Nothing but a Smile (20 page)

Still, it didn't feel the same without Sal down there with them. It felt like he was doing something wrong, and it was enough to make him speak up and say something. When they were done, he told Reenie he'd rather wait to develop the film till the next day and that he was bushed, begging off from having her linger and spend the night. Instead, he went upstairs, checked to see that light was still seeping out from under Sal's door, and rapped lightly. When she answered, he told her he thought maybe they should pack it in on the girlies.

She gave him a put-on pout, frowning like a little girl. “That's no fun,” she said. “Only one of us can be no fun at a time, and it's still my turn. So go about your business, Wink. Really. I'll be all right. Honor bright.”

She told him again how he needed the practice; told him how good he was getting behind the camera. And with a gentle little push, she sent him back out into the hall with instructions to go downstairs to the darkroom and develop the night's work and “keep plugging away.”

“Really,” she said. “Just ignore me and I'll let you know when I'm ready to come out and play.”

All this attention, well meaning as it was, actually made her nervous. She didn't consider herself much like Reenie, who probably wouldn't mind folks fussing over her, paying attention nonstop. But it felt as though Wink was watching her all the time—not in any creepy, vulture way, but like a parent, as if she were a small child again, toddling, unsteady on her feet, capable of cracking her head on a coffee table at every shaky step. She appreciated him being there, in theory, but somehow, in the moment, he made her more uncomfortably self-conscious than she might have been if she were trying to get through her days all on her own.

She decided he needed another photography lesson—not just to distract him from his hovering, attending to her like some unnatural crossbreeding of a personal valet and a guard dog, but also because she genuinely felt she'd fallen short on her end of their bargain. His artistic eye had taken him far in terms of competent, pleasing picture taking, but there were still several technical areas to explore. In the past year or more, they'd been keeping themselves so busy in the confines of the studio, she'd grown lax in challenging him.

Once she was fairly certain she'd harangued him enough about the concept of depth of field—what it was and how to manipulate it—she sent him out on the same assignment Pop had given her at eleven, and Chesty a couple years later:
One roll, two hours. Go out where there's some distance—walk west to Michigan Avenue or Grant Park or down south to the Shedd or
wherever you want. Go up in a skyscraper and shoot down, if you want. Let's see some interesting shots that utilize depth of field.

Even as she laid it out for him, she couldn't help wondering if Pop had given these field assignments to her and then Chesty for exactly the same reason she was giving it now—to get them out of the shop, to stop the hovering and grab a little peace.

But he wasn't gone long, returning in a little over an hour. She reminded him it wasn't a race, but he only shrugged, heading for the darkroom. “Ran out of film!” He was smiling in a distant, distracted way—that and his pace in getting to the darkroom tipped her off that he might have something interesting.

Because there were two boxes of film stock, just delivered, to open and count, double-checking it all against the bill, she didn't follow him in even when she knew he was safely past the fix, and the negatives were hanging to dry.

By the time she had a moment to check on her “student,” she found him pulling his contact sheet from the stop bath.

She could see right away he had some nice stuff. It was hard to see yet, on that small scale, how integral the manipulation of depth of field was in any of the shots, but even to someone like her who admittedly only knew the technical side, and lacked that artistic eye that he and Chesty had, she could see that several of them had great contrast—bold black-and-white lines at pleasing angles. But when he pointed to the one he wanted to work up as a print, she honestly felt disappointed in him. And concerned.
He
was supposed to be the expert on composition and lighting and all those good artsy things, but this one he was hopping around about—stepping lively as he rearranged the chemicals and retrieved the single strip of 35mm negative, getting it ready for the enlarger—seemed, at that scale, at least, like
it should be titled
Ho Hum.
Or possibly
Ho Hum Man on the Corner.
She didn't see it at all. And where was the tricky use of depth of field? The fact that everything looked pretty sharp, from a close-up section of commercial signage in the foreground to a plate-glass window on the far side of a cluttered intersection? Whoop-de-do.

