Nothing but a Smile (11 page)

“So
I'm
not? I'm just the dumb bunny?” Reenie slipped into
a comical breathy voice, somewhere between Mae West and Baby Snooks. “ ‘Looka all the pretty
pischers! Ooh … !' ”
She stubbed out her cigarette against the marble. “Who's the blonde here, sister?”

Sal took a deep breath and waited, hoping to calm the impulse to smack her. When she thought she could say it nicely, she told Reenie she'd never called her names like that and did not think she was dumb, but that she was serious about this, that she was trying to improve her understanding for the sake of her
business,
not just—

“Listen.” Reenie was shaking her head now. “That business back at the ad agency? That's not over. I intend to be an art director again one day, maybe even an artist—a
great
artist. And I'm not going to let a bunch of wolves like that Rollo Deininger get in my way, either.”

“That's great, Reenie.” She checked her lipstick. “I want that for you, too, and I'm sorry. But if you're really serious about it— like it sure sounds you are—maybe you should actually apply to an art school.”

Reenie smirked. “And pay the tuition with what—my good looks? No, I'll have to do this myself. Big picture, down the road, I see myself marrying a guy rich enough he doesn't need me playing housewife, he can just put me through art school.”

Sal told her it was a hell of plan. “Do it all yourself …”

“Darn tootin',” Reenie said. “In the meantime, though, I wouldn't mind soaking up anything ‘the Handsome Hothead' has to say on the subject.”

“I take it that's your nickname for Wink now.”

“I figure it will do,” she said, “until such time as he graduates to ‘the Shover Lover.' ”

The first part, Sal figured, was a reference to him shoving
Reenie's former boss in the supply closet. The latter part meant she'd set her sights on him—as more than an art teacher. Maybe already had her hooks in him.

Which was fine, really. It was what Sal wanted all along, the two of them to hit it off.

Wink ignored the jingle of the shop bell. Sal was out front and would handle it. Besides, it sounded like it was just the mailman.

This was his first solo turn at developing a customer's roll of film, and he needed to concentrate. He couldn't afford to botch this.

He would have assumed Sal was even more concerned than he was about staying on good footing with the customers these days. So he was surprised when she bothered him, speaking to him through the curtain, telling him to be sure to come out and see her as soon as he could.

He gave her a muttery
Yeah, fine,
considering for a moment that she might just be trying to test him further—heap on the distractions to make him concentrate harder on his work. Like the kind of crap they pulled back in basic training—the DI putting his foot on your back and barking obscenities and unintelligible Arkansas slang while you did your push-ups, just to make you really sweat. Hell, maybe this roll wasn't even from a customer—maybe it was all just a test.

“How's it coming, by the way?”

He told her it was fine, no problem.

He found this initial stage, developing the negatives, to be
the least fun part of the whole process—fumbling around in the pitch dark, trying to distinguish small details of the wire spool and load it by touch. There was too much pressure and chance to screw the pooch. Too Houdini; too much like his earliest, heart-pumping battles with a brassiere, on the dark rural roads back in Michigan.

When he was pretty sure he was done with the last step, he ran through the checklist again, in his head. And then once more, just to make sure he hadn't missed anything. With so few customers these days, Sal couldn't afford to get one of them riled up and screaming at her and never returning. And as for him, he'd become even more convinced, handling the cameras and working in the darkroom, that he was seriously going to have to make this his new medium. He hadn't entirely abandoned his growly, teeth-gnashing practice sessions, trying to draw with the old hand and retrain the new, but the results hadn't yet shown much improvement. The other night, while trying to sketch his bedroom dresser—a simple rectangle, at its heart—he ended the evening by punching a nice hole in the plaster wall. He was pretty sure Sal had heard him, though she hadn't mentioned it.

Finally, taking a deep breath, he decided to turn on the safe-light.

As near as he could tell as he hung up the strips to dry, it appeared to be shots of a toddler at his first birthday party— judging from the size of the blob that was the baby and the size of the darker blob that was the little birthday cake.

