by Steve Amick
As they left the studio, he secretly wished they didn't have a full evening ahead of them. Something about visiting this place really had him blue.
36
The picture was called To Have and Have Not, and they sat right up front, so close she could make out the rips and patches in the screen. When the Warner Bros. shield came up like a badge, followed by a map of the Caribbean, they still had the whole front row to themselves.
It was difficult to watch, this close up, but this was where they were supposed to sit, so she didn't complain, other than a few sighs and slouching down in her seat, trying to make it easier to crane her neck to see.
“Bogie's lips do look huge,” Reenie whispered.
Sal told her to hush, not wanting her to ruin it.
Anyway, his lips had always seemed large to her, even before today, but now, it was hard not to focus on them and wonder if these sluglike lips ran in the Bogart family.
They sat through a bunch of marlin fishing and talk of bees, then the leading lady appeared in an upstairs hallway with Anybody got a match? and Reenie's elbow jabbed Sal, pulling her from the story as two men with long coats joined them, taking a seat on either side of them. Neither bookend man said hello or acknowledged them in any way.
She didn't want to be too obvious about it, but she snuck a peek out of her periphery. The man next to her looked like a tough customer. On the biggish side, dark curly hair, possible broken nose, but good-looking. He'd assumed possession of the armrest and he had thick piano-mover hands. The one two seats down, on the far side of Reenie, had a thin, childlike face, a delicate nose, and long lashes. This one was the one who finally spoke, saying, “Bogie's lips look huge.”
That was the password. These were the black marketeers with the nylons.
Sal turned and glanced at Reenie one last time, as if to make sure—as if there were any way to possibly be sure about such a thing—and slid the envelope from her pocketbook, slipping it into the paw dangling at the end of her armrest. Like small prey swallowed by a snake, the envelope retracted up into his coat sleeve. Meanwhile, to her left, the thin fellow allowed a paper bundle to drop from his coat. He was very elegant about it as he bent and rested the package against Reenie's leg.
A minute or two passed, and then there was some lively hustle and bustle on the screen—Hoagy Carmichael singing “Am I Blue?” and the gal joining in and the nightclub breaking out in applause. The two men took this moment to remove themselves, the small one executing the slightest nod of a bow, and they retreated to seats in the back.
Her heart was pumping, even after they'd gone.
She'd suggested, several times, they ask Wink to come along, just to be safe.
“No, no,” Reenie had insisted. “Patrick says if we show up with a fella, they may think he's a cop or a G-man or something. So just you and me, toots.”
This hadn't sounded like such a red-hot plan. Sal asked her if she really thought that would be safe, the two of them meeting strange men unescorted.
“They know my brothers,” Reenie said. “Or know of them.
Believe me, that's like having an entire armored division gunning their engines behind us. We could show up naked, they wouldn't touch us. We'll be fine!”
And they were fine. There was no monkey business, not even so much as a leer. She even wondered, though it was hard to tell in the brief glimpses she got of him, if one of the men wasn't a sissy. He seemed overly gentle handling the stockings. And not once did his glance detour even briefly toward her bosom.
All the way home, she'd expected J. Edgar Hoover or Eliot Ness to step out from an alley, flash a badge, demand to see what was in the Marshall Field's bag. She imagined the unflattering photographic skills of the police department, ugly mug shots, printed on the crime page of the Trib, spinning forward as if in a newsreel or cheap movie, and the headline: CHEESECAKE DUO NABBED IN NYLON RING. The drop head would read “Illicit Photographs Seized as Evidence.”
But no such cinematic-style calamity befell them, and as she locked the shop door behind them, she busted out grinning, not believing their good luck. “Sister,” she announced, “we are rolling in clover.”
It was a surprise—since they hadn't needed his help anyway, they'd kept it from Wink. She stashed the little package in the hatbox in the darkroom until later that night. They'd get him to set up for a shoot, and then they'd pull out the nylons.
