Nothing but a Smile (14 page)

Wink missed mixing the colors, layering it on, building it up.

“Listen,” Reenie said, suddenly behind him, “if this place makes you so gaga, we could wait till everyone leaves and …”

He hadn't realized he was caressing the glass palette. He turned to face her, trying to puzzle out if it was a sincere offer or not. The short time they'd been fooling around, he'd learned enough of Reenie's ways to suspect it was possible she was on the level. She might want him to take her right there, maybe on the drop cloth.

She rolled her eyes up to the beret on her head, gave him a smirk. “Kidding, chum. I'm not doing it in here! You nuts? Someday, I
am
leaving again—mark my words—moving up to bigger
and better, brother, and I'll need to ask these folks for references, believe you me. So ix-nay on the ooky-nay.”

As they left the studio, he secretly wished they didn't have a full evening ahead of them. Something about visiting this place really had him blue.

The picture was called
To Have and Have Not,
and they sat right up front, so close she could make out the rips and patches in the screen. When the Warner Bros. shield came up like a badge, followed by a map of the Caribbean, they still had the whole front row to themselves.

It was difficult to watch, this close up, but this was where they were supposed to sit, so she didn't complain, other than a few sighs and slouching down in her seat, trying to make it easier to crane her neck to see.

“Bogie's lips do look huge,” Reenie whispered.

Sal told her to hush, not wanting her to ruin it.

Anyway, his lips had always seemed large to her, even before today, but now, it was hard not to focus on them and wonder if these sluglike lips ran in the Bogart family.

They sat through a bunch of marlin fishing and talk of bees, then the leading lady appeared in an upstairs hallway with
Anybody got a match?
and Reenie's elbow jabbed Sal, pulling her from the story as two men with long coats joined them, taking a seat on either side of them. Neither bookend man said hello or acknowledged them in any way.

She didn't want to be too obvious about it, but she snuck a peek out of her periphery. The man next to her looked like a
tough customer. On the biggish side, dark curly hair, possible broken nose, but good-looking. He'd assumed possession of the armrest and he had thick piano-mover hands. The one two seats down, on the far side of Reenie, had a thin, childlike face, a delicate nose, and long lashes. This one was the one who finally spoke, saying, “Bogie's lips look
huge.”

That was the password. These were the black marketeers with the nylons.

Sal turned and glanced at Reenie one last time, as if to make sure—as if there were any way to possibly
be
sure about such a thing—and slid the envelope from her pocketbook, slipping it into the paw dangling at the end of her armrest. Like small prey swallowed by a snake, the envelope retracted up into his coat sleeve. Meanwhile, to her left, the thin fellow allowed a paper bundle to drop from his coat. He was very elegant about it as he bent and rested the package against Reenie's leg.

A minute or two passed, and then there was some lively hustle and bustle on the screen—Hoagy Carmichael singing “Am I Blue?” and the gal joining in and the nightclub breaking out in applause. The two men took this moment to remove themselves, the small one executing the slightest nod of a bow, and they retreated to seats in the back.

Her heart was pumping, even after they'd gone.

She'd suggested, several times, they ask Wink to come along, just to be safe.

“No, no,” Reenie had insisted. “Patrick says if we show up with a fella, they may think he's a cop or a G-man or something. So just you and me, toots.”

This hadn't sounded like such a red-hot plan. Sal asked her if she really thought that would be safe, the two of them meeting strange men unescorted.

“They know my brothers,” Reenie said. “Or know
of
them.

Believe me, that's like having an entire armored division gunning their engines behind us. We could show up naked, they wouldn't touch us. We'll
be fine!”

And they were fine. There was no monkey business, not even so much as a leer. She even wondered, though it was hard to tell in the brief glimpses she got of him, if one of the men wasn't a sissy. He seemed overly gentle handling the stockings. And not once did his glance detour even briefly toward her bosom.

