by Steve Amick
But then he remembered he'd be taking it into his little room just down the short hall from a respectable woman—his war buddy's very good wife—and he also flashed on that lovely Reenie, with her pinup looks and her leggy ways and the sob story she'd laid out for him about that creep Deininger making it tough for her, and before he knew it, he'd soured on the idea of the magazine. Some other time, maybe.
That evening, after replacing the glass, he tried to stay out of Sal's hair, slipping out to get something vaguely meat-ish on a bun and stroll up to Wacker before she felt compelled to make him dinner again. When he returned, she came out into the hall to give him fresh towels and a set of keys and to say how glad she was he'd decided to stay a little longer.
Her apartment door was half open, and it struck him that the basic background in those shots of the brunette she had shown him the night before—the kitchen and table—reminded him a lot of Sal and Chesty's kitchen. Of course, a lot of kitchens looked like that all over Chicago.
Kidding around, but also half serious, he asked to see the girlies again.
She looked puzzled. “The what?”
“That roll of film you processed that you were showing me. The girlie shots. Whatever they were.”
She scowled, but was smirking, too, giving him a little shove with his stack of fresh towels. “No! You lecher! Jeez, those are personal property. I mean, someone's personal property.”
“So they haven't picked them up yet? Oh boy!” He rubbed his palms together evilly and made a broad, comical Groucho lunge toward the stairs, like he was rushing down to the darkroom, and she poked him again.
But now he was completely kidding. Because the second the idea about her kitchen had crossed his mind, he'd pretty much dismissed it. No way were they shot in her apartment. And anyway, how would he really get more details out of the tiny contact sheet? It wasn't like he could tiptoe down to the darkroom and give himself a crash course in working an enlarger and developing prints … Forget it.
And he wasn't looking to get his jollies, which was clearly what she thought he was up to. But he left it at that and said good night.
16
The next day, she got two notices from camera supply wholesalers, saying they were forwarding unpaid invoices to a collection agency; a phone call from Mia, wondering how she was coming with her ration stamp “situation;” and a brilliant idea. The brilliant idea, unlike the rest of these things, came from her gran-pop, her father's dad. Gran-pop Dean's photo hung high over the register, way up among the boxes of flash powder that hadn't been used practically since the time of tintypes. Gran-pop was dour looking, with a dour-looking mustache and dour-looking eyes, all of which drooped, but his frame was inspired. It was a cameo frame, Victorian and ornately scrolled and very, very oval.
It was how she'd fix the roll of girl-in-the-kitchen shots— salvage it, that is, rather than going back and reshooting, fussing with all those issues of perspective and building cartoonish prop stoves out of cardboard and all the rest. She had to be practical. And really, when exactly was she supposed to do all that now? With him there in the evenings, right down the hall, she could hardly restage the elaborate setup in her apartment. And during the day, even with tumbleweeds practically blowing through the shop, she still had to be available for the possibility of a lone customer wandering in inexplicably—she couldn't very well flounce downstairs with her flyaway skirt, black wig, and painted-on nylons anytime she heard the shop bell tinkle.
Back in the darkroom, she tried a print using a cardboard cameo frame to mask it as an oval, cutting away most of the extraneous “busyness,” as he'd called it. At the same time, she did a soft “dodging” trick she'd learned from her pop—a wad of cheesecloth on a pair of forceps, wiggled, during the exposure, over the center, casting the edges she wished to obscure in further shadow.
It looked pretty good. The oval made a nice frame.
The editors had said nothing about a particular format; the shots needing to be rectangular. Maybe it was a risky choice.
But she had to admit, they did look better. Wink had been right about all the extra stuff in the background—the spice rack above the stove, the line of the dinette table jutting across one corner. In the oval of the cameo frame, the girl was the star.
She was the star.
Then she had another idea. Something about the thought of her new houseguest being right down the hall and her not being able to carry on in her apartment at night made her think of a keyhole.
It was even better.
Wink seemed impressed.
She just gave him a quick flash of the shots, not much more than a quick shuffle through the five by eights, before closing them back up in a manila envelope, but she could tell that his grin was more at her cleverness than at the naughty flash of leg.
The keyhole mask she'd cut from mat board actually blocked out even more than the extraneous elements in the kitchen, it even blocked out parts of the girl. But somehow, that seemed to make it more exciting, like the viewpoint of a Peeping Tom, getting a look at something off-limits.
“Brother!” he said. “I'd say the skills of the darkroom tech surpass the skills of the photographer!”
She shrugged. “It's hard to work all that stuff and work the camera and take the pose.”
He looked at her curiously in the dim safelight. “What are you saying?”
“I'm just saying … I would imagine. I assume, like you say, it's an amateur, and so …”
“You're going to give them the regular shots, too, right? Without any cropping? These here today are better by far, artistically, professionally—no question. But I mean, in case it's just a guy who wants some record of his wife. Or a gal who wants her guy not to forget her while he's off fighting … Hey, that's probably what it is, actually, now that I think of it.”
