The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Sam stands up. She can’t accept Romey walking away. Their passion isn’t waning—they just proved it. “Why are you doing this?”

  Romey’s face crumples. “Sam, you don’t love me.”

  Sam reaches over and clasps Romey’s shoulders. “You’re wrong. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.” This sounds over-the-top but happens to be the truth.

  Romey tucks her elbows up over her ears. Monkey no hear. She starts to cry softly. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if you are with me as a way to feel close to your sister. Maybe I’m just part of some weird grief process.”

  “That’s not true.” Her protest is automatic but, as she thinks about it, Sam realizes Romey is wrong. Looking into Chloe’s death is what has made it possible for them to get this far. Chloe’s death produced voluptuous possibilities: she might have married Omar or adopted Labrador puppies; she could have been a professor, a businesswoman, a spy. The contemplation of her futures makes her more than she might have been and makes Sam less. When Chloe’s death cancelled her opportunities, Sam stopped allowing herself to take any. If someone got close to her, if it was possible for her to take a lover she might care about, she sabotaged the relationship. But here, in Montreal, understanding this for the first time, everything is different. A tsunami of hope washes over her. “Romey, I do want to be with you. I want to stay in Montreal. We can get married. We can have kids if you want.”

  “Does this mean you’ve forgiven me?”

  Sam wavers before saying, “Yes.” While she’s no longer mad about how Romey treated Chloe, Sam hesitated because there are other considerations. What if Omar is hiding something even worse? Romey may have to choose between her lover and her best friend.

  Romey sighs. “I don’t know about you and me.”

  Then again, maybe there won’t be a choice.

  “Don’t do this to me, to us. Is Omar the only meaningful relationship you’re going to have?” Even though she knows she is making a mistake, Sam can’t seem to shave the frustration from her voice.

  Romey swings her elbows down and shoves Sam’s chest, pushing her away.

  “I’m going now,” Romey says. Her eyes are darkened windows locked down.

  “Don’t wait too long to come back. I have a use-by date.” Sam is full of shit, testosteronic. But Romey strides out of Sam’s apartment without a second glance. Sam wants to follow but grief holds her fast.

  PART THREE:

  WARNINGS

  Chapter Fourteen

  During her third and fourth years of university, Chloe could not stop talking about the Kennedy assassination. As far as she was concerned, the lone gunman theory was crap. Certain facts, she argued, were indisputable: a president was killed, and the Warren Commission established to investigate the assassination operated in secrecy; minutes of its meetings were classified top secret, and much of the evidence was sealed for seventy-five years; witnesses who heard and saw people shoot from behind the fence on the grassy knoll weren’t called. His own government killed him; it was as simple as that.

  Chloe’s obsession with the Kennedy assassination was not an isolated incident. Gradually, her interest expanded to other conspiracies, which she addressed, wherever possible, in her papers for her political science classes. Mind, she didn’t believe all conspiracy theories—she was a skeptic when it came to alien abductions and the alleged dangers of fluoride, agnostic with regard to the idea the Apollo moon landings were faked—but she was unwavering when it came to political assassinations.

  Sam was baffled by Chloe’s new-found passion for conspiracy. It was as if she had wandered into a revival tent filled with snake handlers and been converted. But, as far as Sam could tell, no like-minded individuals had brought Chloe into the fold—her worship was solitary. In fact, in terms of a social life, she needed to get one. She had made no new friends since her breakup with James and the cooling off of her relationship with Tory. Except to go to class, Chloe didn’t leave the house. And, as long as she kept her grades up, Dad didn’t force her to get a job.

  The only things Sam could identify as having been responsible for her sister’s conversion were books. Her scriptures were: Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. When Chloe began to refer to herself as a Foucauldian, Sam decided to read Discipline and Punish. She tried for months to read the book but couldn’t get through it. It was dull. It was an historical account of the development of the panopticon, an architectural model of a prison building that allowed an observer to watch all of the prisoners without the prisoners being aware of whether or not they were being observed. Who cared?

