Nothing but a Smile (19 page)

Finally, clearing her throat, she announced, “I tell you one thing, though, I'm never baking or eating another goddamn cake in my life.”

They both laughed with her, then got up and came around and put their arms around her, hugging her between them.

“Fair enough,” Wink said. “Long as that still leaves cookies and pie.”

A few days after they got back from California, he was minding the store and Sal was out visiting Chesty's aunt and uncle when two men wearing dark suits and sour pusses stepped in. One pulled the shade and flicked the door locked before Wink could come around the counter with a sash weight he'd been using to strengthen his gimp hand.

A second before he had the sash weight up and ready, he saw the flash of leather and metal—badges. They were government men.

“A little privacy, is all, Mr. Dutton.” The bigger one went on to introduce himself and his partner—nondescript Pilgrim names that slipped away a moment after he heard them.

They asked to look around, but started in on that before he could answer. One had a camera, he noticed, but they didn't seem to be there to have their camera looked at.

“This photo,” the bigger one said, “the one you people just tried to fob off on the editors of—”

“Fob off?”

“What exactly were you trying to accomplish with something like that, friend? You looking to give someone a black eye? The military? State Department? Foreign relations? The good people who make Swans Down?”

Wink noticed the guy had phrased it as if he'd been the one taking Chesty's film to the newspaper himself. He didn't bother correcting him because he'd felt just as invested as Sal.

He told him no to the black-eye question, they were just trying
to make some information available to the public; see if it was deemed worthy of attention. He said, pointedly, “Since my buddy apparently
died
taking that photo, seems to me maybe the least we could do was take a peek at
why …
”

They both looked at him wryly, as if it were a silly, silly answer.

“Would you call yourself subversive, Mr. Dutton?”

Subversive?
Where were they getting this stuff? He sure wasn't up on all his crossword puzzle words, but if by “subversive” they meant some kind of boat-rocker, out to buck the brass, they clearly didn't realize they were talking to a guy who'd once consented, in exchange for a crate of canned apricots and an introduction to a certain nurse, to paint an oil for a company commander that placed him square in the middle of his own airfield during a Jap attack, hands on his hips and shouting orders, even though he'd allegedly been in the laundry at the time, closely inspecting the bottom of a mountain of sacks of dirty clothes. And hadn't they seen his rah-rah drawings in
Yank,
for chrissake?

“You fellows looking to find out what happened with the cake flour,” Wink asked, “or just find out who's asking about the cake flour?”

“Smart guy,” the short one told the other one, pointing at Wink as if he'd identified a breed of rare bird.

“No kidding,” Wink said. “You act like we—like
I'm
the subject of your investigation.”

The short one gave him a sick smile, like he was trying to sell him a used car, swampland, or a Bible. “Just trying to get a sense of where things stand now.” He gestured dismissively in roughly the direction of the West Coast. “Back then is back then. Ship's bills of lading, cake flour … not my deal. I don't question the
wherebys
and
therefores
of whoever back
there,
what happened
then,
I question
you,
what's happening in
here, now.”

They poked around in the darkroom and the basement and even upstairs in both apartments.

He wasn't crazy about the look they gave each other in his room, lifting the narrow mattress, exchanging a smirk.

One took photos in every room. The other took notes in a reporter's pad he clutched close to his chest like an old lady playing cards.

After nosing around through what little reading material he kept stashed under his bed plus all the books Sal kept down the hall on her side, including those on her bedside bookshelf, the guy jotting down titles as they went, they returned to the darkroom and took pictures of pictures. It was just odd.

The way they pawed through the stacks of girlie prints, the extras and rejects, taking shots with their own camera of any prints that had nudity, he was starting to think his lack of attention in school was showing: might “subversive” mean something else? (Or was he thinking of something like “perversive”? “Perverted …”?) It had seemed, at first, like these two were on the hunt for troublemakers, but maybe they were looking into deviants.

He kind of wanted to ask them what in the wide world they were doing there, poking through their personal things, and what exactly they were driving at with this “subversive” jazz; maybe ask them to please draw a clearer picture for him, define their terms. But he wasn't about to stir things up further by asking a lot of ignorant questions.
I may be a dope,
he thought,
but I know when to keep my neck tucked in tight.

