Nothing but a Smile (29 page)

Mort was studying the floor. “I … got to thinking: I let myself out but I can't lock it and I … I wanted to make sure you locked it behind me, and you
didn't,
so …”

When Sal spoke, it was all Wink could manage to make it out. He wondered how the hell Mort was supposed to hear it all the way across the room. “Thank you, Mort,” she said. “That was very considerate of you. I'll be sure to do that.”

Mort nodded, still staring down at the floor. The poor guy looked stunned.

“You're very kind, Mort,” Sal said, and he nodded twice and
shrank back into the hall, pulling the door only halfway closed behind him, as if unsure of even what was expected of him in this. They listened, neither one breathing, to his footsteps clumping dejectedly down the stairs and then the distant jangle of the shop bell as he let himself out again.

They both swiveled to the window, craning to see just his hat as he hurried back down the street. It looked cold and dead out there, windy with garbage, the streetlights trembling, and then Sal burst out laughing, breathing at last. It was an uncontrollable laugh that bordered on hysterics, he thought—not entirely sure she wouldn't slip into sobbing. But no, she was laughing.

“I hope you're laughing at the situation,” he said. “The awkwardness and all …”

She couldn't respond other than nodding.

“ … and not
mocking
the Sad Sack.”

This made her shriek now, and she added a wavy gesture as if objecting to something she couldn't currently voice, what with all the shrieking and silliness.

“Brother,” Wink said.

But she just kept laughing.

“Man alive,” he said finally, getting up to take his leave as well now. “You're cold, lady. Very cold. You shall never, ever take the measure of my Gallup pole. That settles it.” But he knew he was smiling when he said it.

Just not cackling and guffawing, as Sal continued to do, long after he was back in his own apartment, down the hall.

But going back to bed and going back to sleep were two different things. He found himself wondering if she had really been kidding or not about wanting to compare his pecker. And maybe even horsing around about it was in some way her way of leveling the playing field. After all, he'd seen her naked plenty.

Maybe the decent, gentlemanly thing would have been to just
show her what he looked like. Maybe he should have done that way back, when they were first shooting the girlies. Just to put her at ease, make it more fair.

Christ on a cracker,
he thought.
It's almost three in the morning, pal, and you are not thinking straight….

He told himself he really ought to get up again and lock the door. He didn't really think she would carry the horseplay any further, sneaking into his apartment or anything ridiculous, but he might need to wax the dolphin, just to keep himself as noble and resolute as he wanted to be. He was pretty sure she wasn't ready—for any man—and no amount of kidding around or booze, no matter how outrageous and desperate she was acting, would make her honestly any more ready.

Manners told her she should be calling Mort Doerbom and smoothing over her behavior with him, but she found herself, late the next morning, her head still pounding from last night's cocktails, more concerned with smoothing over things with Wink. Her behavior was coming back to her in snatches, and it made her wince, thinking how she'd carried on, teasing Wink about having him whip it out.

She imagined him already packed and gone, scared off by the crazy widow, just as she felt she'd almost done the night she sort of kissed him.

There was no answer when she knocked. His door was unlocked as she pushed it ajar to call his name and heard the shower running. Thinking she'd check for a packed satchel or other signs he was leaving, she opened the door wider.

There was stuff laid out, all right, all over his mattress and chair, which was pulled closer to the bed.

Stepping in, she saw they were magazines—girlie magazines— splayed open and arranged around the bed, with only a small area left to sit back against the dented pillow and the headrest. A jar of Vaseline sat open on the bedside table.

She was about to hightail it out of there when she noticed it was her. Every page had photos of her—some in different colored wigs, one also with Reenie in some kind of a catfight pose, but mainly, it was her.

Turning to leave, she saw him standing there in his bathrobe, dripping wet, looking crushed, she thought, maybe even heartbroken.

“It's none of my business,” she said, “but I'm just curious why—”

“Obviously,” he said, plain as a radio weather report, “I was waxing the dolphin.”

