.”

  The tension seems to drain from him. His expression doesn’t exactly soften, but he no longer looks angry. She said the right thing or, rather, didn’t say the wrong thing. Intuitively she understands there is something he doesn’t want to tell her, something she is not supposed to ask. If she asked him the wrong question, he would have thrown her out.

  He says, “Your sister wasn’t the type of girl I ever thought I’d be with. She was so serious. At work, I was always bugging her, asking her, ‘What’re you thinking about? How come you don’t talk to no one?’ After a while, we talked. And it was like she could really feel my shit. It was special with her. She wasn’t like other girls, even smelled different. Didn’t wear Chanel or Obsession but some kind of oil.”

  “Patchouli.” Sam can almost smell it. Can see the little jar of glistening, dark liquid sitting on the bathroom shelf.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” A hesitant smile plays across his lips. He leans over his desk, traces a whorl in the wood with his fingers. To Sam, it seems as if he’s caressing a memory of his own of Chloe. Then he glances at the flashing light on his phone and straightens his posture. Picking up the phone, he cups it with one hand. “Listen, I’ve got more girls to interview. Why don’t you come with me to a party tonight? There’s someone I want you to meet. She used to live with your sister.”

  The roommate. Sam was on a roll. “Where’s the party?”

  “Give me your address. I’ll pick you up around midnight.” Omar pushes a pen across the desk, then taps his finger on top of a pile of business cards held in an antique brass holder.

  Stalling for time, Sam examines the business card. Below a logo of a cocktail glass are the words “exotic, elegant, multilingual escorts.” How did he go from working in a bar to running an escort agency? What would Chloe think if she were alive? Sam wants to ask Omar about his relationship with her sister, but instead she flips the card over, writes her phone number and address on the back, and gives it to him.

  He slides the card into a drawer. “You know, I can tell in five minutes whether a woman can do this job or not. What did you think of the woman sitting next to you?”

  Sam shrugs. What she can remember is the woman seemed neither exotic nor elegant, but then most businesses engage in misleading advertising. Is his question a test of her intelligence or is he bonding with her about girls, which some straight men like to do with dykes? He seems to want her to like him, which isn’t the same as him liking her. While she’s curious about him, she can’t say she likes him. He’s nothing like her sister’s high-school boyfriend. He’s not like anyone she’s ever met.

  Sam asks, “Do you ever hire someone, even if you don’t think they’re going to work out?”

  “Yeah, but it never pays.” Omar walks her to the door. He pauses before extending his hand to her. His handshake is a bit too firm. The next potential recruit totters in on a pair of platform sneakers.

  Chapter Ten

  When Sam was twelve, she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. Teenagers were cool. Sam had an instinct for cool, for knowing the right clothes to wear at school in order to be accepted, but she was also drawn, like Chloe, to rebellion and nonconformity. Sam understood that her sister was kind of cool, kind of a loser. While Chloe played Sex Pistols and Nick Cave records and was interested in Sid and Nancy, she didn’t have a subculture look: she didn’t dye her hair or wear white makeup. Her only friend was Tory, who lived on their street. Chloe and Tory were always talking about how much they hated the preppies, the in-crowd kids, but they didn’t know how to make friends with the cute boys wearing eyeliner at showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Roxy. Mostly Chloe stayed at home and fought with Dad. When she was out, the house felt empty to Sam. Her sister was this large, buzzing presence whose emotions Sam felt acutely. Chloe’s frustration and desire enveloped Sam like the patchouli oil her sister drenched herself in. Patchouli oil bought at a Yonge Street head shop. One time Chloe took Sam there. The place gave her a little charge. While Chloe thumbed through a rack of posters, looking for a picture of Sid and Nancy to add to her collection, Sam examined the black T-shirts pinned to the walls. A large glass case running the length of the store displayed drug paraphernalia and patches stitched with the names of bands and pictures of pot plants. The patches could be sewn onto jackets, pants, and knapsacks. After buying a jar of patchouli oil from the display case, Chloe pointed out the hash pipes and rolling papers to Sam. Out on the street, Chloe unsealed the stopper on the patchouli, turned the bottle upside down on her finger, and smeared a spot of the dark oil on the collar of her black sweater. “Perfume lasts longer if you put it on your clothes,” she told Sam.

  A dab of feminine wisdom lost on Sam, who wasn’t interested in wearing perfume.

  Chloe added, “It doesn’t last forever, but nothing ever does.”