At this point, she remembered a plausible explanation she'd dreamed up for him the other day, and she tried it on him now: she told him the negatives had appeared in the drop slot with only a last name, so she wasn't sure yet what they were for. And, of course, the customer would only be returning to pick them up during store hours, when Wink was away.
He seemed to buy it.
“Brother ….,” he said again. “Clearly I miss all the good stuff around here. Nothing nearly as exciting happens at my place of work.”
17
He hadn't seen Sal's friend Reenie for two days. He'd begun to think she'd either given up and quit, or surprised herself with hidden talent and come up with a winning campaign. Or she'd given up in a more depressing way, relenting to that wolf at the helm.
And he wasn't sure at first if the latter weren't true when he finally spotted her while strolling by the supply room. He'd taken to swinging by LD&M's well-stocked supply room every chance he got—not only to pilfer sketch pads to sneak back to the little apartment over the camera shop to work on his left-hand drawing, but mostly because the sight of the stockroom reminded him, even in his most harried moments of frustration working in the production studio, that at least he hadn't had to take that other job, as a stock boy. Being King of the Craft Knife was at least better than that.
It was the raven hair that tipped him off. She was in there, standing behind a metal rack of sketch pads. He started in, grinning, thinking he'd see if she could sneak away for another coffee, when he heard another voice, male, whispering low, and her eyes flashed Wink's way with a look of distress.
So he went on ahead in, scuffling his feet, whistling “Paper Doll.” Deininger was in there all right, standing awfully close, leaning in. In fact, she was pressed up against the wall, and he seemed to be blocking her exit, speaking privately to her somewhere around the neck, roughly her clavicle.
Across from them in the tight space, there was a high shelf of glue pots. Wink made a move for them, stretching and lurching, groaning dramatically with the effort, and pulled back and elbowed the guy sharply in the back of the head.
“Oh, gee!” Wink said. “I'm sorry, bos
s! I didn't see you there, sir. Gee, I guess I didn't expect to see you here in the supply room having a private meeting with a junior art director, sir. Guess you better go get some ice on that or have someone look at it, maybe?”
There was a harrumph or something from the creative director. Wink stole a glance at Reenie, who looked alarmed, but also a little like she wanted to laugh.
Carrying the glue pot, which he didn't need, Wink started to shuffle out ahead of them, lingering in the hall, waiting for the guy to beat it. But Deininger did not appear. Wink turned to go back in, when the door closed quietly.
The guy made a mistake not locking it.
Standing back, slipping the rubber apron to one side and adjusting his trouser leg for a little more slack, Wink raised one leg and kicked, hard. The door flew open, banging against a metal rack of paper clips, staples, and metal fasteners.
“Okay, clearly this is my fault,” he announced, placing the glue pot on the nearest shelf and heading for him. “Obviously, I was too subtle for you.” This time he used both hands and wrenched him away from Sal's friend, then shoved him hard, full on the chest. Deininger's legs slipped out from under him, his shiny brogans skittering, and he fell back into the corner against an empty, rattling filing cabinet. It boomed like a small-caliber cannon. It was the loudest thing Wink had heard since returning to civilian life—it was barroom loud, dangerous sounding, thrilling.
Deininger scrambled back to his feet like he was on fire. Wink braced himself for a punch, but the guy just squeezed past him, escaping into the hall.
Wink followed him out, with Reenie trailing close behind. Deininger was barking at his secretary coming the other way. “Mrs. Walters! Call the police! Now!”
As Wink approached, the guy whipped around like he needed to keep his eyes on him and started to back down the hall.
“Really?” Wink said, halting his pursuit, which meant he had to raise his voice the farther Deininger scrambled away. “The cops? That sound like good public relations to you, pal? Clapping cuffs on the cripple?” He was yelling now. “Want it to get around how a decorated war veteran got the better of you, despite being burdened with a lame hand?” He waggled his right, high in the air, and now people were coming out, gathering in the hall. “War injury, you know, sacrificed for my country and all.”
Now that he had a crowd at his side, Deininger apparently felt safe enough to stop retreating.
“Seriously?” Wink said. “This is your plan?”
He took it as a sign of a lack of intelligence that there wasn't even a flicker of doubt in this guy's eyes. He didn't appear to even be reconsidering his position, reappraising his situation, strategizing the best diplomatic maneuver. He wasn't budging.
So Wink didn't budge either, just stood in the hall facing him, the two of them like gunfighters—one amused and crippled, the other jangled and red faced—and waited for the police. Which was fine, just fine. He didn't want to work there anyway. If the guy was that bullheaded and unable to reassess the situation and adjust, Wink knew he'd be a horrible creative director. Just lousy.
He untied his rubber apron and hung it on the nearest doorknob while they waited.
