Nothing but a Smile (10 page)

The first real lesson she gave him was the one Pop had first given her: she showed him how to build a simple pinhole camera, using cardboard shoe boxes she got from the old gent at the Flor-sheim's. (The old man had teased her, telling her, “Need to see some ration coupons for those, darling,” as if she were buying the shoes, and she laughed for him, as if it were funny.)

Building the pinhole camera felt almost childish, the kind of assignment she would give a grade-school class, but it was where she knew to start. It was fun, too, carrying them out onto the sidewalk and exposing the photo paper, custom cut by hand in
the darkroom to fit in the back of the box, to the June sunlight as it drew lines from the lamppost across the sidewalk and the awning and the bricks, slanting into the alley that ran alongside the shop. They stood close, following the sweep hand on his watch, counting the seconds out loud.

This way he could work immediately on developing prints and skip right over the fussiness of film; the process of winding and developing a roll of negatives—all that manual dexterity and chemistry—that could be so frustrating to the novice.

This way they could talk about contrast and graininess and all that good stuff, and he could feel satisfied with the results without a long struggle.

She could tell he wanted to get started for real, really jump in feet first and move ahead, but he also seemed to understand that all good things took time and patience.

Which was maybe, when Pop had first given it, also part of the lesson.

The end of June came with the departure of the Republicans and the arrival of summer fashions he found almost startling to his Wac-weary eyes. The Grand Ol' Party had come to town to nominate a Michigan boy from about twenty miles down the road from Wink's uncle Len's farm—Thomas E. Dewey, originally of Owosso—and it felt almost like all the gals of Chicago had been waiting for the stodgy old conventioneers to leave town before pulling out these breezier outfits. Sal told him no, these looks were all the rage now all over the States. Women were showing bare midriffs these days, and the skirts were so slim and
figure hugging—except for the enormous flat hats that also appeared on the scene like a fleet of aircraft carriers and would argue against this trend—that he generally had to wonder if this season's fashions were a result of rationing; you could do your part for the war effort by skimping on material.

Not that he didn't like it. And it reminded him about something that he'd strangely pushed to the mental back burner since he'd moved into Sal and Chesty's spare apartment—the idea that a major element of being back among civilians was being back among civilian
women.
It seemed his thoughts had roamed almost exclusively in that direction at the time of his discharge— or even before, lollygagging in the navy hospital, watching the nurses and wondering what they'd look like in something other than white. And yet, since he'd moved into the back apartment, the only lady friend he was spending any solid time with was the lady of the house.

Sure, her friend Reenie stopped in, too, and he was relieved to hear she was employed again, back at the Stevens-Gross Studio, doing pretty much her old job there. He felt a little sorry for her, that it hadn't worked out in a creative position at LD&M, but try as he might, he couldn't quite bring himself to regret his part in getting her out of there. What else could he have done— sat back and let that masher go about his business? Maybe she was right back where she'd started, performing menial clerical duties for the pinup illustrators. Maybe it was unfulfilling. But at least she wasn't getting herself pawed in the supply room.

It was ironic, he thought, that an illustration studio where the artists were known for producing some of the nation's most popular pinup paintings was kinder and more civil in its treatment of a vulnerable young girl than a prominent and supposedly upstanding ad agency that produced work for America's most wholesome packaged goods.

“That's not entirely true,” Reenie pointed out. “I heard LD&M gets calendar contracts and stuff, too. They just don't flash it around. Bad for the image. Their big clients think it's kind of lowbrow.”

He told her “lowbrow” was carrying on the way that wolf had and then canning her for it. She told him he was sweet, and that felt like the end of it.

In the time since the two of them had been fired, she began to drop by in the late afternoons and evenings, ostensibly to see Sal. He couldn't help feeling a little flattered by the frequency of her visits, until Sal picked up on it and told him, “Don't get a swelled head. She used to hang out here all the time before she started at that ad agency and was always working late and trying to brainstorm some winning idea and just trying to keep up and one step away from the creeps. So this isn't new for her—this is back to normal, Mr. Swellhead.”