They used the darkroom to change, and Reenie went in ahead of her while Sal double-checked the way Wink had the camera set up.
“Hey, Sal?” she said, calling out to her from behind the curtain. “You said something earlier about us rolling in clover? I think maybe we're rolling in something else.”
She didn't like the sound of this. Leaving Wink to it, she marched over and pulled back the curtain. Reenie was down to her panties and bra, the lacy black set that went well with her hair, but she wasn't wearing the nylons. Instead, she held one stretched out between her hands as if playing cat's cradle.
Sal could see for herself. “They're a little big?”
“A little? Seabiscuit might be able to pull it off. Maybe.”
Wink joined them and they gathered around the big surprise. According to the labels, only one pair was XL. The other three were XXL.
“Nice surprise,” Wink said. “You shouldn't have.”
Reenie reached around her and slapped him on the head. “Any ideas, mister, or are you just going to stand there looking dashing?”
Sal came up with the idea of pulling them back tight with clothespins, but the other two outvoted her on this, claiming it would be too hard to shoot every shot so that the stockings never wrinkled and the clothespins never showed.
Wink asked, just for the sake of argument, what if they just let them be big and wrinkly—how would that look?
“Like a safari,” Reenie said matter-of-factly “Like we're elephants. Or rhinos.”
But ultimately, Reenie was the one who came up with the solution. They wouldn't wear the stockings. They'd use them as a prop, as the main theme. Holding them up, dangling them, inspecting them, they didn't look outrageously huge. They would shoot a storyline of girls buying a pair of nylon stockings—the last one on a sales table—and then they would fight over it.
So Sal and Wink carried the dinette down from upstairs while Reenie made some hand-lettered sales signs out of cardboard. Reenie borrowed a couple of Sal's hats from the closet and the two they'd both worn that day and arranged them on the far wall on pushpins. It looked a little like a ladies' department.
The best shots, she could tell, even as they were doing it, were the ones Wink got once they got going, once the poses moved beyond the wide-eyed surprise and the two “customers” discover the one pair of stockings for sale, once the struggle had begun and their clothes “accidentally” began to fall away. The giant nylon worked wonderfully for tug-of-war, stretching outrageously. They grimaced and sneered, putting on their most ferocious faces, and it was hard to hold their expressions long enough for the shot without busting out laughing. In one shot Reenie dreamed up, they both stood on either side of the sales display and braced themselves, each with one leg up, a foot jammed against the table.
At one point, they were both up on the table, with Sal on top, pinning her down, but Reenie holding fast to the prized nylons. Another shot, Sal was on all fours on the floor, the nylons between her teeth, with Reenie straddling her, working the ends like reins.
“Next time,” Reenie said when they'd shot the roll and Sal had begun gathering up the oversize, seemingly useless hosiery, “we'll string them up and make hammocks, do a whole desert island fantasy …”
The girl was just chock-full of ideas.
37
It was Chesty's birthday, and Sal was hitting the sauce. The three of them had had dinner earlier, and one drink there, toasting him in his absence, and then she'd opted out of the movie after and had the two of them drop her back at the shop. She said she just wanted to sit and think
happy birthday wishes that he was safe.
He and Reenie took in a picture featuring Joan Fontaine as some poor gal just trying to get married but pestered by her fiancé and three old flames, all trying to dig up dirt on her and tell tales on her. It appeared to be a comedy.
After, they necked in the park by the Buckingham Fountain for a little bit, watching the twinkling lights on Lake Michigan, and though she worked him over a little through his trousers, with her hand, Reenie insisted he not try to sneak into her place with her tonight but that he better go back alone and check on her friend. “Even though she was acting all perky and all,” Reenie said. “It was maybe just an act, you know? And we don't want to rub the couple-y thing in her face too much today.”
So he went back and found the light was on under her door, and she had “I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire” on the phonograph, which stopped with a jolt when he rapped lightly.
When she appeared in the hallway, it was clear she'd been crying and even clearer the drinking hadn't stopped with the one birthday toast at dinner.
