Nothing but a Smile (24 page)

“I love it,” Mr. Price said. “I love it a lot. Except it's … no good.” Mr. Jericho Price, Sal thought, looked an awful lot like Chesty's uncle Whitcomb. Maybe twenty years younger, less involved in banking, more involved in girlie pictures and the brown-paper-wrapper stuff sold behind the counter. But otherwise, very similar. Elegant and genteel.

“The production cost,” he said, “doing all these separate face cards … I was expecting
one
girl, on the back. You've got—what? One, two, three—”

“It's wigs,” Wink said. “Two girls with wigs.”

Mr. Price looked a little more impressed. “Still, production costs—it's not like a boilerplate—boom, boom, boom, every card the same.”

“Mr. Price,” Sal said, “how fast is this world changing? How many new things have popped up just since the war?”

“Since
Tuesday,”
Reenie said. “Since
breakfast …”

“Do you want to buy a deck of girlie cards next month and find someone else beat you to this idea? Because you weren't sure it would make enough money? That's really your style, being cautious?”

She felt his gaze lingering on her, studying her, and thought for a moment that the look was one of someone about to slap her. As cold as Uncle Whitcomb was, she'd never felt that possibility for an instant. But Mr. Price opted for smiling, not slapping. “We'll make it a larger run,” he announced. “Volume. More units, lower cost per unit, more potential sales. Gotta take a risk to make the big bucks. That's my philosophy, anyway.”

He shook hands all around with them, stopping at Reenie because she didn't seem to want to let go till he agreed to “be sure to tell that rat Rollo Deininger who beat him when you tell him he lost the pitch.”

“With pleasure, my dear, with pleasure.” He patted her cheek, mentioning again that soon “you two lovely ladies will be in the hands of men all over the globe.” Sal thought she saw Wink wince a little at this, but he held his tongue.

On his way out, she noticed his coat was more of a cape than an overcoat, and he looked slightly Continental, swooping a silk scarf around his neck like a vanilla swirl. Clutching each of their hands a second time, he declared, “It's a pleasure doing business, and it's a business doing pleasure.”

A little creepy,
Sal thought, the way a phrase like that rolls off
the guy's tongue. He might have just left it at
thanks
and a handshake.

The money from the card deck was just the nest egg they'd been needing to put Sal's plan into action. She wanted to start their own publishing company. Nothing big. They would operate pretty much the same as usual, even continue to sell photos to the existing girlies, but they would also put out their own. Specials, they were called—one-time titles under their own masthead. This meant contracting for print jobs and distribution, but the profit share would be higher.

He would have been fine, himself, just putzing along as they always had, but for Sal, it seemed more like an emotional need, less a business decision. “I want to be in charge,” she said. “At least of some of it, some of the time. It's
my
fanny, after all.”

He had an impulse to say,
Well, it's not very often
your
fanny, actually.
Fanny shots were more Reenie's domain. Sal's was nothing to cry about, but her top feature was definitely her top drawer.

He didn't say this, obviously, not looking to have his teeth handed to him, not looking to be out wandering the streets with those ex-GIs who couldn't find a place to live.

“First,” she told him, “we need a company name.”

Wink thought S&W Publishing would pretty much cover it, but Sal thought it was “too bland; too forgettable.” Plus, she wasn't sure, but she felt as if there was
already
a publisher with, if not exactly that name, something close enough to be confusing. “And then there's the issue of Reenie, her feeling left out.”

Reenie wouldn't be involved financially in this, just the modeling
and art directing she already did, for her regular cut of the fee. But he saw her point. Reenie might still take it wrong. There was no accounting for Reenie.

“Hey!” Sal said, “how about Left-Hand Publishing? On account of all your—well,
both
of our, really—personal setbacks we had to overcome and make do, not just your hand, but …”

Personally, he wasn't so keen on a name that made it sound like you maybe held the magazine with your left hand to free up your right.

In the end, they settled on S&W. Reenie would just have to get over herself if she felt left out.