18
All the way up to the Gold Coast to visit her in-laws that morning, she tried to focus on what she should do next, exactly, and to block out the looks from the old men and young vets on the platform and on the train and walking down the street. She knew what they were looking at. It was much too warm today for a jacket, and so they were checking her out.
Though she never would admit it to anyone, not even her best girlfriends, Sal knew she had a nice figure—specifically, she was well endowed, as her aunt Patty, who shared the trait, liked to describe it. Her legs were a little stumpy for her own liking, her bottom a little flat and broad, but she knew she had a good thing going on up top. It was hard not to know it—she'd long ago grown used to the drift of men's eyes, the sudden glaze of distraction that would come over them in her presence, and the stolen glances she'd catch in the reflection of display cases and windows when they thought she couldn't see.
Which is how she knew Chesty loved her for her—he'd known her before they'd even appeared.
Chesty—known back then as Billy Chesterton—arrived in her life long before the bosom. It must have been somewhere in the beginning of junior high when he started riding his bike down to the shop from his upscale neighborhood north of the river and helped her pop sweep up and stock supplies, and generally made a nuisance of himself. It was that annoying age when boys just reeked of body odor and an earnest awkwardness, and so she tried to avoid him as much as possible. But he wasn't there for her. He was there because he'd caught the photography bug. He'd been reading magazine articles and had a brand-new camera his uncle had given him and wanted to learn everything he could. So the third or fourth time Pop saw him loitering around the store, he got the kid talking, decided there was only one way to find out how passionate he really was about tackling something that would amount to extracurricular schooling, and took him on as unpaid help, only on Saturdays. That schedule expanded, though, and by high school, he was not only getting a little pay but working three weekday afternoons as well. He even tried to talk Pop into opening the store on Sundays, but Pop told him his late wife had been raised Catholic—Sal's mom had passed by then—and though Pop didn't believe and didn't take Sal to services, they still weren't going to open up on Sundays. He told him to do his homework on Sundays—that he had to make something of himself, not just take pictures and hang out in the camera shop.
And he was making something of himself—somehow, between all the shuttling down to the Loop and working in the shop, he managed to become the photo editor on both his high school newspaper and yearbook.
And by then, she wasn't so annoyed that he was always there. Surprisingly, despite not having time to go out for sports teams, despite standing stooped over chemicals in the darkroom hours at a time, his growth had not been stunted and he had a beautiful head of hair. Her pop always claimed the chemicals had taken his own hair, but Chesty never had that problem.
In a way, his love was more pure than hers. Because though she'd come around when he began to bloom into a handsome young man, he'd acted moony about her from the start, back before her skin cleared and she filled out. Long before her best features, as she saw it now—when she was all “bruised knees and bee stings,” as he later put it. It was clear he would have been hanging around a camera shop even if she hadn't been living above one, but it might have been a different camera shop.
Her pop always kidded her that she was, from the beginning, “the only other thing that boy likes almost as much as photography.”
And maybe she was shallow for not seeing the same in him when he was all elbows and bicycle handlebars, barging in, always there—heck, she'd been aware of his presence the afternoon she got her first menses. She wasn't so clear what was going on in the toilet, but she knew Billy, as he was still known then, was working that day. He was somewhere in the shop, his constant-seeming presence something she never had a say in.
It was only in high school, when he had friends on the paper and yearbook, that other boys started calling him Chesty, and the nickname spread and seeped into other parts of his life, and soon they were calling him that at the shop as well. It was around that time that she began to blossom herself, and it came on like gangbusters, and because they were starting to gravitate toward each other, addressing each other with more care, more manners, doing little favors for each other—sharing a bottle of pop, an umbrella, eventually taking in movies, holding hands, kissing, sparking, petting, going steady—she would hear his new name Chesty and think, self-consciously, I am too … We belong together. There was no question.
And she knew that even if she hadn't grown to love him and they hadn't married, there was a good chance her pop might have willed Chesty part ownership in the shop anyway.
19
The two arresting officers who eventually arrive
d were pretty polite about the whole thing, like this was normal behavior among businessmen working in the Loop.
When they got down to the lobby, he realized his portfolio was still upstairs—still with Deininger, who'd asked him to bring it back in his first day, to show to the other CDs and principals in the company—and he had better get it now, when he could, because he certainly wasn't coming back.
He described it to them, and one of the cops went back up in the elevator to retrieve it while he stood in handcuffs with the other. It was just after lunchtime and the lobby was being crisscrossed with people he knew—other illustrators and art directors—with their eyebrows raised, probably inventing all manner of fantastic stories about what he'd done.
When the cop appeared in the elevator with his portfolio, his partner began moving him toward the street. “We walk to the precinct,” he explained. “Do our part for the effort.”
It was a beautiful June day in downtown Chicago, and other than the fact that he was handcuffed and flanked by two uniformed patrolmen, heading for jail, it felt great to be out of that windowless studio, walking around in the sun and the breeze.
The cop holding his portfolio had it unzipped and was glancing through it as they walked, maybe making sure it didn't contain any weapons.