In a flurry of picking up and covering up, attending to the bed and the magazines, pulling the covers over the mayhem, putting away the Vaseline, eyes only on the business at hand, he explained the whole deal, how he'd stuck by his self-imposed policy for two years of
only
looking at the photos that actually ran in the magazines. That looking at any pictures of her just lying around the darkroom felt disrespectful, that this way he at least was no different from the average Joe, and—“By
looking,
you mean … What did you just call it? Waxing the … ?”

He stopped and faced her. No amount of housekeeping was going to make this better. She'd retreated to the doorway and had her back half turned to him, her own eyes cast down to the worn runner in the hallway.

“Waxing the dolphin,” he said. “I figured it was less creepy if I stuck to only what every other guy can get hold of, only—”

He stopped, wondering if he should just say, unapologetically, that every guy waxed the dolphin, tell her to knock next time, and be done with it. But she wasn't bolting; she was sticking it out. So he decided to tell her.

He told her how he'd decided, over time, that he
wasn't
the average Joe because the average Joe looking at her in the girlies didn't see what
he
got to see—a smart, gorgeous woman with an inquisitive mind and a scrappy soul who made him laugh and believe in himself and want to get up every morning. “The rack,” he said, “is swell, too.”

She looked him in the eye now, turning, stepping back into this room and slipping slowly into his arms. He held her there against him, her hand pinned against his chest, and they stood there for the longest time.

She sounded so small when she said, finally, “I think my not being ready, with Mort, I think that was just—I always thought you sort of pitied me, or—”

“Pitied you?” Where the Jesus did she get that?

“I never imagined you felt so—I mean, when I said I wasn't ready last night—”

“I know
I'm
not ready,” he said, trying to make a joke because he really wasn't ready, in a lot of ways. “I just got through waxing the dolphin. I couldn't be ready for another half hour at least.”

She socked him lightly in the breadbasket, but kept hugging him.

“Also, I refuse to whip it out for your scrutiny until you're sure you're over your giggle fits. So
that's
another roadblock.”

But seriously, there was something else standing in their way, and he wasn't sure it could ever be fixed by time. He told her she could be ready to open her heart to a man anywhere from today to years from today, but to Wink, whenever it was, she would still be Chesty's widow.

“Always?” She actually sounded hurt. “Even after more than two straight years of being
my
best friend?”

He'd never thought of himself as that before. He hated the way she sounded almost offended—rejected or something—and he had to wonder now if she might have a point.

“I guess I'll have to think about this some more,” he said. “A lot more.”

“You do that,” she said. “In the meantime, feel free to look at any pictures your heart—or your
dolphin
—desires.”

She gave him a final squeeze, hands around his waist, and a kiss on the cheek, and then she let herself out, pressing the button lock first before pulling it closed behind her.

Christ on a crutch,
he thought.
Like I'll be able to think about anything else …

She woke to the realization that someone was in her bedroom. By the sound of his breath and his smell alone, she knew it was Wink, even before the hushed repetition of her name. He was standing at the end of her bed, wiggling her foot gently, trying to quietly wake her.

It was too dark to read the clock, but it had to be at least midnight. “Let me guess …,” she managed to mutter, “you need to borrow more Vaseline.”

“No, smart mouth.” He kept up the whispering, though she thought she'd made it clear he'd already woken her. “Knock it off and listen.” Even with his voice low, he sounded urgent and worked up about something, straining to get it out. “Here's why it's okay:
I never heard of Breakey, Nebraska.”

“Excuse me?”

“Before we buried Chesty there, I mean. Before the trip out west. I never even heard of Breakey Nebraska.”

With a groan, she rolled over and worked herself up to a seated position. “Fascinating, but what does it mean?”