They managed to put out two specials in the first month operating as S&W Publishing. In the interest of keeping things friendly, one was called
Winkin' with Weekend Sally,
starring Sal, and the other,
A Weekend with Winkin Sally,
featured Reenie. The latter was shot up at Reenie's brother's rustic cabin in Wisconsin; the former shot around the Loop—right in the alley next door and Grant Park for the harmless stuff, Sal walking around in the wind, turning actual, real-life nonmodel heads when her skirts got away from her. (The topless stuff was all done in the studio, on a park bench one of Reenie's brothers “borrowed” from the city a few years back that had been sitting in her mother's rose garden all this time. Reenie found a guy to help Wink borrow it once again.)

She also brought in a couple friends for cheap temporary help on the pasteup, including her former partner from her brief stint in advertising, Cal from LD&M, whom she obviously was seeing now, at least on some level. Wink tried not to react when he caught a glimpse of her, late one night, goosing the guy as he bent over the layout table. The rest included a hatchet-faced
young guy named Hef who had a day job as an intern over at
Esquire
and all variety of overeager notions about what they should do that went on and on and on.

Sal confided in him the second night Hef was around that the kid made her anxious. “All that energy! He's like a Pepsi-drinking, pipe-smoking machine you can't shut off! We don't need to reinvent anything,” she said. “Let's just keep it simple and put this out at a profit.”

“Okay,” Wink said. He'd come to find that, all in all, Sal's plans were generally always okay.

It was also Sal's idea, in the interest of boosting goodwill with the man they now called Sunshine State, the grumpy proprietor of the neighborhood news shop, to give him a special rate on their S&W titles—for him, they would work directly, cutting out, for his store only, the distributor they'd acquired. In exchange, she felt certain he would give them special placement on the shelves, maybe push the titles with his regulars. “Think of it as a foothold,” she said. “If it works, we expand the offer to a few other places around the area, maybe even regionally. It's a little more work, but it's a way to get some notice, have it build….”

Wink saw himself in a truck, delivering the things store by store, but she told him that would never happen. “Limited offer,” she said. “Just enough to get things rolling. And if nothing else comes of it, at least good ol' Sunshine might be a touch more polite next time we're supposedly ‘loitering.' ”

When she presented the idea to the man himself, disguised in a dark wig, she took along an autographed photo and signed it for him from Weekend Sally with big
X
s and
O
s and suggested he put it on display over his stool.

The man's grumbles and gripes seemed to drop down a full
register. “So that's you, then, lady? With your butt-knocks hanging out and all?”

Sal gave him a wormy smile. “In the flesh!”

Wink noticed, as they were leaving, that the publicity photo was actually one of Reenie, with a sun hat barely covering her bare ass, pouting over her shoulder. He recognized her back. But he didn't say anything. He was sure Sal was more than aware and knew what she was doing.

A week or so after the first special came out, he was up on a stepladder behind the counter, rearranging boxes of flashbulbs, and Sal was at the other end, balancing the cash drawer, when Mr. Price walked in with two bouquets of cream-colored roses.

He said, “One is for you, Mrs. Chesterton, and—”

“The other's
all
mine!” Wink called down from the ladder.

Mr. Price glanced up, acknowledging him with a weak smile, then returned his attention to Sal. He told her the other bouquet was of course for her friend, Miss Rooney—”Or is she going by ‘Winkin' Sally' these days?”

This guy made him even edgier now that Reenie had managed to learn more about their onetime client, apparently from her brother Dennis. Jericho Price, it was said, traded in more than girlie pictures or even dirty pictures, his most legitimate enterprise being prizefighters—he was said to back a few title contenders, in fact—but Wink assumed being a promoter was just a sliver of his involvement in the fight world.

Of course they were learning this a little late in the game— a fact he found rather annoying. It sounded like maybe Reenie could have dug up a tad more background on the guy before they conducted business with him on the card deck. For one thing, he might be one of those guys who, if you
conduct
business with
them, presto chango!—you're
in
business with him. That wasn't what he and Sal had in mind.