She wasn't crying now, just smeary eyed and red cheeked, and when he gave her a little smile, meant to say he understood, her face twisted in silent pain. He opened his arms and she walked right in, her hands at her sides. He felt her wet face pressed up against his shirt, throbbing with silent sobs. He patted her back, said, “There, there,” said something about it being the last birthday Chesty would spend away from her, he was sure.
He couldn't tell if she was breathing heavily now or sniffling or what it was, but she pulled aside his jacket lapels and kept her face buried in his chest. And something else—was she unbuttoning his shirt?
She was, but not in the normal way, from the top down. She seemed to be working somewhere in the middle, just opening it enough to press her nose in against his undershirt. Then the sniffing became more audible. She was smelling him, taking big whiffs and laughing and whimpering.
“I never get to smell that man smell anymore,” she mumbled.
She was so sloppy and pathetic, he couldn't take it as a come-on. He let her sniff a few more solid ones, patting her head a little, and chuckling at how silly it felt, standing there in his friend's hallway, letting his wife inhale his chest.
Then he pulled her away and helped her back into her apartment and got her started getting ready for bed, leaving her to the more private stuff, and then he beat it out of there, back to his apartment down the hall.
The next day, Sal seemed pretty embarrassed, avoiding him at every turn. Reenie came by, and Sal seemed glad to have an excuse to leave. The two went over to the coffee shop and were gone for almost two hours.
That night, Reenie stayed over. He'd been able to get hold of some rubbers, and they did it standing up, her grabbing hold of the top of the dresser, watching him wryly in the mirror. The bed, they'd found, was squeaky as hell.
It wasn't till they'd turned off the light and turned in that she said, “Oh, Sal told me how she came a little unglued last night— Chesty's birthday and all.”
“She did?”
Reenie started giggling. “I told her she's welcome to smell you all she wants.”
He didn't say anything. Across the alley, Ella Fitzgerald was singing with the Ink Spots, “I'm Making Believe.”
“She wanted my—you know—blessing,” Reenie said. “I told her it wasn't mine to give.”
He could hear her breathing and enjoying her smoke. He wondered if he should say something, but she beat him to it: “That was right, wasn't it?”
“That she could smell me again?” Wink said.
“That it wasn't mine to give. That we don't have that kind of—”
“Is it possible I really smell that much like Chesty?”
There was a long pause and she said, “I don't really recall what Chesty smelled like, distinctly. Not that I could put into words.”
He suggested then that maybe it was just that all men smelled alike.
She seemed to be thinking that over. “I'm Making Believe” was a record, he decided, not the radio. They were starting it up again.
When she spoke next, Reenie's voice was so low, it felt like they were behind enemy lines: “I just want to make sure it was okay—everything I said to Sal.”
Reaching across the dimness, he patted her hip. “Sure. Everything's jake.”
He knew it wasn't the kind of answer she wanted. She wanted some kind of definition about their relationship.
He adjusted his breathing, making it steady, as if he'd already started to fall asleep.
38
The name Winkin' Sally now regularly appeared in print with almost all their photos, as well as a second name, Weekend Sally. The two names were either rotated interchangeably or paired inseparably, like a comic book duo. It was still fuzzy to Sal which one she was supposed to be and which one was Reenie. It seemed, too, in correspondence, that the editors didn't make any distinction themselves and possibly couldn't make any distinction. It was possible they weren't aware at the magazines that they were actually two separate real-life girls rather than a double exposure or a dozen different girls, someone new each time.
She and Reenie were drinking coffee at the Zim Zam and checking out their latest work. Four magazines were spread out before them, one with Sal identified by the editors as Winkin' Sally, another with Reenie identified as the same, another with Sal as Weekend Sally, and the last with both of them, jointly billed as Winkin' Sally and Weekend Sally, but nothing more itemized than that.
