Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  The only other flaw in the idea would be Wink himself. He might not want to rent the apartment, even if it was at a cut-rate price. Maybe he hadn't really enjoyed talking to her that much. Maybe his visit had been entirely out of obligation—a chore to check off the list, done only out of respect for his pal Chesty— and he would rather find a place more exciting, where the action was. Maybe a place with a lot of other veterans as tenants, where you could get a poker game going at all hours or toss around a medicine ball in your undershirt. A place where unmarried, available women might be living next door, not some boring married lady.

  And, of course, she needed to get her husband's okay.

  9

  The sun was setting on the war-bonds billboard—setting, too, on another day of dismal luck. An orangey glow washed across the sign and the oily-looking rooftop supporting it and the El track just beyond where a train was whisking all of those employed Chicagoans away from the Loop, home to their dinners and loved ones after a job well done.

  The coy squint and chipper, toothy grin on the beaming, painted majorette, dressed up like Uncle Sam, seemed precisely calculated to make her just slightly naughty, implying she just might be a “victory girl,” one of those notorious stateside gals who felt it was her patriotic duty to sleep with any red-blooded serviceman, whether just returned home or about to ship out.

  Sure, her legs were bare, but for a legitimate reason: she was no doubt leading a war-bonds parade. And the striped stovepipe hat was tipped over one eye only because it was too large, not to be sexy, and the hand cocked on her hip was standard to twirlers and marchers, not a streetwalker stance, a come-on. But that wide, wet smile—brother, better look twice! That made his pecker jump, despite his glum state. Which meant the artwork was doing its job—hats off to the illustrator and art director!

  Lucky employed bastards …

  His list of prospective contacts had dwindled even faster than his meager savings (nine dollars and seventy cents). He'd crossed the last off his list today, with nothing more promising than a lot of hearty thumps on the back and words of admiration for the work in his portfolio he could no longer duplicate and the standard welcome home, soldier! guff. One creative director he met with, Rollo Deininger, did say that there was a chance he could start him off managing the in-house production studio at LD&M, and then see if he could eventually work his way up into an art director position—if Wink weren't able to eventually return to his real calling, illustration work. Production studio manager wouldn't be a great job—not much better than the near possibility of the day before at that other agency, stock boy for the art supplies. It would be a hell of a step down, in terms of pay and prestige. He'd essentially be gluing campaign comps onto presentation board and constructing one-off in-store stand-up displays and that sort of thing, along with overseeing a crew of the ad world's truly underpaid—art students and interns—as they put together all the layouts and did all the grunt work to make the creative teams look good when they pitched a client. What was worse, Deininger wasn't even actually offering him the job yet, just informing him that it might be a possibility.

  Great to know, he thought. So might the end of the war and my marriage to Betty Grable and the return of full function to my drawing hand—all possibilities …

  On that score, Deininger had come right out and asked. He seemed like a blunt man, but Wink understood the need to know.

  He assured him the lame hand would present no problem in the event of either job becoming available—art director or production studio manager. The truth was, he could work an X-Acto knife and bottle of mucilage and boss around the production kids even if he had a hook for a hand. Art director, he was less sure of—it would be hard to entirely avoid drawing with that one.

  But he could tell that even the crummy production room possibility was just a lot of bunk. The guy was just being upbeat about it because he was a veteran; thought he was doing him a favor by blowing sunshine up his ass.

  And now he was looking out at the end of a day that felt only marginally different from the end of everything, and he couldn't for the life of him get a bead on how to make it better. Sure, he could go get sauced. Crawl in a bottle somewhere. Except the amount of lubrication he would need to feel better about his prospects would mean digging pretty deep in the kitty.

  There was a place back in the PTO where they'd had no real PX, so some of the boys had thrown together a hooch speak— part Quonset hut, part grass mat, under the brass's radar and down jungle roads, that they'd dubbed the Corncob in honor of their fearless leader, MacArthur. He suddenly missed that place. He could get drunk dirt cheap there, and it felt like no one— brass, Japs, or civilization—would ever find him.

  But now, here, dollars left meant days left. So the smart thing, the penny-pinching thing, the long-range-plans thing to do, would be to sit there in that dingy room and take it. Besides, he needed to buckle down and start working on the rehab. Either figure out a way to adapt the half-dead hand or train the left.

  Training his left usually seemed like the least depressing exercise—more like a parlor trick or a party game than something to be overseen by some stern nurse at the VA back in Hawaii.

  He had no proper drawing paper, but no matter—it would be wasted anyway, like handing a nice Borden & Riley linen sketch pad to a toddler to hack at with crayons. Instead he had a stack of shirt cardboard he'd salvaged from the trash cans in the showers down the hall. A lot of his fellow losers in this hotel were out going on job interviews, it seemed, based on the amount of new shirts being opened.

  He tried not to look at his hand or at the so-called drawing but to just stay focused on his subject, the window and curtains, the girl on the billboard beyond. The pencil felt completely at odds with his hand, and he knew the results would be no more than a series of spasmodic swirls and herky-jerky lines, nothing resembling his subject in the least. And he was right. When he finally looked down, it was almost laughable.

