Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  It seemed peculiar she'd be playing fainthearted and delicate now. Especially after talking a big game about the quick bucks they could make with the various after-hours clients she thought she could get them, the ones whose products purported to run a little more to the blue, the French.

  “Not your business, Reen,” Sal said, trying to be patient with the little faker. “Your bazooms, that's all. Just a little. It's not that big a deal, actually. I mean, it's all a little nerve-racking, isn't it, whatever you're showing? Even if it's just thighs you don't feel so great about or—”

  “Sal,” Wink said. “Show her those first ones. Whattaya think?”

  It was a good idea, so she took Reenie down to the darkroom, alone, and showed her the first things she shot, before Wink had even arrived last year—without a wig, even, and without a stitch on top.

  “Jeezo Pete, Sal!” Reenie's shock seemed legitimate. And they'd left Wink upstairs, so she didn't have any reason to be putting her on, playing it up, acting demure. “And you were showing all this to Wink?”

  “What—you think my husband's going to be all that much more upset, if he were to find out?” It was a legitimate question, actually, the answer to which she wasn't really sure. Was Wink alone seeing her nudes worse than the clothed cheesecake appearing in print, available to anyone? “I sort of figure ‘In for a penny …' ”

  “Not what I mean—Chesty's reaction.” Reenie sneered, giving her a shot with her elbow. “I mean thanks a heap for letting me know you're showing him this! … Pal!”

  Sal explained that she took them all on her own, that Wink wasn't in the room. Still, she was curious about her reaction. “Does it bother you, really, him seeing … more of me like this?”

  “Not really.” Reenie shrugged, poker faced now, with the slightest little pout maybe just slipping out. “He can do what he wants.”

  “He didn't do anything, Reen. Not with me, at least.” She would hope her dear old pal would know her better than that, that she wasn't that kind of wife to Chesty, no matter how far away he was or how long he was gone. Sal wasn't positive Wink wasn't seeing other women, but she didn't mention that.

  Reenie said, “Well, he can look at what he wants, is what I mean, then. They're his eyes, not mine. And we don't have that kind of a setup, he and I. We just don't.”

  The first concept they tried under these new relaxed guidelines was one dreamed up by Reenie. The theme was an artist and her life model. “Cheap as heck,” Reenie said. “We won't need to buy a thing.”

  Except she did need to “borrow” an easel from her day job. And an old white dress shirt from Wink—he'd ruined it in the darkroom, so it would serve as a perfect artist's smock.

  When she'd heard the pitch, Sal had assumed her friend would play the artist's model herself. After all, she'd posed for the calendar artists over at her work, and she knew the real “model poses”—the corny, vampy stuff—far better than Sal.

  “No, no,” Reenie said. “I'm the artist. You're the nude.”

  Reenie had it all worked out for her: if Sal stood with one leg cocked slightly, holding her bosom, and her leg turned just so, all you really saw was the side of her bare bottom and the tops of her bosom and a long, bare leg, but none of her private business. The long expanse of bare leg felt the most scandalous, personally, though really didn't count as nudity, in Sal's mind. What did make her feel most exposed was just getting in that position. She felt her face burning up, her heartbeat pumping in her neck, her fingers getting tingly against her goose-pimpled bosom, because what the magazine reader got to see and what Wink had to see, waiting for her to get safely in position, were two different things.

  To his credit, he seemed unduly preoccupied with the lights and reflectors and fussing with the cords in the time between throwing her robe clear of the shot and Reenie aligning her and declaring her in position, ready to go.

  It seemed to her that Reenie ought to be the one so very exposed, at least in this first series, since she was already used to stripping down for Wink, in private. For her part, Reenie did have her bottom peeking out from beneath the shirttails of her paint smock as she extended her paintbrush to squint one-eyed and measure the proportions of her model. And when the thing escalated into a paint fight, as they'd scripted it to, there was more of Reenie's bare fanny and even a nipple or two popping out of her torn smock, but for Sal, being actually stark naked, every shot had to be carefully and slowly choreographed, to make sure she was still strategically covered—by a splotch of paint or the palette or a corner of the easel—and each shot, waiting for the two of them to confer, Reenie saying, “No, wait, I think we can still see her puss,” was excruciating.