Then he took another breath, pulled back the curtain, and walked up to the front counter, a little wobbly as his eyes readjusted to the daylight.

She stood behind the counter, beaming, her hands flat on the display case. There on the glass was what looked like a check.

He stepped closer, saw the amount: seventy-five dollars. The
payer was some publishing company. The payee was
S. Dean Chesterton.

“The girl-in-the-kitchen photos,” she said. “They
bought
them.”

He was surprised she hadn't rushed to the bank to deposit it yet, and he told her so.

“I wanted you to see it first. And admire it.”

“Nice one,” he said admiringly.

“That's it?” She sounded disappointed.

“It's gorgeous,” he said, laughing at her. Picking it up for a closer inspection, he noticed the memo line read
Titter 7/44.
Jabbing a finger at it, he explained that that had to be the magazine issue.

She looked like he'd notified her that she was pregnant. “You mean—it's—it's
out?
It's on newsstands and—? Lord love a duck!”

“My sentiments exactly,” he said. They grabbed their hats and headed out to find it. Somewhere out there—not just somewhere, but
all over
out there—Sal was sashaying around in a flipped-up skirt, showing off her legs, and making some lucky, unseen GI a wonderful home-cooked meal.

The grouchy newsdealer eyed him suspiciously, but maybe he wasn't sure he had a browser this time or saw that Wink was quicker about it now, finding the one he wanted, because this time he didn't make with the wisecracks. Perhaps he thought Sal was a whole different gal or they weren't even together. She waited off to one side while he made the purchase, not having brought her disguise, the black wig.

Wink suspected she might not listen to him—wouldn't wait till they got back to the shop to search through it for her pictures, and so he bought a copy of
Life
as well, and tucked it in there.

He was right: she only made it a few doors down before she had the copy of
Titter
flipped open, hidden behind the
Life
cover of Admiral Nimitz, and was yanking at his arm like a kid, like he'd taken her to Riverside for a ride on the merry-go-round.

He noticed now she was wearing his Ray-Bans again, and when she spoke, she was peeking over them, like a spy, quietly declaring: “We, my friend, are in business.”

The first thing she paid off was the past-due invoice for darkroom chemicals. She called the suppliers and told them it was in the mail and to please ship the last order; that they were almost out of fix and potassium ferricyanide for reducer. Playing it safe, she sent in half what was owed for the city tax—enough to keep them happy.

Fifteen dollars, she decided, would go to Wink.

He frowned when she handed him the five spots, but she told him it was pay for helping around the store. “Walking around money,” she said. “Take Reenie to see
Double Indemnity.”

The frown remained. “I feel funny taking a cut. I mean, I'm not sure how I feel about capitalizing on your … well, I don't want to take
advantage …
”

She knew what he was driving at, and she didn't like it. The word he was stumbling over trying to avoid was
pimp.
If he really felt that way then he was as much as saying she was a whore.

“Work it out,” she told him, “because if you're calling yourself a certain thing, you're calling
me
something, too. And I don't think that's very nice.”

He lost the frown. “Sorry.”

“And if that's your attitude, it's going to get in the way because we'd be fools not to keep going with this.”

He sighed, but he wasn't really shaking his head anymore. “It just doesn't sound like
a we
situation, Sal …”

She handed him another five spot and told him he was to go out and find some black-market ration stamps he could purchase—maybe sugar or butter—to give Mia in exchange for the use of the wig. And to make her continue to think she was just doing something as harmless as bilking the government.

“That's your part,” she said. “So the fifteen bucks is well earned.” She shoved the money back his way, and this time, after a moment of consideration he picked it up.

She had a lot of questions, it seemed to Wink, about what was enticing and what was more enticing—this or this—and though it started out seeming like
she
was the confused one, the more she probed for some kind of exact formula for what made an image hot stuff, the more it seemed like maybe
he
was.

