Nothing but a Smile (9 page)

They'd originally given him some pills for his hand, but those were gone. As was the pain. He considered, for a moment, where that putrid bathtub gin might be that Sal had squirreled away somewhere … Another time, another place, maybe if he were more settled in, he'd be thinking
of other
distractions to the restlessness as well—like trying to meet a girl. Though knowing Sal would be sleeping right next door would make that idea a little awkward.

Was she really serious about being a lax landlord? Meaning, say, some night he did invite a girl home with him—that would actually fly?

That idea made him think of Reenie. She was a stunner— something out of a magazine—but
maybe
he'd have a chance; an outside shot … Except he didn't want to act the drooling ape Deininger had been. Better take it easy on that front.

Seeing Reenie and Sal together that afternoon, he'd thought how lucky he was, this newly returned to Chicago and still finding his way around, and already he knew two very cute, very fun gals, even if they were just pals—one being off-limits, the other being in the caution-slow lane. It still was a hell of a kick, hanging out in the afternoon, watching the civilians bustle past while idly laughing it up with two great, spunky women. It was just nice to have new friends.

And he hated to be the kind of guy who got
ideas,
but seeing them together this afternoon made him wonder about one other thing: was it possible that the dark-haired model in those shots Sal had been processing, supposedly for some customer, was actually Reenie? Meaning what—Sal was the photographer? Or someone else entirely—some guy Reenie knew or worked with somewhere?

It made him wish he'd gotten a better look. But the first time, the contacts had been too tiny. And the second time, the prints had been too coyly obstructed by that keyhole silhouette. In both cases, she'd barely let him get a good look, just flashing them and then kicking him out.

But it wasn't like there was a lock on the darkroom. Hell, there wasn't even a door. It was just a curtain.

The darkroom was very organized, and she appeared not to be sugarcoating it about the state of business—there were only a few strips of negatives clipped up on a corkboard on the far wall and nothing hanging on the line to dry and nothing in the chemical baths.

He found a few shots of Chesty, in his uniform, next to a kangaroo. Ones he'd sent home, Wink figured.

The manila envelope that he remembered was gone.

He did locate a wide drawer under the workbench, and it contained a lot of papers, including what looked like tables with a lot of information about ratios of dilution of various chemicals, and some pieces of mat board cut out in different shapes, including the keyhole, and a manila envelope. Uncoiling the string enclosure, he found it contained photos, all right, but these were different. These were nudes, or seminudes—girl curled up in a chair, girl bare assed on a towel, girl resting her bazooms on the back of a chair—all with their faces x-ed out with a grease pencil. All clearly blonde.

With his fingernail, he scratched at the
X
on the one suntan-ning her ass. And it stared back. It was Sal.

The lady who would be sleeping right down the hall. His buddy's wife.

In his shock, he stepped back and banged his head on the
unlit overhead light. He yelped out and swore, and the chains rattled and adrenaline shot through him; fear he'd disrupt everything here and she'd see it later and realize he knew.

Except … she'd been the one to bring him in there initially. She'd shown the other ones to him, asked him for his opinion. On some level, she'd
wanted
him to know. She wanted him to look.

Didn't she?

He stood there, trying to catch his breath as he scratched away the other
X
s and stared, frozen, not sure what to do.

He could still pack his grip and sneak out. That was still a viable plan. If he could pull it together and stop bumping into things. If he could stop staring at the photos.

Christ on a crutch,
he thought.
What does she want from me? She was the one pushing for me to stay here … Christ on a cracker …

He was only human, after all. He was only a guy. He was a good guy, sure, or tried to be, but he was only—what was that again?—human.

And he was just out of the service, for Christ's sake. Maybe it wasn't the same as being away in prison for a while, but still, a thing like that left a guy weak in certain areas.

Yeah, he had to get out of there. Pronto.

“What are you doing?” It was Sal, stepping through the curtain.

He blurted out some question about picking her up at one a.m.

“Never mind that,” she said. “What're you doing?”

He reminded her that she'd brought him into the darkroom before. Twice. The part he didn't say out loud, but wanted to say was,
You wanted me to find these.