  This time, she got good and loaded, starting before the session was over and continuing on, alone in her bathtub upstairs while the two of them ran the negs. She could hear them laughing and having a good time down there. It came right up through the floorboards and the pipes.

  Mostly, she worried that if she wasn't completely plastered, she'd sneak down there and destroy the film. So she drank up.

  39

  He was starting to feel self-conscious about his efforts to retrain his right hand. Thinking that Sal could hear him banging around and cussing and carrying on whenever he tried, he'd started to remove himself from not only his apartment but the whole camera shop, taking a tablet over to Grant Park or Navy Pier, if the weather was bearable, or sometimes—if he wasn't feeling too down about it—to the Art Institute, though usually that was a bad idea. Sometimes folks in the museum sidled up close alongside him, thinking they were about to catch a glimpse of a budding talent at work and, boy, were they in for a shock. He could feel them stiffen next to him, holding their breath for an instant as they zeroed in on the swirly, shaky lines and distorted proportion. They probably thought he was delusional.

  And, of course, since taking it outside, his diligence in retraining his hands was waning. After all, he wasn't simple. He knew what was what. He'd been working on it for a well over a year, and still no luck. Here it was, August 1945 already. Hell, just last week, when the fight with the Japs was finally over, they announced that scientists had managed to retrain atomic particles, for Christ's sake. They'd found a way to make atoms go from basically lying there unnoticed and useless to blowing two whole cities to dust. And yet he couldn't coax a few lousy fingers on one hand to behave normally.

  The left, uninjured hand wasn't getting much better. As they'd explained it to him way back at the VA hospital in Hawaii, that hand was like a radio that was all wired up right, only no one had taken the time to tune it properly. While meanwhile the right was shorting out on some of the wires, but the wires that were still connected were already well tuned.

  The young doctor was just trying to be helpful, using these comparisons, but really they were unrelatable as hell and still weren't any less so, all this time later. Radio was about sound. Art was about sight. Some things didn't take a medical degree to know.

  “Doctors do that,” Sal told him once. “They try to find a way to illustrate what's going on—”

  “Sure,” he told her, “but dragging radios into it doesn't help! Christ, I could illustrate better with the bum hand itself …”

  The problem was, he still didn't know which hand had a better shot of drawing properly, if either was even possible.

  With his right hand, he found the best thing he still had going, if anything, was tonal control. He could still shade and vary the degree of shading, as long as he could keep the charcoal or the flat of the pencil gripped between his okay thumb and his iffy middle finger, because that hand still had a memory of finesse; it still had a looseness in gesture. He just couldn't make all the fingers work right.

  The left hand, he found, was slightly better—though still not great—at blind contour drawing, the classic first-year exercise of following the outline of a thing without looking at the paper. It was supposed to strengthen hand-eye coordination. The results with his left were shaky and jerky, but
that was often the case with this exercise.

  He did a lot of these—simple still lifes he found around him, staring out at the view from a bench, letting his hand do its worst without interference. For one thing, at least he didn't have to stare at his monstrosities as he produced them. He could glance at them once, at the end, and just toss them into a trash basket.

  When V-J Day, as the newsreels were calling it now, had happened last week, he felt a little unpatriotic that he wasn't feeling more worked up about it. Of course it was great that the war was over, but for some reason, he didn't feel all that compelled to go looking for a parade. And there were plenty. In a town like Chicago that loves its parades, they were popping up spontaneously every six feet. There was dancing and kissing and carrying on right out in public. Reenie confessed she lost count of the guys who kissed her on August 15.

  He'd thought about grabbing someone and kissing them like that—acting crazy. Maybe kiss Sal, just to play it safe, not grab some stranger's girl on the street, maybe get his block knocked off. But it just wasn't in him to do any of that.