  In the fall, Sam would begin junior high. On notepads she wrote: “What Is Going to Happen to Me?” She wanted to be ready. She wanted to reach past her childhood to the risk and shimmer of the city and adventure. A poster on the street advertised an all-ages show, which was being held at a nearby church. She asked her father if she could go.

  “Only if your sister takes you,” he said.

  Chloe gave a world-weary sigh. She was eighteen; she was over the whole all-ages show thing. Sam couldn’t remember Chloe ever going to one, but she claimed she had. Nonetheless, she agreed to accompany Sam.

  Sam’s first gig. Church basement, low ceilings, lots of rooms, stream of kids, and the indescribable thrill of being around teenagers when you weren’t quite one. On stage the band was setting up. They were called the Vegetarians. “We’re part of a youth direct-action group who do benefits for different animal rights organizations,” the lead singer announced over a microphone. While his fellow band members tuned their instruments, the singer jumped off the stage to hand out pamphlets about factory farming. Sam stuffed one into her pocket.

  The singer got back onto the stage and sang-screamed, “Fuck fast food, fuck fast food, fuck fast food.” Three words plus three chords. Sam leaped into the mosh pit, got bumped around from boy to boy like a pinball. It was fun. She ran to get her sister.

  “C’mon, let’s dance.”

  Chloe shook her head. “Maybe later.” But Chloe didn’t join her; she stayed on the sidelines watching the band. When they finished their first set and left the stage to take their break, Sam saw Chloe scamper after the singer, a tall, skinny boy with blue hair who looked her age. Sam crept over to them because she wanted to tell him she liked his band. As he leaned over a drinking fountain noisily slurping water, Chloe tapped his shoulder, her fingers resting for a moment on his sweaty bare skin, accessible through a hole in his tattered T-shirt. He jerked his body up, regarding Chloe with such raw curiosity that Sam found herself staring at her sister as if she had never seen her: a lanky girl in jeans and a black sweater, messy red hair reaching below her shoulders, silver studs caulked along the edge of her right ear.

  “Great songs. Too bad about the name of your band,” Chloe said.

  Sam was shocked. Why was her sister being mean to him?

  “What’s wrong with our name?” His voice was tinged with a familiar huffiness. He sounded, well, like Chloe.

  “Too obvious.”

  “Have you got a better one?”

  “The Battery Hens.” Even though Sam figured it had probably taken Chloe his whole set to come up with the name, she looked terribly smug.

  He didn’t tell her then how much he liked the suggestion, but his interest in her swelled across his face. He didn’t crack a smile, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Sam spent
the rest of that summer watching James’s shows, helping her sister sell Battery Hens T-shirts, and handing out pamphlets on animal liberation. Mostly people threw them on the floor, but Sam read them and became a vegetarian. She and Chloe went to a demonstration where attractive, young women who had little need of makeup carried signs that said, “Beauty Without Cruelty.” They were part of the Compassion Campaign launched to protest cosmetic companies testing on animals. When Sam and Chloe’s father left town for a conference, the band came over for several days. The boys had crests of brittle dyed hair, which they let Sam touch. They wore ripped T-shirts and black vinyl shoes. They were all radical vegans who were obsessed with food. Every one was thin, and they talked about the joys of soy, the horrors of milk, which produced mucus in your nose, and their sugar highs from the chocolate bar they shouldn’t have eaten. The first night Chloe dyed her hair black. Within a week, she bought herself some vintage clothing from Kensington Market, took out some vegetarian cookbooks from the library, and became vegan. Her indiscriminate indignation became focused as a gob of spit. When Chloe saw a beagle on the street, she would rant about how their obedience made them a favourite of researchers who would take them from animal shelters and cut out portions of their brain in labs. Sam cried the first time she heard this. She wanted to become vegan, but Dad wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let her dye her hair either, but she did get permission to buy her own clothes, to go thrifting with Chloe. Sam worshipped her sister more than she had when she had been a little kid. Chloe’s new life was so cool, so right on. Sam believed in it and in her without realizing there was a difference between the two.

  PART TWO:

  RISKS

  Chapter Eleven

  It is just after midnight when Omar calls Sam from his cellphone. While they talk, she watches him from her balcony as he paces back and forth on the sidewalk in front of her building. Above her, the night sky is rippled with clouds, grey finger curls. Sam leaves her apartment, meets him on the street. His illegally parked car is chrome-coloured with a sleek body. She has no idea what kind of car it is, but the last time she saw something similar was in a James Bond movie.