“Well,” she grumbled, leaving him to it, “don't forget we're not made of photo paper …”

She tried to remember what she had come up with for her own depth-of-field assignment when she was eleven. Obviously nothing so great it had remained memorable. Neither could she recall what Chesty had come up with, though she knew Pop had been pleased enough with both of their efforts.

At five by eight, she could see it. It was something. At first glance, it had the candid appearance of something accidental, maybe even a mistake or throwaway shot, loading the film. It seemed chaotic and real, but there was solid composition to it, a wounded GI framed by two distinct vertical lines, a perfect division for the rule of thirds, and it put her in mind of Hopper's painting and the way that image had seeped into her the longer she looked, the first glance brushed off, registering, as this one did, as just some urban crossroad somewhere, bleak and unimportant.

The left third of the picture was taken up by what seemed to be the rear end of a panel truck—mostly just part of the advertising painted there, two stark words in white:
COLD CUTS.
The right third of the picture was defined by a utility pole with a metal sign bolted to it:
NO LOITERING—NO STANDING ANYTIME.
This second part, she knew, referred to cars and cabs, but still, the combination was clever, because in the middle distance, framed by these two bold verticals, but just a tad off center, to
keep it interesting, was a beefy but rumpled-looking marine in a peacoat, not only standing, but reading a newspaper.

His left hand was a prosthetic, the metal pinchers crimping the pages. It was startlingly sharp, surgically shiny. “Oh my,” she said, despite herself, hoping she didn't sound insensitive. It was just there was something so unsettling about it, something that went beyond a young man losing his hand.

The focus was clean enough to read his glum expression and the detail of a five o'clock shadow along his jawline. On the open page, the clear, short blocks of type told her it was the classified section—
want ads,
she imagined,
looking for work.

At his side, slumped like a dead body, just visible at the bottom of the shot, was a duffel bag. She could make out part of the stenciled lettering:
CPL. A. KE
-something. She wondered if it constituted all his worldly possessions—lugging them around everywhere he wandered, like a turtle.

Beyond him still, counterbalancing the middle third, were three words,
WELCOME HOME, SERVICEMEN,
on a banner draped along a line of perspective that drew her eye farther in, toward what must be the building across the street, brick with a plate-glass window. An American flag filled most of the curtained window, except for a card at the bottom that read
SORRY NO VACANCY.

“I'm standing two blocks back,” Wink said. “Guy thinks I'm shooting this blossoming crab apple in someone's yard, way down the street, maybe the delicatessen truck, at the most.”

The picture was incredibly moving. It made her sad, of course, but also a little angry. And, also, almost want to laugh.

“I got to thinking,” Wink said. “You told me all about depth of field—what it is, how to adjust it—but you never told me
why
you'd want to use it.”

He was right. She'd never asked Pop either, and she didn't think Chesty ever had. It was just a tool, to use or not use.

This is an artist,
she thought.
That's the difference.

For the first time in a long time, she wished her pop could be there, just to put his two cents in.

Wink had his hands shoved down in his trouser pockets now. She hadn't seen him look this anxious since the time he tried to convey Chesty's message, that first night in June of ‘44, nearly two years back. “You know,” he said, “maybe this doesn't make any sense and this is probably crap here, just something I'm goofing around with, but … it's the first time I've done anything since …” He held up his right hand, the uncooperative one. “You know—that feels like when I used to do my cartoons. Like I'm almost
saying
something, you know? Leastways, working with juxtaposition, irony, all that good stuff. Not just making an interesting picture or a cute picture or—”

“It's exactly like that,” she told him. “And it belongs in print.”

She told him she'd talk to Bob at the
Trib
and see if he'd take a look at it and gave him a little cuff on the shoulder on the way out of the darkroom, the way she imagined Chesty would have.

There was a male face at the front door of the shop. Wink had been expecting Reenie for more than two hours, but that hardly looked like her. Not so much around the mustache; the much rounder, Germanic-looking head.

But she was there, too, about to let herself in. He heard her husky laugh and another woman's, too, and the rattle of her keys.