Wink told her he didn't have a swelled head, he'd just wondered how her friend was doing, is all. He told her he wasn't planning on bothering her or anything.

“Oh, go ahead and bother her,” Sal said, smiling now. “I did want you two to go out, remember? I'm just saying she's not
currently
coming by to see you. Doesn't mean she won't be, eventually, if you get off your rear end and talk to her like you're halfway interested.”

He was interested, sure, but Sal had been keeping him more than busy, showing him the ropes. He wasn't exactly twiddling his thumbs, looking for ways to kill time by trying to decipher the intent of a complicated big city girl like Reenie. He had skills to learn.

He was getting it.

He'd always done well in science, back in school. Especially
chemistry. So the darkroom part of Sal's photography lessons, breaking down the development of the negatives and the prints, felt to Wink like it was falling into place pretty logically. Every once in a while, he required just the slightest adjustment—a subtle eyebrow or intake of breath from Sal, teaching him in the womblike reddish haze behind the heavy curtain. But he hadn't yet made one move so completely wrong she had to raise her voice. He didn't want to get too cocky too soon, but it seemed like he was really getting it.

He liked the narrow margin of error in this part of “Sal's Crash Camera Course,” as they'd been jokingly calling it. For once, at least some part of producing a picture was measurable. All his life, he'd worked in the terrifying abyss of relatively few restrictions that was the other two-dimensional arts. He had taken one ceramics studio class, before the war, and with that, too, like this, he'd been comforted by the limitations of the medium and the part that seemed almost like a recipe out of a cookbook, as tried-and-true as something from the
Farmer's Almanac
—”Corn should be picked when acorns are the size of squirrels' ears …” With a drawing or a painting, you started down a path, and you either kept going in that direction or altered what you'd done and tried something else, but there weren't the same absolutes, no
Crosshatching must always be done at a diagonal angle to the object being textured, except in the case of a herringbone suit … The human nose must be drawn for no more than ten and no less than five minutes …
He'd never felt the comfort of the rigid parameters Sal laid out for him here in terms of stop bath, developer, fix. There was security in the control of a measuring cup.

In a way, it was a little like being in the service. When he'd been in, he'd grumbled as much as the next guy about the whole lousy deal, plotting the demise of everyone from that day's mess cook on up to FDR himself, but the truth was, the structure and
lack of freedom did make it easier to concentrate on the fun part—what he would do on his next leave or what he could possibly trade for in exchange for painting another cheesecake bomber girl. And in the darkroom, not being able to wing it—not just throwing various chemicals into a tub like a Creole gumbo and hoping for the best—made it easier to concentrate on the parts of it over which he
could
make choices, the whole
art
part of it.

The choices available through selection of shutter speed, as she'd been showing him, plus the range of diaphragm openings—the list of oddly sporadic and specific fractions called f-stops—he found as exciting as a full palette of fine oils. He'd never really thought about it, even watching a pro like Chesty at work back in the PTO, but there were more options found in these gizmos than properly utilized by the average weekend slob peering down into his Brownie in the park, waiting for his kid to stop drilling for boogers, so many choices that could affect lighting, color, and that area Sal particularly wanted him to help
her
with, composition.

Besides, being in the darkroom for any length of time soon felt peaceful; removed. If the store was closed and they didn't have to listen for customers out front, he would commandeer Sal's radio, and between the low music and the low lights, it was almost like he was back in the better parts of the Pacific theater, like that illegal speakeasy hooch, and there weren't any car horns honking or El trains rumbling or newsboys crying out about destruction, just the night and the close proximity of a nice-looking girl.

Except, of course, if they were both there now, in the PTO, back on the bottom of the world, Sal would be too busy to be giving him photography lessons. She'd be off with her husband on a three-day pass, enjoying herself a hell of a lot more than she
had to be now, and Wink would have to find himself another date to stand beside, talking low, lost in the dark of the Corncob and the tropical night.

