Nothing but a Smile (15 page)

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 birthday, 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:

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?”

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.

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.