Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  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.”

  28

  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.

  29

  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.

  30

  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.

  For his part, Wink didn't seem exactly kid-glove smooth himself, fidgeting with the lights, checking and double-checking the shutter speed, no time to stop and look her in the eye.

  For this first session, his role would have to merely be that of art director, wardrobe assistant, corner man, maybe cheerleader. Since he didn't trust himself adjusting the focus yet, she would still have to supervise the actual operation of the camera, then hop back around in front of it.

  The bathrobe was Chesty's, so it dragged on the floor, and underneath, she had on leg makeup and Wink's khaki dress tunic from his army uniform—all of which exposed far less than he'd already seen in pictures from the other two shoots. Heck, the first one, she'd been topless, even. So being jumpy about this didn't make any sense—rationally.


  Of course, those two earlier times, he hadn't been standing right there, right in the room with her. Suddenly, this whole thing felt pretty cockamamy.

  “You need a belt?” he asked, and she thought he must be as flummoxed by this as she was, because he should have understood that she wasn't going to wear the bathrobe once they started. So no, she wouldn't need a belt.

  “I don't think so …” She scooted over to the mirror one more time and opened the robe to take a peek. They were set up in the little studio area in back that they normally used for passport photos and children's portraits. The mirror was a little low—just about bow-tie height for the grade-schoolers.

  The plan was to mince around in various configurations of his old uniform, like she was trying it on, clowning around for her soldier boy. It wasn't much of a theme, but she thought they'd better keep it simple: it was going to be hard enough concentrating on posing and being sexy with Wink there for the first time.

  Adjusting her wig, she turned back to take her place and saw he had slipped away. She could hear him on the stairs, clumping back down, in a hurry.

  He appeared with her pop's antique bathtub gin, taking a pull. She'd misunderstood about the belt.

  With a gasp and a wipe of his mouth, he held it out for her, giving her another chance to refuse. This time, she took it.

  And then she took her place on the X they'd marked on the floor with black tape, put on a smile, slipped off the robe, and tossed it clear of the shot.

  31

  He was trying his hand at making prints, practicing on their first roll of girlies together, when he heard a rap on the door frame that held the blackout curtain that was the darkroom door.

  Sal was running the shop, so either it was even deader out front than it normally was or he'd lost track of the time and she'd already locked up for the day and wanted to see about dinner.

  He grunted that it was safe to come in, not looking up, concentrating on the print in the developer tray, watching each click in the sweep of the luminescent clock. He figured she was watching pretty intently—the teacher and her apprentice—and it only made him concentrate harder as he gripped the photo with the rubber tongs, lifted it from the developer, and dropped it into the stop bath. Swishing it around gently, he turned it over, curious to see how he'd done.

  There seemed to be a nice range of black and white. This business of contrast was a tricky one. The line of Sal's cleavage needed to be deep and dark but not so overexposed that she looked like she had a stripe of chest hair.

  “Hmm,” she murmured, noncommittal.

  With the tongs tugging one corner, he held it up to the safe-light for a closer look.

  He felt her sliding up behind him, peering over his shoulder. Her hair brushed his neck and he got a whiff of her. Even over the stink of the chemical baths, there was a difference: her perfume was more hibiscus and lavender; Sal's, he'd noticed, was more lilac. This was Reenie. It had to be—it wasn't just her hair brushing his neck now, but her lips.

  “Oh,” he said, and she found his mouth.

  “Oh yourself,” she said.

  He pulled away, realizing she was peering down at the photo in the fix. Flipping it back over, thinking he'd better cover up the work he had hanging up to dry, he said, “Listen, that's not who you think it is.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don't hand me that. I'd recognize that cleavage anywhere.” She had that evil arch to her eyebrow she did so well. “Looks like you and Sal're teaching each other all kinds of things.”

  Reenie's reaction was not quite what he expected. Instead of acting jealous or disgusted or accusing the two of them of carrying on together, she simply said, “I want in.”

  “In?” he said.

  Her black pageboy bobbed as she nodded enthusiastically. “On the fun. And the cash, of course. I'm assuming there's cash to be made.”

  It was Sal who said, before he could even think of it, “We'd pay a straight modeling fee, sure.”

  In other words, Reenie would not be getting a third. Sal was shrewd like that, full of business savvy, and it was amazing to Wink that she and Chesty were having financial problems, with that kind of tough talk.

  Reenie didn't seem to be thrown by this. She seemed more concerned with cooking up creative possibilities they could explore, immediately spewing half a dozen ideas for cheap and easy themes for pinup pictures, just off the top of her head, which would involve only a few readily attainable props and costumes. “You're using leg makeup, right? Well, you should shoot her putting on the leg makeup as a separate shoot first—one about a gal making do without real nylons—then change the wig and do whatever you were going to shoot. That way you've got two photo stories for the price and trouble of one.”