Now Mr. Price was saying he'd heard a few things around, rumors only, about them starting their own publishing venture and trademarking the two girls, and he said it in such a disbelieving way that Sal was quick to say—almost bragging, Wink felt— that it was absolutely true; they'd done all those things since the last time they saw him.

Mr. Price's look of concern seemed almost fatherly. “Oh, I wish you hadn't done that, my dear. Risky, going out on your own like that, the little guy, all alone. It sounds like fun at first, but there are a variety of obstacles and headaches that may befall you that you will
not
see coming, I promise you.”

He took a moment to tsk-tsk and shake his head, casting his eyes down to the glass display case and polishing it with his cuff in a way that looked absentminded.

But then he somehow managed to perk up, smiling again, beaming back at them. “Well! No reason to fret: if you ever feel the need for a partner in this venture—or you would like to be rid of it entirely—merely give me a jingle.”

It gave Wink the creepy crawlies, the way he said
jingle.
It was like a man of his stature and influence asking if there was a
little boys' room
where he might go
tinkle.

It was the anniversary of their anniversary and, admittedly, she'd had a few.
Sauced,
Wink would say she was, which was probably a load of hooey because she could still feel her legs, so what the hell did he know?
Big judgmental lug …

Just to make sure, she started feeling her legs, and they felt great, leaning over in her kitchen chair and running her hands down the length of them. It was some time ago now that she and Reenie had gone out and each purchased a pair of actual nylons—their first since the war, not counting the giant-sized black-market fiasco—and
her
pair had been sitting in her top drawer, remaining untouched in their original package like prissy, nonparticipatory little prudes while Reenie's pair was no doubt ruined by now, with scandalous runs from some guy's greedy, grabby paws, probably lost in some bachelor's couch cushions somewhere in the city, maybe snaked around a bedpost, maybe even in the apartment of Mr. Judgy McJudge'em down the hall.

Practically
anywhere,
Reen's hose could be now! The girl had an old prewar Buick some new guy had just out and out given her for “no reason,” and she was lately forever driving all over the city, to this party and that …
Crazy …

The motion of leaning over, feeling herself up, made Sal a little tipsy and light-headed, so she stopped and sat up, still admiring how great they looked.

What a gyp,
she thought.
A person's anniversary, and no one to even comment on that person's great-looking legs, let alone …

She remembered the last time he'd told her she was sauced— the night she got a little tipsy because it was Chesty's birthday, back when they still counted, when he was alive, and she unbuttoned his shirt and took a big whiff of him.

Wink,
that is, not Chesty. Wink's chest …

And where
was
that long, man-smelling judgy man, anyway? What did a person have to do around here to just smell a good-looking man once in a blue moon, it being a special occasion and all?

Pushing herself up from the kitchen table, she first put away the bottle so he wouldn't judge, then went out into the hall and
meant to knock on his door, and perhaps she did, but it seemed as if he simply appeared, opening up and stepping out. Maybe he'd heard her coming.

When she spoke, it didn't come out nearly as clear or forceful as she'd hoped: “Sorry I said all that … mean stuff …”

He looked puzzled. “Mean stuff?”

It dawned on her that she hadn't said anything, just drinking alone in her kitchen, so she moved on. “I got married today. We were married.”

He just nodded a little and pulled her close. She was still talking, trying to tell him something, though she wasn't clear what, so her mouth was still somewhat open when it landed on him, on his neck, and she felt the salt of his skin against her lips and wondered if he would think she'd kissed him. She hadn't meant to. She could smell the starch in his shirt collar and just a hint of sweat and tobacco and maybe perfume—Reenie's, still, or someone else now? maybe just hair oil?—and she wanted to smell him again like that last time, smell his chest for just a second.

She pulled away a little, unsure herself if it was in order to step away or just to unbutton his shirt and smell his chest. He let her go, his hands lingering lightly on her arms as if meaning to steady her, and something in his eyes that she caught only out of the corner of hers, as she looked down now, at his shirt, looked about as much like pity as she thought she could bear.