All the way home, she'd expected J. Edgar Hoover or Eliot Ness to step out from an alley, flash a badge, demand to see what was in the Marshall Field's bag. She imagined the unflattering photographic skills of the police department, ugly mug shots, printed on the crime page of the
Trib,
spinning forward as if in a newsreel or cheap movie, and the headline:
CHEESECAKE DUO NABBED IN NYLON RING.
The drop head would read “Illicit Photographs Seized as Evidence.”

But no such cinematic-style calamity befell them, and as she locked the shop door behind them, she busted out grinning, not believing their good luck. “Sister,” she announced, “we are rolling in clover.”

It was a surprise—since they hadn't needed his help anyway, they'd kept it from Wink. She stashed the little package in the hatbox in the darkroom until later that night. They'd get him to set up for a shoot, and then they'd pull out the nylons.

They used the darkroom to change, and Reenie went in ahead of her while Sal double-checked the way Wink had the camera set up.

“Hey, Sal?” she said, calling out to her from behind the curtain. “You said something earlier about us rolling in clover? I think maybe we're rolling in something else.”

She didn't like the sound of this. Leaving Wink to it, she marched over and pulled back the curtain. Reenie was down to her panties and bra, the lacy black set that went well with her hair, but she wasn't wearing the nylons. Instead, she held one stretched out between her hands as if playing cat's cradle.

Sal could see for herself. “They're a little big?”

“A little? Seabiscuit might be able to pull it off.
Maybe.”

Wink joined them and they gathered around the big surprise. According to the labels, only one pair was XL. The other three were XXL.

“Nice surprise,” Wink said. “You shouldn't have.”

Reenie reached around her and slapped him on the head. “Any ideas, mister, or are you just going to stand there looking dashing?”

Sal came up with the idea of pulling them back tight with clothespins, but the other two outvoted her on this, claiming it would be too hard to shoot every shot so that the stockings never wrinkled and the clothespins never showed.

Wink asked, just for the sake of argument, what if they just let them be big and wrinkly—how would that look?

“Like a safari,” Reenie said matter-of-factly “Like we're elephants. Or rhinos.”

But ultimately, Reenie was the one who came up with the solution. They wouldn't wear the stockings. They'd use them as a prop, as the main theme. Holding them up, dangling them, inspecting them, they didn't look outrageously huge. They would shoot a storyline of girls
buying
a pair of nylon stockings—the last one on a sales table—and then they would fight over it.

So Sal and Wink carried the dinette down from upstairs while Reenie made some hand-lettered sales signs out of cardboard. Reenie borrowed a couple of Sal's hats from the closet and the two they'd both worn that day and arranged them on the far wall on pushpins. It looked a
little
like a ladies' department.

The best shots, she could tell, even as they were doing it, were the ones Wink got once they got going, once the poses moved beyond the wide-eyed surprise and the two “customers” discover the one pair of stockings for sale, once the struggle had begun and their clothes “accidentally” began to fall away. The giant nylon worked wonderfully for tug-of-war, stretching outrageously. They grimaced and sneered, putting on their most ferocious faces, and it was hard to hold their expressions long enough for the shot without busting out laughing. In one shot Reenie dreamed up, they both stood on either side of the sales display and braced themselves, each with one leg up, a foot jammed against the table.

At one point, they were both up
on
the table, with Sal on top, pinning her down, but Reenie holding fast to the prized nylons. Another shot, Sal was on all fours on the floor, the nylons between her teeth, with Reenie straddling her, working the ends like reins.

“Next time,” Reenie said when they'd shot the roll and Sal had begun gathering up the oversize, seemingly useless hosiery, “we'll string them up and make hammocks, do a whole desert island fantasy …”

The girl was just chock-full of ideas.

It was Chesty's birthday, and Sal was hitting the sauce. The three of them had had dinner earlier, and one drink there, toasting him in his absence, and then she'd opted out of the movie after and had the two of them drop her back at the shop. She said she just wanted to sit and think happy birthday wishes that he was safe.

He and Reenie took in a picture featuring Joan Fontaine as some poor gal just trying to get married but pestered by her fiancé and three old flames, all trying to dig up dirt on her and tell tales on her. It appeared to be a comedy.