They didn't ask where Sal was. Maybe they didn't care.

“If you really have to do this,” Wink said, hoping to make them feel bad, “I'm glad you came this afternoon, on account of Mrs. Chesterton—the widow—is out visiting her grieving in-laws. She'd probably find this a little upsetting.”

“Relax, Mr. Considerate. We knew you were alone.” The G-man patted him on the shoulder in a condescending way that made him want to knock the guy's block off.

But he didn't, of course.

Now that she was back home, she kept going, kept on with all her normal routines, brushing aside suggestions from Wink and Reenie and other well-meaning friends that she might need a period of adjustment. She might want to close the camera shop for a while or cut back on hours, maybe go away for a little rest.

The Chestertons suggested she consider selling the store, or at least taking on a partner or manager and moving out of there— discontinue her part in keeping it going and see it more as a source of income, an investment. It was as if they'd forgotten that her own father had started the store and raised her above it, long before their nephew even came to Chicago. They told her she could come stay in one of their extra bedrooms, an offer she declined politely.

Reenie offered a hunting cabin up in the Wisconsin Dells that her oldest brother, Ryan, owned with a policeman friend. She could stay there as long as she wanted—well, until deer season opened, but it would make a quiet getaway if she just wanted to go somewhere and think.

Wink, who had no place to offer her, instead offered her privacy—suggesting again that he could move out, if she wanted. And now she honestly gave it a little more consideration than she had out west on the train. She knew Reenie would take him in, at least until he found his own apartment. But given what
Sal had been hearing about the housing crunch with all these boys coming home now, she didn't imagine he would find it all that easy to find a place. And then maybe he'd stay longer with Reenie than he'd planned. And those two would fall into some sort of new phase, based only on convenience and an increased sense of familiarity, and they'd maybe get married without truly meaning to and regret it later and start drinking … Too many young people these days were getting paired up for far more terrible reasons than that—shipping out, coming home, needing housing, needing citizenship … Besides, Sal didn't particularly want him to leave. Enough had changed in her life, with no way to fix it, ever, so why add to the list? Better to keep Wink there, and keep running the shop and, yes, keep at the girlie photos.

Except, when it came down to it, she didn't feel like posing just yet. She couldn't quite put it into words, but right now, it didn't feel the same.

“You don't get it,” Reenie said. “She didn't
think
you'd get it.”

It was true. He didn't get it, but maybe that was because it didn't make a whole heap of sense. The fact that it was taking more than one woman to explain it and deliver it and interpret it left him even less sure it was something that could
ever
be gotten by a guy. According to Reenie, Sal was ready to get back to business, done with her mourning enough to roll up her sleeves and produce some more girlie material, except she didn't want to pose for the shots.

“So she's still too upset or … ?” He wasn't sure he bought that, though she had stopped the louder crying jags at least a
week ago. She no longer seemed as down in the dumps. If not peppy, she at least seemed to be getting on with her routine, making it, more or less, through her day.

“Of course she still misses him,” Reenie said. “But no. She just thinks it's not quite right, now that she doesn't have a husband.”

Wink would be the last one to push a gal into peeling for the camera if she had any beef with it. Hell, Sal
originally
practically had to talk him into the whole deal. But he could not for the life of him get his head around
this
screwy reasoning: having a husband had made it
more
proper to pose naked for the public?

Reenie moved closer, right up against him, so her explanation was an intimate whisper. She was doing it, mostly, he knew, so Sal wouldn't hear her relaying their private conversation word for word, but he also figured she was being cozy, settling him down by touching his chest and breathing on his neck as she spoke—a thing he didn't mind one bit. She smelled of Wrigley's spearmint gum and hairspray. “The way
she
sees it,
before,
she could always tell herself, while she was doing it, she was really posing for
him,
playing it up for him, batting her eyes, sticking out her can, whatever. All for Chesty. Not flaunting it for some other guy, stepping out on him, but fantasizing it was just the two of them there. More of a ‘pure' thing, was the way she put it.”