  While her sister’s influence led Sam to become a vegetarian, the path of conspiracy buff was not for her. But perhaps she was just bitter over the way Chloe had abandoned vegetarianism. It was an issue that caused their relationship to pulse with friction when, for example, Sam left the following note in the fridge: “Dear Number One Sister: In future, please don’t let your bloody hamburger meat touch my tofu. Sincerely, Number Two Sister.” The irony of the greeting and sign-off was not lost on Chloe, who retaliated by tantrum.

  When Sam returned the Foucault book, she found her sister lying in the dark in the basement den watching the X-Files. She was supposed to be reworking the outline for a research paper, an historical survey of eminences grises. She had recently had a crushing meeting with her supervisor, who had characterized the outline as sloppy and unfocused. Chloe should be examining no more than three examples of decision-making by unofficial advisors and provide detailed background, covering the socio-economic, historical, and cultural context of each situation.

  “Here’s your book back.” Sam dropped Foucault onto the portion of the Ikea couch Chloe wasn’t lying on.

  “Did you like it?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t think I got it.”

  An advertisement came on. Chloe swung her legs onto the floor and sat up. “Sam, listen to me. The people we need to be afraid of are multinational corporations and state governments who only let us see what they want us to see. What Foucault adds to this is the idea that we need to examine the way in which the government has made surveillance normative.”

  Sam nodded. Was normative a fancy way of saying normal? She didn’t ask because she didn’t want to sound stupid, plus she wasn’t sure she really cared.

  Chloe wasn’t daunted by Sam’s silence. “For example, take bank machines. We don’t even think about the cameras that watch us withdraw money. We don’t even consider that those cameras can match faces with identities and economic transactions. Basically, the government can find out everything about everyone.”

  “I guess,” Sam said. “I’m going out. Catch you later.”

  Chloe held a pillow to her chest. “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t know yet.” A lie: Sam was going to a gay bar, something she had never done before. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t tell Chloe, but Sam thought maybe it was because she wanted to have an experience that was hers alone, something to which Chloe wouldn’t be able to say, “When I was your age, I did that.”

  “Are you going with Dyna?” Chloe singsonged Dyna’s name.

  “Yeah. What do you have against her, anyway?”

  Now it was Chloe’s turn to shrug. “She seems trashy.” The X-Files were back on, and her attention was once again burrowed into the screen.

  Dyna Kouropoulos was Sam’s new friend. Dyna was a year ahead of Sam, so they didn’t have any classes together. They had met outside the side doors where everyone smoked. Even though she didn’t smoke, Sam liked the smokers—they were the bad-ass kids. Dyna was an incest survivor, a fact she tossed like a Molotov cocktail into unrelated conversations. She wasn’t beautiful—she had a big nose and a sprite of acne running across her square-jawed face—but guys paid a lot of attention to her. She had long brown hair and a pretty body, but so did lots of girls, so why, Sam wondered, were the boys always sniffing at Dyna? Why couldn’t Sa
m stop staring at Dyna? Why did she ooze sex, as if being molested when she was a kid had sprayed her skin with pheromones? The other girls hated her, called her a slut and worse. All the girls, except Sam who knew Dyna wasn’t really a slut. If you didn’t like having sex with boys, it didn’t count. To Sam, Dyna described getting up in the middle of a blow job in order to make a sandwich and fantasizing about chopping off the penis she had been sucking. Although she couldn’t remember the first time she had sex, she knew she had lost her virginity to her father. What she did remember was going horseback riding and thinking to herself, if a boy ever asked, she would tell him she broke her hymen from riding a horse. But no boy ever got that story. After guys fucked Dyna, she told them her father had raped her. Their reactions? Shock, horror, embarrassment, and occasionally contempt. But none of it seemed to make a difference to her. “I’ve never been in love,” she told Sam. “I can’t decide whether I hate men or feel sorry for them.”

  No one at school talked like Dyna. As casually as she would lend a pen, she handed over her most squirmy secrets and feelings, something which Sam admired but which also made her feel afraid for Dyna, protective. Sam couldn’t stop thinking about her. The two of them spent every day together. They ate lunch, spent their free periods together, had coffee after school. On weekends, Dyna liked to go to punk clubs, even though she didn’t like the music and didn’t look like a punk. She wore white Lacoste shirts with super-tight jeans; Chloe dubbed Dyna’s style “preppy gone bad,” which Sam found annoyingly apt. What Dyna said she liked about punk was the anger, but Sam also noticed the looks Dyna showered on the skinhead boys. Personally, Sam was over punk. One day Dyna suggested they go to a gay bar.