  For one thing, he didn't have a clue what he was going to do with his life. For as long as he could remember, the answer to that question lay on the white drawing tablet in his lap. And though that had been closed to him for more than a year now, somehow, he hadn't really felt a need to think about it as seriously because he could always tell himself There's a war on. Now, with peace suddenly dropped on them like a ton of bricks, it felt like nothing more than pressure to make serious plans.

  Sal had even seemed a little thrown by this sudden peace. Chesty would eventually be coming home, and Wink got the idea that she'd grown fond of their unofficial side business.

  The night of V-J Day, in fact, she'd confessed that she'd secretly felt she was doing something to help. “I always imagined,” she said, “or I guess hoped, that one day some vet would come up and tell me that the photos, you know, helped just a little.”

  She seemed almost glum, and he'd decided to tease her out of it. “So we haven't been doing this for the money?” She laughed and he told her, “Hey, just because no one's ever come up and told you that yet, about the girlies helping, doesn't mean it's not true.”

  When he got home from trying to draw in the park, she must have seen him coming because she was standing out on the sidewalk, waiting for him, hugging herself though it wasn't quite yet Labor Day, the sun golden in her hair, on her yellow dress. She started in when he was still half a block away, calling out to him as he approached. “Hey. You know how we've talked about how someday we're going to have to explain to Chesty what we've been doing here? The photos and all?”

  He saw she was grinning, which maybe meant she'd come up with a good explanation. Which was good, because he wasn't sure himself that he'd be able to explain it to the guy when the time came.

  “Yeah …” He stepped into the shop, and she followed him in.

  “Well, better start working on that explanation,” she said, and he noticed now she was clutching a postcard with a palm tree. “He's coming home.”

  40

  Sergeant William “Chesty” Chesterton stood looking out at the San Francisco Bay, his ears filled with the clamor of seagulls. Pretty, but not five hours' worth of pretty.

  There would be a bus arriving, eventually, that would get him from the naval yard to the train station, but that wasn't for five hours, and he didn't even have a magazine. He'd been cleaned out, the whole collection pilfered during the crossing from Hawaii. A fellow couldn't even go topside for ten minutes without risking having his gear tossed and pawed through. It was like traveling with monkeys, really. He especially wished he hadn't lost the girlies he'd been thinking about showing Sal; the couple issues with the girl that looked so much like her—that is, if you squinted a little and ignored the fact the hair was all wrong. Anyway, he still hadn't fully decided if he would show them to her, let alone tell her about them. Probably he would. Sal was pretty all right. She might actually get a charge out of it, knowing some sexy girl in a magazine looked—to him at least—just like her.

  He was shooting with the Argus—boring long perspectives of the docks, close-ups of the moorings, panoramas of the disappointingly unfoggy Bay, all a bit unpeopled for his taste—when he heard someone calling him.

  “Hey, shutterbug—84 Charlie!”

  They'd been calling him that all the way from Hawaii. He squinted into the sun at a shadowy figure on the gangplank of a navy freighter. He was pretty sure it was an ensign he recognized from the trip over.

  “Over here! You wanna get an eyeful of something really wild, check this out.”

  The cargo class was docked right next to the cattleboat they'd just come over on. He imagined this guy wasn't going home, like him, but probably shipping out on another troopship. Chesty felt sorry for the poor bastard.

  Grinning like he was camp happy, gesturing to follow, the ensign called over his shoulder, by way of explanation, “You gotta see this. It's relief for the Japs, right, but you tell me what the jumping Jesus the skibbies plan on doing with all this.”

  Stepping down into the hold, the metal clang of the stairs got quiet about halfway down, the reverberation muffled. He strained to see why in the dark, his eyes slowly adjusting to take in mountains of white powder only partially contained by a scattering of wooden crates. It was everywhere, floating in the air like misty breath on a winter's morning.