Part of his side of the bargain was to teach her a little art theory, such as the elements of composition, and he wasn't sure at first how serious she was about this, nor how he would teach her. He wasn't an instructor—had no lectures worked up, nor the patience to ever design such things. If he had a good textbook, with full-color examples from the masters, he could much easier lay out the whole deal about the Golden Ratio and the rule of thirds and balance and framing … But the only textbook he'd ever owned like that—this would have been back when he was taking classes at the Academy in 1940—had been swapped, if he remembered right, for a half-drunk pint of mint schnapps and a pair of winter gloves.

It wasn't long, though, before he realized he was staying right in the neighborhood of what amounted to perhaps one of the world's largest art textbooks—guarded only by two stone lions. Being right on Adams, it was only a matter of blocks to the Art Institute. And on Mondays, admission was free.

At first, she wasn't quite clear what he wanted her to see in this room and began to glance around, hoping not to appear nearly as dumb and inartistic as she felt. The one dead ahead, barely taken in, registered only as something as mundane as a claim check for the cleaners, found at the bottom of her purse.

But he was pointing at it, redirecting her.
Okay …
Yes, it still struck her as commonplace, in the way of a magazine ad or a billboard or a snapshot taken out the front window of the camera shop, just to get the roll spooling. Maybe a candid at the Berghoff. And as modern as this summer's ladies' fashions—it could have been painted earlier that day. Maybe the day before, to allow the paint to dry.

And yet, despite that first reaction, there was actually something captivating about it. It drew her in, physically, pulling her into the room, right up close.

NIGHTHAWKS,
the plate on the wall said.
EDWARD HOPPER.

“This one's new since I was here last, back before the war,” he said. “Brand spankin'! Two years old. Kind of different, may not be your cup of tea, but I think you'll see a lot of what we've been talking about at work here. The way the fellow's got it worked up, compositionwise …”

It was just three people and a soda jerk or maybe a short-order cook, late night at a lunch counter. These people weren't special, they weren't doing anything fancy, they weren't even shown in enough detail to qualify as a portrait, to determine the degree of their beauty or grotesqueness or what the heck they even looked like. They were just sitting there like lumps. Lonesome lumps.

But the triangle of yellow—the bright light of the seedy little eatery—did cut through the darkness, the brackish gray-green of the dead intersection, to frame them so sharply.

And the way they were isolated off to one side, counterbalancing the empty, darker, practically unused portion of the composition—it did really focus her eye on them in a way that began to feel not only intentional but powerful, even masterful.

Moving right up to it now, she started calling out things she saw in it; things he'd been teaching her. They'd been talking
about framing and lines of perspective and balance and something he called the rule of thirds.

With all she'd known of photography, learned from her pop and then Chesty, they'd never bothered getting into any of this with her. All she'd managed were the practical fundamentals of recording a pretty image: how to determine if something was worth the cost of film and photo paper, how to determine which part should be in focus, how to get it in focus, and how to line it up inside the frame.

“Also, there's the juxtaposed complementaries …”

It sounded like Reenie. She turned to see her sitting on the bench at the back of the room, reading from a brochure. She wasn't sure how long she'd been there.

“Or are you two not covering color theory today?”

With a smile, Sal greeted her, noticing that Wink was looking away now, drawn to something across the room that looked like a storm at sea. He didn't appear particularly surprised that Reenie had joined them.

Rather than make a scene, Sal did what any dignified person would do—she announced she was going back downstairs to the ladies' room, knowing Reenie would feel duty-bound to tag along.

It worked, but her friend didn't volunteer any explanation once they were down there, just grabbed a smoke by the sinks and waited.

After faking it in a stall, then pretending to wash up, Sal told her, at the mirror, “Say, Reen? Why don't you just meet us after, hon? You're not missing out on anything …
social.
He's just giving me a little art tutorial, you understand?” She pulled the steno pad she'd been scribbling on from her pocketbook and flashed it at her friend. “I'm actually trying to learn something, so—”