  Walking into the gay bar, Sam felt nervous, exposed. She thought, everyone will know I’m gay. If she ran into a neighbour, that person would know the truth about her, and she wouldn’t be able to retract it. But once she was in the bar, Sam realized she was being silly, paranoid—no one here cared about her. She was disappointed to see she and Dyna were the only women in the bar. The reason Sam agreed to go to a gay bar was to see lesbians. But the place they were in throbbed with men: alert hunters studying a dance floor of gyrating quarry displaying naked muscular chests.

  The few seats in the bar were taken, so Sam and Dyna leaned on a square pillar, which was covered in mirrors.

  “Check it out—these guys are all hunks!” Dyna said.

  What struck Sam about the men was their pleasant scent. The place was packed, but all Sam could smell was aftershave and gel, as if the men had just taken a shower and put on an-tiperspirant Punk bars were as full of guys, but they stunk of beer, smoke, sweat, and, not too infrequently, vomit. Two men with moustaches necked beside Sam. The sight was both slightly shocking and a relief. She and Dyna were in a bubble, away from incursions, or so Sam thought, until an older man came over to them and put a beer in her hand.

  “Thanks,” Sam said. Without thinking about why he might have brought her a beer, she proceeded to drink it.

  Dyna glared at the man. “We’re lesbians.”

  The man stared at Sam for a moment, then left.

  Dyna explained, “He thought you were chicken.”

  “What?”

  “A young boy. He bought you a drink because he thought you were a fag.”

  “Oh.” Sam felt stupid. She drank the rest of the beer as fast as she could. She wanted to get drunk but was afraid to order another beer in case the bartender asked for ID and threw them out. Dyna was bolder; she went to the bar and returned with two more beers. When they finished their drinks, Sam cupped Dyna’s ear, ostensibly so Dyna could hear Sam above the music, but in fact Sam just wanted to touch her. “Are we lesbians?”

  “Do you want to be?” Dyna yelled.

  Sam nodded and Dyna kissed her. Sam had only ever kissed a boy or two at a dance, but this was different because she was kissing someone she wanted to kiss. She was kissing Dyna, whose lips were fuller, whose mouth opened just enough to hold Sam’s tongue. There was a feeling like the blooming of flowers in Sam’s chest, and she pressed herself closer to Dyna. Running a tongue along Dyna’s slightly crooked front teeth, Sam felt their hard edges, an imprint she wanted to keep forever. She opened her eyes and saw their reflection in the mirror: a gawky boy-girl with freckles and pale lashes kissing a taller girl-woman, who was wearing enough mascara for both of them. Sam closed her eyes; she wasn’t sure what they were doing could survive scrutiny, could survive—high school. But when Sam opened her eyes again, she saw Dyna’s eyes were also open, were, in fact, peering around.

  When they walked out of the bar, Sam was plastered. She had spent all of her money on beer and needed to take a cab home, so they stopped at a bank machine, where they had to wait for two teenage boys to finish getting their money. Sam felt so loose, so loud, as if she couldn’t be contained, as if the best parts of her, the love and affection she carried deep within her, were flowing like lava from a volcano. She stumbled against Dyna, then put an arm around her, reaching up to kiss her.

  “Lesbians.” The teenagers stood with legs apart, scowling at Sam and Dyna. Even though it was December, the boys weren’t wearing coats. Their hair was unwashed, their jeans dirty.

  Sam thought, lesbians? How pathetic! The boys hadn’t even called them dykes, let alone carpet munchers. Did they think Sam was going to cower and be ashamed? Well, she wasn’t. Not after tonight. She said, “Nothing gets past you guys!”

  One of the boys looked uncertain while the other one glanced at the ceiling, then flicked his eyes meaningfully at the other boy. Without a word, they trudged out the door.

  Dyna said, “I’m not really a lesbian. I just thought it would be easier with you.”