  He'd seen a man in the square in Canberra who owned a pet monkey that “drew” pictures for a nickel. They'd been better than this.

  After only three attempts, crumpling them and tossing them into the wastebasket, his left hand already felt cramped.

  Maybe alcohol would actually limber it up …

  He really could use a belt, some kind of relief. He thought of crying and started to laugh. They'd told him at the hospital in Honolulu that a time would come when he'd need to cry over the loss and that it was natural to do that. And he had, once, unexpectedly, out on the beach, when no one was around. That was enough.

  Of course, there were other fast forms of relief, some even cheaper than liquor. Sighing, giving in to it, he slid his hand down his pants. It was one of the few things he could do pretty much the same as ever with his right.

  But he couldn't think of anything good. And he didn't have anything to look at. He'd had a pretty well-pawed hotbook, but someone had lifted it off him in Hawaii. The girlie card of Rita Hayworth in his wallet was so worn from sitting on it, the only part not worn away was the top of her hair and a little bit of her imprinted signature.

  Brother, he thought, getting up off the bed and moving over to the window.

  If he stood off to the side of the curtains, he had a better view of the girl on the sign without, hopefully, putting himself in sight of anyone down on the street or across the way.

  Be just my luck, he thought, getting hauled in now on a morals charge.

  He tried to think if she looked in any general terms like any old girlfriends, any he'd met in the service. Sometimes that helped.

  Not dropping the business at hand, he slid the wastebasket over closer with his foot. Hopefully that would catch it.

  He decided to go with the idea that she was a victory gal, easy as a breeze and “full of a generosity of spirit,” as an Australian “leftenant” he knew once put it. In real life, Wink would usually try to steer clear of such wild girls—they usually came with a load of headaches, like boyfriends
or brothers or remorse or disease—but what the hell, this one was only imaginary.

  He was at that point where it could go either way—the quick arrival of relief, or a prolonged teeth-gnasher in which he would finally have to close up shop before he chafed himself raw. There was something about her blonde hair he found troubling …

  He froze at the sound of someone at the door, knocking, and a muffled male voice. “Hey! Soldier. If your name's Dutton, there's a phone call for you.”

  “Yeah?” For some reason, the first person he imagined was Chesty's wife.

  “Yeah! Some Kraut named Dining-Room-something.”

  Cramming it all back in his trousers, he bolted out into the hall, sliding on the floorboards in his stocking feet, and took the stairs two at a shot. Boners were for another time.

  10

  Once she got the idea in her head, she decided to just do it fast and not think about it too much or she'd chicken out. So she closed the shop temporarily, spinning the cardboard arrows around on the little clock-shaped sign that indicated when she'd be returning, gave herself an hour, and locked the front door. She told herself she wasn't being derelict: the film slot was still an option for any customers dropping off a roll to be developed, as unlikely as that was.

  Her mom's second cousin Mia ran a beauty shop over on Racine—in fact, the place was one of those two-sided operations, spanning two storefronts, barber and beauty shop, the whole thing lately run by Mia's nephew Carlo (whatever that made him to her, Sal wasn't quite sure, having no interest or patience for the math). Currently, Carlo was fighting in Italy (for the U.S.A., of course), and in the meantime, his aunt Mia was doing her best to oversee the whole thing.

  She could see right off, just by the dusty windows, that Mia had her hands full keeping it going. A few of the wigs displayed on the higher shelves along the top of the window showed traces of actual cobwebs.

  Mia looked overstressed, but glad to see her. After the hugs and kisses, the cheek patting and hip pinching—things Sal frankly never got used to, physical affection being less of a spectacle on her side of the family—she coaxed the tiny old lady to the back of the beauty shop where they could talk. She had two customers, and both were camped out under loud hair dryers, but Sal wanted to make it appear that she was up to something shady.

  She told her she thought she might have a way to collect extra ration stamps every month, but she was going to need a little help. In exchange, she'd of course pass some of the stamps along Mia's way.

  To pull this off, Sal knew she was going to have to cut back on sugar and butter and a few other things, but in the end, it might pay off.

  And if it really paid off, she could probably just buy the extra ration stamps on the black market and give them to Mia that way, rather than taking from her own supply, as she was going to have to do now.

  “To pull it off,” she said, “I'm going to need a wig.”

  The old lady didn't appear shocked at all, but turned real conspiratorial, clamping a hand on Sal's, her eyes suddenly alive. “Ah, you make the phony identifications! With the photo making and everything, yes?”

  Sal tried for shifty, glancing around the beauty shop, and told her it was probably best for Mia if she didn't make her too much of an accomplice by giving her too many details. “I'm thinking maybe something much darker than my actual hair,” she said, “and something you can spare for a while.”

  Let her think she was scamming them down at the ration center, “double dipping”—registering for a second set of ration books under an alias. Let her think whatever. Anything was probably better than telling her the real reason for borrowing the wig.

  Mia began patting her hand furiously, pulling her over to the shelves of wigs. “I think maybe I got just the thing, hon. It fit you nice like it was born right on top of your head! It fool everybody, this wig I'm thinking of for you.”

  11

  His second day at the ad agency, he spotted Sal's friend.