But then he remembered something strange and amusing that he'd experienced four years back, when he was first in Chicago, taking classes just south of where they were now, at the Academy. It seemed, now, like it might serve as some kind of a response—if not an exact enough answer, at least a placeholder. So he told her about the first anatomy class he took there and how the “life model”—which in this case was just a fancy code name for “stunning leggy blonde”—came out from behind a little Japanese screen, dressed in a plain silk dressing gown, and moved, all business, to the wooden crates the instructor had
laid out in the center of the circled wagon train that was their easels. Then she dropped the robe, like it was nothing.

Of course, he managed perfectly well to keep his face in order, his jaw from dropping into his tackle box, and so did his fellow classmates, mostly all male. They were all adults, at least, if not quite yet professionals. Nobody giggled, drooled, or gawked.

But then an odd thing happened. The next class, while they were getting settled at their easels and the instructor was convo-luting another structure for her to pose on, Wink noticed movement behind the little Japanese screen in the corner. And he noticed the other male students were starting to notice, too. The model was just changing out of her street clothes, a perfectly normal thing for her to do, but she'd somehow jostled the screen slightly, inadvertently allowing a nice peekaboo slit of several inches through which they could see her getting ready, resting one foot at a time on a rung of her changing stool, unbuckling the strap of each pump, removing the shoe, unrolling the stocking—”Yes, this was 1940, remember actual stockings, Sal?”— and then straightening to unhook the clasp of her skirt and let it drop. In that narrow window, they glimpsed the vaguest
idea
of her white, pedestrian underwear, the unfrilly, utilitarian garter belt; gathered, in a moment, some idea of how her blouse came undone, and her serious-minded, overkill bra—and though it was only a matter of thirty seconds, tops, it was wildly exciting. Not just to him, judging by the mouth-breather gapes from his fellow artistes. The simple, partially obstructed view of her untucking the shirttails of her blouse from her waistband, the underhand flick of hand to hair as she freed it from the collar of her blouse, was stunning—far more so, even, than the two or three hours of almost boring nudity she'd subjected them to in the last class.

“That first time,” he explained to Sal, “it wasn't nakedness so much as
barrenness.”

But on this following day, the model appeared, in that little glimpse of a private moment, to be nothing like the seemingly freewheeling, free spirit who'd posed before. Hell, her underpants were all wrong.

“It was amazing,” he said. “And when she finally realized we were all watching her taking it off—just
beginning
to take it off— she shrieked and snatched up her clothes and bolted. From the room. From the school.”

He laughed, remembering now how steamed the instructor got, how he called them all silly children for behaving in that way. And since the model never returned, the teacher took her place until he eventually found a new girl. But Wink had always felt it was more punishment than practicality, making them all stare at his wizened old pecker and saddlebag of a scrotum, his gray pubes and sagging chest and ass cheeks.

Sal seemed stymied by the story. “Really? This wasn't just some weird reaction on your part alone?
All
the guys were more worked up over her slipping out of her skirt than being able to study her in the buff? You're putting me on, aren't you?”

He shrugged, not sure how else to explain it. “Guys … are guys.”

She looked like she was having an epiphany, and when she spoke, it was like she was sounding it out, trying it on for size. “It's the closest thing they can have to being romantic.”

When he heard her say it, he knew it was true.

Talking about it and finally doing it, she found, were two entirely different animals.

She'd assumed, with all the planning and rationalizing they'd done—talking it to death, both agreeing that this was the responsible thing to do—that they could be shrewd businessmen about it, adults about it. But now that she was standing there in a bathrobe, it was hard enough to keep her breathing even and steady, let alone keep a firm grasp on the rationalities and logic, and she gripped the flannel lapels tight, not so much out of modesty, but simply to hang on.

It was so silly and illogical, but she couldn't help wanting to hold off to the last minute to shed it—waiting till they both agreed they had everything in place; waiting for the chill to stop shooting up her spine, giving her goose bumps, making her cheeks tingle, her fingers shake.

Summertime,
she told herself.
It's summertime. You're
not
cold.