They'd moved beyond feeling cowed by the grouch at the news shop and had marched in there, without wigs or Wink this time, bold as royalty or streetwalkers, and bought exactly what they were looking for. Bringing them out in public, sitting at a small table by the window, with other patrons giving them frowns and raised eyebrows, felt like nothing compared with facing the newsdealer earlier, staring him down. So, as Reenie had put it, “to hell with it—if they don't have bigger things to think about, then let ‘em frown themselves silly …”
She was right—they certainly had more important things to think about. The American army had just crossed the Rhine; victory in Europe was close at hand; MacArthur had even returned to Manila—all things more important than two gals looking at girlie magazines at the coffee shop.
The one Sal was looking at was a copy of At Ease and a photo story someone had cobbled together out of shots of her attempting to bathe in an army helmet Wink had taken with him at discharge: “Weekend Sally on a Saturday Nite!” She'd kept her towel on the whole time and had unseen panties on underneath—along with even some pasties Reenie had lent her—and of course never managed to get down in the helmet, but just stuck her toe in the thing and pretended to pour water from an empty teakettle into it and generally acted like a moron, doing the pouty face Reenie had taught her. She remembered Wink asking her, in a moment alone after the shoot, where Reenie had gotten pasties, and Sal had told her she had no idea.
“Not so crazy about weekend,” Sal said now, privately thinking that had to be her now, by default. Since Reenie always made a point in each shoot of winking every other second in a way that almost appeared painful, a physical exertion, like she might throw out her back, Reenie had probably commandeered the first name, the one they'd originally given Sal. “Weekend sounds awfully close to party girl. A pushover you call in a pinch, when you've got nothing better lined up. A girl just for the weekends, or one who'll go away with a man.”
“I think it's maybe a pun,” Reenie said. “Like she's weakened by something. You know—worn down, dropping her defenses, giving in.”
“Eww!” Sal hadn't even thought of that. “Now I'm even less crazy about it.”
“Relax,” Reenie said. “If anyone thinks one of us is the easy one, it's me. Men smell it on me or something. Trust me. I'm the part-timer they don't take seriously.”
She sounded irked about something. Sal wondered if she was upset in some sort of delayed way about what she'd told her about Chesty's birt
hday, about getting drunk and sniffing Wink the other night, but Reenie had seemed understanding about that—even laughed with her about it. Sal studied her friend for a moment, but Reenie didn't look up from the page, flipping through, biting the corner of her lip, and Sal didn't pursue it. She loved the girl, but there was that black Irish streak that was just plain scary.
The next day, Sal opened a letter she thought she should share with Reenie. Normally, she would have taken it to Wink and the two of them would have decided on it, but given the content, she thought she should leave the vote up to herself and Reenie. It said:
Dean–Great stuff this last time, as usual! Keep ‘em comin', old boy!
Thought you should know that we on the “Editorial Board,” such as it is, have been thinking that the time is ripe, for “loosening up” a little around here. You might have noticed in the last few issues of our various titles, we've allowed pictorial content to get a bit “zestier.” Now that we as a society almost have this great hardship behind us, we feel our boys, at home in peacetime America, will be ooking to “let their hair down,” just a tad. and we for one feel they deserve it. Without some of the stickru strictures placed on us by military censors and the PX concessions, etc–who felt our boys wouldn't handle certain “distractions,” we foresee being no longer under quite as tight strictures.
Basically, we're looking for “nipple-peepers” and a little of the tushy.
See what you can do with your beautiful babes, friend.
*Fees will be increased accordingly, of course–say, double your current rate to start? How does that grab you?
It seemed to grab them differently. Sal immediately went back to the first impulse she felt when she'd opened it—working the numbers, considering what they could potentially make—while it appeared that Reenie was thinking more like the art director she wanted to be, imagining the new storylines and gimmicks they could concoct.
But when they presented the possibility to Wink, inviting him in to sit at her kitchen table, Reenie surprised her by suddenly starting in with the coy stuff, saying, “I don't know, Sal … Show my business? Really show it?”