  “Wow …”

  “Right?” the ensign said. “Crazy, huh?”

  Through the blizzard of white, he strained to make out words stamped on a nearby crate: SWANS DOWN, it read—a strange phrase that nonetheless stirred a gray memory he couldn't quite place, an earlier time, a younger time, safe back home, maybe in the kitchen.

  “Cake flour,” the ensign said, and then it all made sense.

  Except for the part where it was filling the hold of this ship, and he pointed that out to him. “This is a basic necessity?”

  “Yeah, right? Thing hits me just the same. Only who knows? Maybe someone up top feels so solly for the little fuckers. Wants em to have a nice treat, maybe a nice red velvet cake. Who knows. Maybe someone's idea of a joke or it's something someone had in surplus or it was going rotten anyway, maybe boll weevils, a tax write-off—who knows how the brass thinks, am I right?”

  Farther back, narrow sunlight shafted in like it would in the nave of a cathedral. Beautiful, but maybe not enough light. He lifted the Argus and adjusted the f-stop, hoping that would compensate for the lack, and fired away. The one-striper beside him stopped talking, as if watching him work or afraid sound would disrupt the shots. Chesty had a half a roll still and no real conviction he'd captured anything but blackness. Digging out the flash rig from his pack, he really started to imagine he was standing in a snowstorm. The ensign started giggling.

  Framing the shot again, including the guy in this one, off to one side, turned three-quarters, Chesty saw himself back home, standing in the first heavy snowfall of the season—my God, that would be soon! two months at the most, knowing Chicago—and he thought how it had been so long since he'd seen snow, he'd missed entire winters with his wife, and he thought of her warm little kitchen and Sal in the front window, looking out at the snow blowing around outside, and pressed the trigger for the biggest flash he had ever seen, white, white, white.

  41

  They traveled, with bereavement vouchers procured through his contacts at the New York offices of Yank, on the Southern Pacific's Overland Route. Separate accommodations. Boarding in Chicago, he slipped the porter a couple bucks to make sure they were properly situated—not in adjoining sleepers, which might elicit disapproval from fellow passengers, but kitty-corner from each other, across the aisle and down three doors. Distant enough, he hoped, for her to feel some privacy in her grieving, but close enough that she didn't feel completely abandoned.

  The body—or, as near as he'd been able to determine, an assortment of parts they'd been able to recover and box up in
a coffin—was waiting on ice at the Port of San Francisco. Once they took possession, they would reboard the train and escort Sergeant William Chesterton to his final resting place—the family plot in Breakey, Nebraska.

  Initially, he'd offered to travel to California in her place and bring Chesty back for burial, but Sal said no, that didn't make sense, since they wouldn't be burying him in Chicago.

  This had been news to Wink. It didn't seem like the right time to pester her with a lot of questions, but he'd had no idea his friend was from Nebraska.

  Somewhere beyond Laramie, he got to talking to an auburn-haired gal named Carol in the lounge car. She looked a little like Rita Hayworth, except one eye was visibly smaller than the other. Though it was somewhere between ten and midnight (he couldn't keep track of these time zones they were passing through), the lady was drinking a lot of coffee, and when he declined to join her in a cup, saying the stuff would keep him from sleeping, she seemed like she was about to say something, then thought better of it and smiled to herself instead. They talked about the steamy novel she was reading, Forever Amber, and when he asked if it was as scandalous as he'd heard, her mouth curled in a way he liked a great deal and she said, “It'll do.” Asking to see it, he riffled through the pages, expecting something nasty to pop out at him and grab his attention, which it didn't.

  While he was still glancing at it, she stretched a little in her seat, long and lovely, and he strained a little to keep his eyes on the page. “You have to read it terribly closely to find the juicy stuff,” she explained, and that settled it for him. He handed it back and she ordered another little pot of coffee from a passing porter—a woman, as were several of the mechanics he'd seen so far. He expected they'd all be out of work soon, sent back home now that the men were returning.