They'd been planning to do a shoot of Reenie doing calisthenics with a set of chest expanders and fake barbells she'd made the night before with balloons and a carpet tube, all painted
black. She'd been clear she'd come straight over after clocking out at the Stevens-Gross Studio. Now here it was almost nine, and she'd brought guests?

He'd been heading down the back hallway, making strides into the darkened front part of the shop, intending to throw the bolt on the door just to save Reenie the trouble of unlocking it and to impress upon her, with his quick steps and glowering, that she'd been wasting his evening and there was lost time to make up, when he stopped up short, only halfway down the hall, recognizing the face in the glass.

It was a face that took him back five years now, before the war, to art classes here in town—classes where he could properly hold a brush or a piece of charcoal, pinched precisely between his marvelously engineered fingers.

It was Gil Elvgren. His hero.

Why in the
wide
world had she brought him here?

Sidestepping into the cellar doorway, he peered back just as Reenie's spare key finally came through for her and they burst in, the shop bell jangling. He heard the click of the front lights and the other woman say, “Looks like maybe we kept you a bit late, dear …”

There was a reason Wink had never gone over to see her during her day job. He didn't want to run into Elvgren. He thought she understood that. So the maniac tells him he should swing by?

Elvgren would look down on all this, he bet. When he'd taken a class with him, Wink remembered how his uncle back in Michigan frowned at Elvgren's calendar work, which was vibrant and lustrous, with glowing skin and masterful composition. His uncle was of the mind that that was smut, because the girls were overly pretty and underly clothed. But it was all relative:
Elvgren
would frown in turn, he was sure, at what
they
were doing now—
comparatively, the basest sort of puerile provocation, having so little to do with art.

If she brought them all the way in, they'd see everything. There was no time to hide the props and break down the lights they had set up in back, and he had no idea what this lunatic he sometimes considered his girlfriend had told the great artist.

“Whoopsadaisy …,” the other woman said, and he took it to mean she'd realized they were no longer alone. Wink had heard it, too—the shush of slippers on the backstairs; Sal clicking on the light on that end and heading down the hall toward them. He was caught in between, flanked at both exits.

From the top cellar step, pressed against the open door, he watched as she approached, wrapped in her housecoat. She paused for a second and looked directly at him, then kept going, not giving him away. He withdrew down into the cellar, creeping step by step so they wouldn't hear, hoping Reenie's introduction of her guests would cover the sound of his retreat.

He was surprised to see Sal coming down to investigate. Earlier, when Reenie had failed to show at the appointed hour, he'd gone upstairs to wait with her for a while, in the back of his mind wondering if this might be the night that Sal decided it was time to pose again. But she'd told him she was going to heat up a hot-water bottle, of all things, and curl up with her old cookbooks and plan some hearty meals she'd been without for a few years, on account of the rationing. He'd thought to himself,
What are you now, lady—sixty-five years old?
but he'd just told her, instead, that it sounded like a great idea.

Below the floorboards, the conversation was muted, with sudden snatches breaking through intact. Sal was no more than a low, silky sound, the genteel murmur of a lady playing the well-mannered hostess. The mysterious other woman, Wink decided, was Elvgren's wife.

“We wanted to make certain our Reenie got to her destination,” Mrs. Elvgren said, her voice rising, emphatic with apology or alcohol or both. “We're so sorry it's so late, but Gil and I
had
to drag Reenie out to dinner with us. Look at her! The girl requires fattening.”

“Pure rot,” Elvgren said, and Wink could picture him up there, looking even more than he remembered like a sort of Ernest Hemingway. “Don't listen to the missus. It's claptrap. We understand you've got one of my former students here, so we thought we'd tag along and—”

“Intrude,” Mrs. Elvgren said.

There was polite laughter and some muffled pleasantries Wink couldn't quite make out regarding restaurants and which places were back to snuff, menuwise, and which ones still needed to get back on their legs. He couldn't tell what Sal was saying about where he was. He assumed she offered some excuse, or was at least playing dumb. Except for Sal, they all sounded tipsy, which seemed like a swell idea.