After, they necked in the park by the Buckingham Fountain for a little bit, watching the twinkling lights on Lake Michigan, and though she worked him over a little through his trousers, with her hand, Reenie insisted he not try to sneak into her place with her tonight but that he better go back alone and check on her friend. “Even though she was acting all perky and all,” Reenie said. “It was maybe just an act, you know? And we don't want to rub the couple-y thing in her face too much today.”

So he went back and found the light was on under her door, and she had “I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire” on the phonograph, which stopped with a jolt when he rapped lightly.

When she appeared in the hallway, it was clear she'd been crying and even clearer the drinking hadn't stopped with the one birthday toast at dinner.

She wasn't crying now, just smeary eyed and red cheeked, and when he gave her a little smile, meant to say he understood, her face twisted in silent pain. He opened his arms and she walked right in, her hands at her sides. He felt her wet face pressed up against his shirt, throbbing with silent sobs. He patted her back, said, “There, there,” said something about it being the last birthday Chesty would spend away from her, he was sure.

He couldn't tell if she was breathing heavily now or sniffling or what it was, but she pulled aside his jacket lapels and kept her face buried in his chest. And something else—was she unbuttoning his shirt?

She was, but not in the normal way, from the top down. She seemed to be working somewhere in the middle, just opening it enough to press her nose in against his undershirt. Then the
sniffing became more audible. She was
smelling
him, taking big whiffs and laughing and whimpering.

“I never get to smell that man smell anymore,” she mumbled.

She was so sloppy and pathetic, he couldn't take it as a come-on. He let her sniff a few more solid ones, patting her head a little, and chuckling at how silly it felt, standing there in his friend's hallway, letting his wife inhale his chest.

Then he pulled her away and helped her back into her apartment and got her started getting ready for bed, leaving her to the more private stuff, and then he beat it out of there, back to his apartment down the hall.

The next day, Sal seemed pretty embarrassed, avoiding him at every turn. Reenie came by, and Sal seemed glad to have an excuse to leave. The two went over to the coffee shop and were gone for almost two hours.

That night, Reenie stayed over. He'd been able to get hold of some rubbers, and they did it standing up, her grabbing hold of the top of the dresser, watching him wryly in the mirror. The bed, they'd found, was squeaky as hell.

It wasn't till they'd turned off the light and turned in that she said, “Oh, Sal told me how she came a little unglued last night— Chesty's birthday and all.”

“She did?”

Reenie started giggling. “I told her she's welcome to smell you all she wants.”

He didn't say anything. Across the alley, Ella Fitzgerald was singing with the Ink Spots, “I'm Making Believe.”

“She wanted my—you know—blessing,” Reenie said. “I told her it wasn't mine to give.”

He could hear her breathing and enjoying her smoke. He wondered if he should say something, but she beat him to it: “That was right, wasn't it?”

“That she could smell me again?” Wink said.

“That it wasn't mine to give. That we don't have that kind of—”

“Is it possible I really smell that much like Chesty?”

There was a long pause and she said, “I don't really recall what Chesty smelled like, distinctly. Not that I could put into words.”

He suggested then that maybe it was just that all men smelled alike.

She seemed to be thinking that over. “I'm Making Believe” was a record, he decided, not the radio. They were starting it up again.

When she spoke next, Reenie's voice was so low, it felt like they were behind enemy lines: “I just want to make sure it was okay—everything I said to Sal.”

Reaching across the dimness, he patted her hip. “Sure. Everything's jake.”

He knew it wasn't the kind of answer she wanted. She wanted some kind of definition about their relationship.

He adjusted his breathing, making it steady, as if he'd already started to fall asleep.

The name Winkin' Sally now regularly appeared in print with almost all their photos, as well as a second name, Weekend Sally. The two names were either rotated interchangeably or paired inseparably, like a comic book duo. It was still fuzzy to Sal which one
she
was supposed to be and which one was Reenie. It seemed, too, in correspondence, that the editors didn't make any
distinction themselves and possibly
couldn't
make any distinction. It was possible they weren't aware at the magazines that they were actually two separate real-life girls rather than a double exposure or a dozen different girls, someone new each time.