  Sal shot him a look that told him she was damn impressed and would file that idea away.

  Reenie asked what Sal got paid for the first batch, and she told her. Reenie then suggested they might consider, at some point down the line, making some bigger bucks with some of the so-called after-hours clients she'd heard about back at LD&M. “There are people like this character Mr. Price or Pace or something—they come in and hire the art department for special jobs, unofficial. Deininger especially. Girlie calendars, card decks, that angle. Some of it's kind of, you know … French. I'm just thinking, if you ever want to cut out the middleman, skip over these magazine publishers. I understand it can be very heavy on the do-re-mi, and that's always a good thing.”

  “We're fine for now,” Sal said, a little stiffly, he thought. “But thank you for your suggestion.”

  “I'm just saying,” Reenie said, “if you're doing it, do it all out, is all …”

  He knew that she wanted to go back to school to study properly to be an art director. Maybe she was thinking that between the pay from her day job at Stevens-Gross and some extra cash on the side from posing, it would be enough to get her that degree.

  Or maybe she was just a little nuts. That was also a strong possibility.

  He'd suspected as much the night he'd given his little art lecture for the two gals down the street at the Art Institute, when, after they both said good night to Sal, Reenie quietly tiptoed back up the stairs and slipped into his apartment.

  As soon as she had the door closed, she leaned back against it, looked him earnestly in the eye while gliding her hand down his pants, and whispered, “You know I'm not one of those victory girls, right?”

  He said he knew.

  “I don't just throw myself at every boy who serves, okay? I'm fun, sure. Or I can be. But I don't just push right over for every man in uniform. Get me, buster?”

  He was having trouble swallowing. “Gotten,” he said, and it came out funny.

  “Like you, for inst—you're not in uniform. And I'm planning on climbing all over you like ivy on a trellis. So what kind of a golldarn victory girl is that, huh, dreamboat? There goes that theory right out the ever-lovin' window.”

  He didn't tell her he'd given up having any theories about anything having to do with any woman at all ever since arriving back in Chicago. He didn't tell her anything because she had her tongue in his mouth, and she was pushing him back toward the narrow bed.

  32

  She enjoyed it best of all when the letters from Chesty were typewritten, like this one was. Not because his handwriting was so awful, but she had to think that it meant he was safely back out of the fray, working closer to civilization (if they had such a thing down there on the other side of the world) and not pinned down in some jungle skirmish, assigned to cover the wrong story at the wrong time. A typewriter meant he had a chair and probably a desk—both good signs, in terms of danger.

  There were six pages to the thing, and this last she handed to Wink to read:

  6

  can imagine we laughed our a—s off over that one!

  Oh, also–rc'ved your letter re: Wink Dutton staying in your Pop's apt. and that is aces w/me. I will worry considerably less than I do now knowing he is there.

 
Just don't let him become TOO handy w/a camera than yours truly–I would not welcome the competition!

  Seriously, though, that boy has the eye, I tell you. He is one talented ason-of-a-gun and if you have ever wanted to learn more in re: art theory etc., as I know you do, I suggest you take advantage of his presence, his generosity and his thickheaded tendency to drive a point into the fground.

  I'm just razzing the lucky so-and-so, of course, dear. Dutton is a good egg and I'm glad to know he'll be around–not that you ever needed any looking after, kiddo.

  My love to you and a sock on that bony jaw to Dutton–

  Chesty.

  She showed it to him just so he would know she wasn't misinterpreting or misrepresenting her husband's desires in any way.

  “Well, okay,” Wink said. “I guess that settles that. Should I run out and get a little throw rug or a potted geranium, maybe a pretty frame for that picture of my girlfriend, really settle in for good?”

  She wasn't sure why he was being so sarcastic about it—it wasn't like they were holding a gun to his head and making him stay there.

  “You have a girlfriend?” she asked, thinking maybe Reenie had already succeeded in working her charms on him.

  He snapped his fingers like she'd suggested a crackerjack idea. “Oh right!” he said. “I should probably pick up one of those, as well. I mean, as long as I'm getting the comfy rug and the geranium and the picture frame.”

  The conversation just sort of ended. When he shuffled off to his end of the hall, and closed his door, she had a good idea he was having a belt of something.

  The man took a nip more frequently than she remembered her husband doing, but maybe she was just idealizing Chesty, since he was gone. And maybe her husband would be drinking more now, too; perhaps as much as Wink. War changed men. One more drink or two here and there could hardly be the worst result, given the other choices, like shell shock or paraplegism or trench foot. Or, well, death.