  She came in looking for help mounting some comps, stooped over a little, her eyes on the rough sketches in her hands, shuffling through the tissues, all business, but she was tall—a long-legged whirlwind with inky hair, arched eyebrows, and a tiny pout of a mouth. Exactly like a pinup.

  “You're Reenie,” he announced. She had to be.

  It stopped the flurry, for a second, as he introduced himself and explained who he was—who he was in relation to Sal and Chesty Chesterton, that is, not in terms of LD&M, which was evident, he felt, from his rubber smock and proximity to the layout table. She shook his hand a little too earnestly, pumping it like she was trying to get a bucket of water out of him or impress him that she could rub elbows with the boys. The way she grabbed at it, he didn't have time to offer his left instead. He wasn't sure she noticed anything about his right. If she did, she was too polite or too flustered to mention it.

  Normally, he figured, it would be all right to ask her to have lunch with him, or at least take a coffee break later in the day, since Chesty's wife had been planning to maybe fix them up anyhow. And he had to hand it to Sal—she had a good eye.

  But he didn't feel right bringing it up this very moment. Maybe it was the distracted way this gal let out a heavy sigh and held her shoulders so stooped, like the world was weighing her down. She was having a bad day, clearly.

  Sal hadn't mentioned in what capacity she was working there, but this seemed to be her own work she needed to have boarded. “So you're an art director, I take it?”

  “Junior art director—they're just trying me out.” Then she muttered, “I'm in over my head—obviously.”

  That, he decided, was begging for elaboration. But he could see it would have to wait.

  After meeting Sal's friend, he found himself thinking of the pleasant evening he'd had the other night. On his walk home to the hotel after work that second day, he decided he ought to stop by the camera shop again and give her the latest—that he was back among the employed, no matter the lowly position. It was a career setback, but that setback had occurred beneath the Coral Sea, inside a submarine, not in the offices of Lampe, Deininger & Monroe, and any sort of movement forward now was news worth sharing, he figured.

  Besides, it wasn't just to tell Sal alone. She would write Chesty and tell him he was getting settled in, starting to make his way as a civilian, and thus spare Wink the physical chore, struggling with his left or fumbling around on a typewriter he'd have to rent—that is, after filing an Application for a Certificate to Rent a Class-B Typewriter at the ration center, then waiting for the Typewriter Rental Certificate—not to mention sparing himself the guilt of not yet writing the pals he'd left behind.

  Plus, he owed the lady dinner.

  12

  The new roll, she kept her bosom out of it. Not even a fanny shot—well, not her bare fanny. She showed a lot of leg, very high up, which was trickier to orchestrate than she imagined, since she'd decided the poses should tell a story, not just be shots of her dumbly holding up her skirt like some sort of raunchy game of show-and-tell. After much struggling to make the skirt look like it was naturally positioned, she finally hit on two things. The first of these was a length of thread, sewn to her hem, that she could use to lift the skirt by tying it to some prop in the scene—for one shot, the back of the dinette chair as she bent to check the bread. The second trick was a wire clothes hanger, unlooped and straightened, that she basted into the hem—not unlike a southern belle's hoopskirt, but one that could be bent and shaped to give the appearance of being caught by the wind—like in one she did of a pie cooling in the breeze of a little electric desk fan. The editors had just said “leg shots,” with zero clarification regarding nylons, so she shot half the roll bare legged, then painted on her leg makeup and drew on the seams with her eyebrow pencil. (This last touch she never bothered with in real life—she had to take the closet mirror down and prop it against the wall to try to get the lines straight up the length of her legs—and her husband seemed to like her legs just fine wi
thout her having to glam it up so.) Once she had the fake stockings painted on, she went through all the poses a second time, thinking, The biggest fantasy part of this fantasy is that the gal owns actual nylons… Already she was starting to think of the gal posing as someone else, not Mrs. William Chesterton, and it helped her follow through with it. Of course, the wig helped a lot, too. It was the last thing she adjusted after getting the tripod and the lamps just so. In the wig, it just seemed a good deal easier to vamp it up— dip a shoulder, pout the mouth. Overall, it felt like she was coming on pretty hotsy totsy, but it was hard to tell, as she was no longer clear on what part of herself she was supposed to show more of and what part less.

  And now, in the darkroom, she still wasn't sure. Maybe these shots weren't an improvement on the first batch, the ones she'd mailed off like a fool. It was discouraging—how was she ever going to know what worked? These seemed cute, but was that cute enough to get a homesick GI smiling the right amount but not get him lava hot, AWOL hot? Who knew?

  The only thing she felt certain of was the wig. To her, the dark hair looked all natural, no question, so she doubted any man would spot it as a phony. Maybe if the man were a hairdresser, but then what would he be doing shelling out good money or army scrip to look at these pictures?

  But then again, as she was already rapidly learning, it was all such difficult business trying to calculate the silliness of men.

  She'd just hung up the contact sheet to dry and was about to start in on the tough work of selecting shots, making cropping decisions, trying to get a few usable prints out of this, when she heard the tinkle of the shop bell out front and a friendly call of “Hello? Anyone home? Anyone hungry?”