“It
means,”
he said, almost sounding annoyed now, “maybe we'll do it with the lights off and air-raid curtains pulled tight or something, just so you don't bust a gut laughing at the equipment like you did with the last poor sap you let in here—but I am
not
in the wrong here, that's what that means. Chesty was a good guy, a great guy, a pal as far as that goes, but we weren't pals-to-the-bitter-end kind of pals, clearly. I didn't even know the guy was from Nebraska, for the love of Jesus! That whole story of being shipped off to Chicago to live with his aunt and uncle, leaving his mom back there, his dad parking on the train tracks— none of that! He never told me a bit of it! And I never told
him
about taking ill as a kid and my mom leaving and … I'd say that that puts me squarely in the ‘friendly professional acquaintance' category,
not
the ‘best buddies' category.”

“And in the ‘okay to pursue the widow of category?”

“Exactly,” he said, and that was the last he said for a very long while.

He'd never enjoyed the “aftermath” all that much. He usually felt like getting up and moving around. Maybe not fleeing, but doing something else, going out for a bite or walking the girl home. But he didn't mind this at all, this time, just lying there with Sal, her body still warm and tingly against his. In fact, he was kind of hoping he could just lie there till he fell asleep, even if it meant waking up in her bed in the morning and facing what they'd done. Already, in his heart, he knew he'd done the right thing.

She said, “I imagine we're going to probably skip a few steps, you and me. The normal rituals.”

He wasn't sure he necessarily wanted to skip the rituals with her. But maybe that wasn't what she meant.

“I mean … the slow getting-to-know-each-other part. We've done that. And we get along … and it turns out you're attracted to me.”

“Very,” he said.

“And you don't seem to be playing the field with other women lately. You seem to have knocked off fooling around with my friend …”

“On account,” he said, “of I'm in love with you.”

She adjusted the covers and rolled over on top of him, her hair falling in his face. He'd noticed, already, even when they were doing it, that her hair made him itch. All that time he'd known her and been so close to her, relatively, and yet he'd never had an inkling her hair would make him itch. Something about
it being so fine and a little wavy, maybe. He'd never known a woman to make him itch with just the touch of her hair to his skin, but he imagined he could get used to it.

She stared down into his face. There was little light coming in from the alley-side window, but he could feel her breath. “Everything you're telling me?” she said. “Same here, pal. Why do you think that's any different for me?”

“No fooling?”

“Honor bright. All of it. Well, except for looking at your picture and thinking of you and waxing my—not sure what
I
wax. Touching myself, then.”

“Right. Of course not.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don't look at your picture while I think of you and touch myself. But, hey, two out of three …”

For a second, he couldn't breathe. He'd never known another woman to make both his heart and his pecker leap at the dead same instant.

Packing her suitcase for their long weekend alone in Reenie's brother's hunting cabin up north in the Wisconsin Dells, she dug deep in her pile of old sweaters, knowing the warmer and woollier the better—patches and moth holes and unraveling be damned—and so even included the tight, slightly shrunken turtleneck she'd owned since senior year in high school. She stopped, examining the old monogram on the breast, constructed from her maiden name Dean, and realized the initials fit again; acknowledging, for the first clear moment that day, that her name was now Dutton. Sally Ann Dutton.

A few of the other girls growing up teased her about this a little—her initials spelling out
SAD
—but she'd never been particularly morose growing up, except the year her mother got sick and died, and she certainly wasn't feeling sad now. Far from it.

They'd taken care of the whole thing, in a civil service devoid of all frills, earlier that morning, down at city hall. Reenie and Keeney were the official witnesses, but Chesty's aunt Sarah had attended as well, sneaking away from her husband Whitcomb by coming downtown in a regular taxi, of all things. Sal was moved, seeing her there, touched that she would go to the bother, both logistically and emotionally, of showing. She appeared markedly older and frailer, despite the smart suit and new hat, and it was hard not to think it had a lot to do with the loss of her “young William” a little more than a year before. But she smiled sweetly through the whole proceeding. And though it seemed a little awkward, introducing her to Wink for the first time, out in the lobby, the grand old gal showed her true breeding and grace and took them all to lunch at the Palmer House.