Even as she said it, Wink could see it—there had always been a wholesome, good-girl quality to Sal's photos. No matter what she was actually doing in them, no matter what she was showing, she came off as decent and true. So maybe she was right. Maybe the pictures wouldn't work as well if she felt loose and available or something. It was odd thinking, women's logic, but he couldn't help but get it, a little.

“Plus,” Reenie said, “as long as Chesty was alive out there somewhere, she could kid herself that she
was
posing for him. She liked to think he'd actually see one of her pictures somewhere and be fooled by the wig and all—which, by the way, I personally think is nuts. I mean men are thick, sure, and husbands apparently more so, but don't those married types know every square inch of each other after a while? Anyway, Sal thought he'd never recognize her but hoped a photo would catch his eye all the same. He'd get a kick out of it, put it in his wallet or his helmet, look at it on lonely nights … Basically, she was hoping to give her husband a thrill long distance. Boners from home, sort of a naughty Red Cross package … Now, she just figures she'd be getting naked for strangers.”

Wink bit his lip, waiting for the urge to subside that made him want to bark,
But she
has
been posing for strangers!

Reenie volunteered to help—in fact, insisted—in searching for some new girls to model. “You need me,” she said, patting his cheek so it stung a little and giving him that wry arched eyebrow of hers. “Even creeps and killers can be matinee idol handsome, dollface. You might be some white slaver with a panel truck and a hypo full of opium—how would a gal know?”

So she went with him, to the burlesque shows and the dime-a-dance halls. Trying to help, he offered up the suggestion that they contact his alma mater, the American Academy of Art, see if they'd share their list of life models, but Reenie made a sour face. “The kind of gal who shows her beav to a room full of long-hairs and brooding artistes? Gotta be a little short in the face department, am I right? Maybe a little flabby, too?”

She was right. Except for that time he'd told Sal about, when the model hadn't known they were watching her disrobe, the
models hadn't been much in the way of va-va-va-voom. And the instructors, except for maybe Elvgren, had chosen them for having “interesting definition,” which translated to meat on their bones, and not usually in the preferred locations.

Of the two, they had the most luck at the burly shows. The dime-a-dance girls were mostly either offended or
too
agreeable in a lackluster, dead-eyed way that made him sad and made it clear they were also part-time prostitutes. He passed on these.

And a few girls came from Reenie's workplace, the Stevens-Gross Studio—fellow girl Fridays like herself who sometimes modeled for the painters there, and the idea that he might get to shoot a model who'd inspired the great Gil Elvgren made him feel, in theory, one step closer to being what he'd meant to be, an actual artist. The thought both pleased and depressed him.

Mostly, the process of looking for more girls was an awkward one. He felt like a traveling salesman, seeking out company, and even letting Reenie do most of the talking wasn't much better. That just made him feel like a pimp, like she was in his stable and they were trying to break in someone new.

He thought about sitting on the porch of his uncle's farmhouse in St. Johns, sketching a deer that had wandered into the yard during the thaw, trying to get the wide wet eyes and beautiful, trembling legs just right, and it struck him that he'd literally been around the world since then.

“Thirty bucks,” Reenie told them. “Easy as pie.”

The first shoot with a new girl, Sal didn't even come down to watch. Actually, he heard her on the stairs, the creak of the old wood as she stood and listened, then sat for a while, smoking, which was not her usual habit. And though the shoot was just
dandy—a goofy lion-tamer bit, with a whip Reenie had rounded up somewhere, no doubt from one of her scary brothers, and the girl, a slightly bucktoothed redhead named Rox, in a pith helmet and a belted safari shirt, holding a wooden chair for protection, ran through a series of silly poses with a ratty, floppy-necked lion rag doll, which was minus one of its button eyes. Reenie, ever the disgruntled art director, had added the touch of a sketched-in big top on the canvas scrim behind, nicely freehanded in charcoal swoops. And they had no problem getting Rox to sign the release form Sal had come up with, relinquishing all rights for a flat thirty-dollar modeling fee.