  In an instant, Sam’s cockiness vanished. She got it: Dyna thought Sam would be easier to keep at bay than a boy. Everything Sam felt, everything she wanted to feel, was not possible. Dyna had wound a tight thread around Sam, intending to weave the two of them together, but instead Dyna had cut off Sam’s circulation.

  Sam looked at the ground. When they got out of the bank machine, she was too stunned by Dyna’s comment to notice the boys waiting for them. The first punch to Sam’s stomach seemed eerily normal, an appropriate accompaniment to Dyna’s rejection. As Sam’s palms smacked the cold, raw ground, she realized the security cameras in the bank machines had temporarily provided them with protection.

  Chloe looked up from her morning coffee. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Is it that bad?” Sam ran from the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom to examine herself in the mirror. While Dyna had screamed, the boys kicked Sam’s legs and ass. Then one of the boys stopped what he was doing to Sam to seize the hood of Dyna’s coat and pull her to him. Sam scrambled up from the ground to lunge at the boy holding Dyna. What Sam had got for her efforts was an elbow in the eye. An eye that was now puffy and bruised the colour of an eggplant.

  Chloe stormed into the bathroom without bothering to knock. “Did Dyna do this to you? Are you guys having some kind of twisted dyke relationship?”

  Twisted dyke relationship? With shaking hands Sam ran a washcloth under cold water. Was her sister no better than the idiots who had done this to her, who would have done worse if two big men wearing chaps and leather jackets hadn’t chased the boys away? In the mirror Sam glared at her sister’s reflection. “Get. Out.”

  “She did do this to you, didn’t she?”

  Sam pressed the cloth to her swollen eye. “No, she didn’t. But I’d like some privacy. Don’t say anything to Dad, okay?”

  “like I ever have.” Chloe flounced off.

  By some strange instinct, Chloe’s assessment was partially true: Dyna was the one who had really hurt Sam.

  Sam told her father she got drunk and fell on some stairs, and he grounded her, but Sam’s misdeeds were trumped within days by Chloe, who dropped out of school. Her supervisor deemed a second thesis outline unacceptable: Chloe had failed to deconstruct the concept of conspiracy theo
ry and eminence grise.

  “We live in a culture of secrecy—that’s what I’m deconstructing. But I’m not going to deconstruct my decon-structions. That’s insane!” Chloe railed to Sam, who didn’t have much to say to her sister or to anyone because she couldn’t stop thinking about the night she was attacked. After their rescue, Dyna had hailed a cab. The two of them had got into the back seat, and Dyna had held Sam’s hand. Speaking in a low, fierce voice, Dyna had said, “I can’t believe this shit still goes on, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Even though we’ve got feminism, men keep raping women. Men are such fuckheads.” When the cab had stopped in front of Sam’s house, she had invited Dyna to sleep over, but she had shaken her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Sam had croaked, “I just want you to hold me.” She had been telling the truth, but Dyna hadn’t been able to meet Sam’s eyes, had stayed in the cab. Now Dyna was dating a guy. So much for men being “fuckheads.”

  When Chloe announced she was visiting Montreal for a weekend, Sam barely paid attention. But when Chloe called on Sunday night to say she had decided to stay there, Sam was furious. How could some people just take off? How could some people dump the people they loved? When their father drove Chloe’s stuff up to Montreal two months later, Sam remained at home, pouting. She missed her sister, but Chloe’s absence felt like an echo of the other aches in Sam’s life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sam parks the rental car in front of Francis’s building and waits for him. He asked her not to ring the buzzer because the noise will disturb his mother, a nurse who works shifts. The discount car rental place gave Sam a Pontiac Sunfire, a low-end sports car, which she rented for four days, from Friday morning to Monday evening. A phone call and her credit card will allow her to add days if she needs to. She flips the radio station dial, searching for a sound to incinerate her thoughts of Romey. But all Sam sees are a slow succession of images from the night before: Romey’s face scrunched with pleasure as she came; her cheeks streaked with tears and mascara while she cried; the brisk movement of her long legs as she stalked out of Sam’s apartment. The radio doesn’t help. Romey keeps trespassing through Sam’s mind.