Except when she finally did look down and her eyes adjusted and he saw that she saw what he held in his hand, he wasn't so sure anymore. Maybe she didn't want that. Maybe she was disappointed. She looked deflated, smaller than her normal petite frame, if that was possible.

“Wait.” She didn't say anything more, but stepped back through the curtain. He heard her back behind the counter in front, the ding of the register, and then she returned with a stack of clippings and letters and handed them to him.

The letters were business envelopes. The clippings were ads he'd seen a hundred times before—”Art Photos Needed.”

“Look at the response,” she said.

He opened the letters and glanced at them just enough to see they appeared to be correspondence with the people who'd placed the ads. He wasn't sure what to say. Why was she thrusting all this stuff at him? “Chesty is my friend, Sal. I'm really not comfortable—”

“I don't play around, if that's what you're wondering.” She sounded a little peeved now, and glared at him. “I love my husband and I'm
true
to him—that thing you seemed to have such difficulty relaying the first night you came by.
I
say it easily. I am true to the man I love. That's not at issue.”

She told him how she'd been fooling around with these girlie shots, thinking it might be a way to bring in some extra cash fast, that they really needed it, and that she was, in a number of ways, way out of her realm, and she could use a little help from someone like him—a friend, someone who respected her husband and her and knew scads of things about pictures and men and girls. “Someone,” she said, “who I don't think will judge me.” She showed him where she'd hidden the contact sheet for the shots of the brunette in the kitchen and a stack of five by eights of the
same, unobscured by the keyhole-shaped frame. And then she showed him a wig, pulling it from a hatbox he'd missed, under the workbench. She was the brunette.

“Just one more thing about all this,” she said. “Chesty doesn't need to know.”

Without meaning to, he let out a little gasp of air. There was only so much he could promise. This fell firmly in the
a little much
category, and it was hard not letting her see that.

“I'm not going to cheat on him,” she said, “but that doesn't mean I'm not going to lie to him. Only not because I'm trying to hide something that's really all that shameful.” He looked away, staring at the large luminous numbers on the glow-in-the-dark timer as she said, “I need to lie because if he knows I'm doing this, he'll be concerned about our
finances,
how bad off we must be. Which we are, unfortunately.”

She pulled out a stack of bills, including what appeared to be a letter from the city about property taxes, and laid them out on the workbench and tapped them once, like a poker player laying down the killer hand.

“So I need you not to tell him.”

She waited for his response. He sighed again, trying to think of something noncommittal. Finally, he said, “I'm terrible at letter writing.” He held up his lame hand. “Even before this.”

Apparently, it wasn't enough. Her eyes narrowed. She was growing impatient. “I'm serious, Wink Dutton!”

He threw his hands up, in surrender. “Okay, okay. I won't tell him. I promise.” He wished she hadn't pressed him. He still had a lingering feeling that he had no idea what the hell he might be signing up for.

As near as she could figure it, based on what she tried to learn from Wink over the following days—and there was no telling really, how much he actually knew about such things or how much he was shielding her from, still withholding information, maybe trying to be genteel—it wasn't so cut-and-dried as there not being
any
nudity in girlie pictures. Not at all. In fact, when she showed him the publishers' responses from the first batch, his brow got a little crinkled with an expression that seemed to say something was not quite right.

“No, no,” he said. “There are nudes. Sure there are. I've— I've seen them.”

“You own some, you mean.”

He hesitated.
“Owned
some. Past tense.” He seemed a little fidgety, saying this, like he wanted to change the subject, and he launched into a complicated spiel about the range and variety of girlie photos, then seemed to be backtracking, claiming there really wasn't that much skin. He tried to explain something he said he'd been led to understand back when he was contributing to
Yank
—that both they and the civilian publications were making an effort to show more “good girls” these days, as well as fewer Aryan blondes. Girls next door who were still next door waiting for the poor sap to come home safe. But there were different tones for different kinds of magazines.

“But the girls are never actually naked?”

His face screwed up again—Wink was either wincing or thinking. “You
can find
it …”

It felt impossible, sitting in the camera shop, trying to understand all the distinctions he claimed there were. “This requires a field trip,” she told him. “I'll go get my wig.”

At the nearest indoor news shop, she let him enter first, counted to twenty Mississippi, then followed him in, disguised in her borrowed black wig and Wink's dark aviator glasses.

Immediately, the owner, a slightly scaled-down version of Sydney Greenstreet, started giving her the evil eye from his perch on a stool beside the cash register, but she went right into her investigation anyway, glancing at
McGall's
only briefly before drifting over to the more lurid covers.

The covers were what she'd call cheesecake, and at first, it was hard to tell them apart. A few times, when it seemed like the owner wasn't looking, Wink, standing down the aisle at a fair distance, would jerk his head a little or nod in the direction of a particular title, and she'd investigate.

Between the gossip confidentials and the “adult humor” cartoon-gag magazines and the nudist and burlesque promotion-als, there were dozens of titles. Of course they didn't have sufficient funds to purchase all of them, so they had to study them there.

Knowing she could never remember everything she found important, she slipped her grocery pad out of her pocketbook, concealing it in her hand, and tried to discreetly jot down a few notes and titles of potential magazines. A lot of them, according to the addresses listed on the mastheads, were published by the same people, and most she recognized as the places she'd been writing.

Suddenly, the newsdealer was at her side, breathing like an inbred pug. “Hey, lady.” She returned the magazine in her
hand to the rack and picked up a
Stars and Stripes,
ignoring him. “ ‘Scuse me,” he said. “Princess? This here is not a
scenic view,
okay?”

It was, however, a free country, so she sniffed a little and moved on, continuing to browse. Maybe he thought it scared off the shy customers, seeing a woman looking at the men's magazines. Well, it wasn't something she was going to make a big scene doing, but it certainly wasn't fair for him to object, as long as she was discreet. He hadn't said anything at all to Wink yet, who was down the aisle a ways, acting like they weren't together, and
he
was browsing just the same. Possibly the man just didn't want to tangle with Wink, the way the big lump was huffing and puffing to catch his breath just venturing away from his stool.

But he wouldn't drop it. “Oh, I see! Either you can't hear me or you're too
royal
to address the rabble …”

With a somewhat-menacing throat clearing, Wink glanced over her way, at which point the newsdealer, to her surprise, redirected his abuse, fearlessly waddling over to face Wink instead. “Maybe
you
can tell me, Slim. Can't figure out for the life of me, your friend here”—Sal was stunned that he'd put them together with one mere rasp of the throat. She decided he must be more on the ball than he appeared—”is she Miss Helen Keller herself or is she maybe the lost Anastasia, empress of Russia? I ask on account of she's either deaf as a door knocker or too royal for me to be speaking to, is that it?”

“None,” Wink said, “of the above. We are conducting a scientific survey, sir, that has far-reaching, global ramifications for all our young boys out there still fighting for freedom, country, and sweet little Janie next door.”

“Yeah? That so? Well, buy or leave, pal: there's your American way right there. Ramificate
that,
friend. And if you don't like my policies, you can buy me out and I'll be off to the Sunshine State
and you can stay here and run this place however god-awful way you want. Run it into the ground, the fuck all I care, I'm in Florida, basking in the sunshine with the beautiful babes like in these here girlie magazines, but until then, Slim—and Mrs. Slim—you gotta play by the rules!”

Ignoring this, Wink offered her his arm, escorting her out.

She thought she had a better general idea now of the range he'd been talking about—though nothing but the half-hidden ones over to the side, some of which seemed like they were from France or somewhere, bore any similarity to the first batch of shots she'd taken.

All in all, it felt helpful, getting a glimpse into the male world like this. She felt just a hair closer to understanding what they were looking for. On the walk home, she suggested that, for future research, they could find another magazine shop, to which Wink said, “You kidding me? As long as we're too broke for a lot of movies and nightclub entertainment and the Book-of-the-Month Club, I don't know about you, but I'm going back for the free floor show.” He gave her a wink, adding, “These days, Mrs. Slim, we gotta grab our smiles wherever we can.”