Nothing but a Smile (23 page)

Wink shook his head like it was too ridiculous to even answer and mentioned instead that they gave a twenty percent discount on merchandise sold to government employees, and that seemed like enough.

She might not have known at all about the editorial that followed if it hadn't been for the old grouch at the news shop. He'd grown curious a few days before when they'd been waiting for him early that morning the photo ran—even more so when they bought six copies (she'd put one clipping in the store window; one on the
glass case at the register, where customers were certain to see it if they'd rushed past it on the way in; one went in her scrapbook; one Wink sent to his uncle who lived on a farm in Michigan; and Reenie snatched up the last two), and he asked them what was so damned special they needed to run down his supply for the day.

When they'd shown him, he studied the photograph for the longest time, not showing any signs of approving or being impressed, but more like he was trying to make certain they weren't trying to pull one over on him. Finally, he just tipped his head in almost reluctant recognition. “Eghh. Mr. Big Shot! So
not
just a fella likes to look at the girlie pictures.
Dimension,
this guy has.
Multifaceted,
this guy. I guess one never truly knows what goes on, does one?” She thought for a second he might grace them with an impression of the radio announcer from
The Shadow,
but he laid off and returned his mouth to its interrupted activity regarding a cigar.

But today, a few days later, he seemed expectant, anxious to show them there'd been a follow-up to the photo. The editors had placed what amounted to a retraction or an apology:

“It's that head guy they got up there,” the news dealer said, breathing on her with the stink of chewed seegar. “What's-his-name—isolationist conservative guy. Never wanted us in the fight. Any opportunity, he loves to stick it to the Dems. This way, he sticks it to ‘em, then turns around, eats his cake, too.”

The mention of cake only made her think of Chesty, lost in that blizzard of white, and it only made her sadder. Wink had done something wonderful—a great, thought-provoking picture, beautifully composed—and they were using it to poke, not provoke, then leave him holding the bag.

Sons of bitches …
It was a good thing they'd stopped calling her for tech work since the men came back. If they were letting her in the building late at night these days, who knew what she'd do?

Despite this cold-footed second-guessing by the editors, readers, it turned out, appeared to feel differently. The letters to the editor regarding this—at least the ones they printed—ran in favor two to one, with the supportive readers writing that Wink's
photo “perfectly illustrated the present plight of the GI lucky enough to make it home,” as opposed to the single dissenter who wrote, “Mr. Dutton's sick trick photography gives voice unnecessarily to the grousers and radicals who wouldn't know a bootstrap or how to pull themselves up by said strap, if their life depended on it.”

Sal contacted a gal she knew who'd somehow hung on to her proofreader job at the paper even after V-J Day, despite being a gal, and her friend told her, “Fact is, we've apparently received
sacks
of letters and almost all of them
loved
your beau's cockeyed photo.”

Sal explained that he was not her beau.

But she
was
proud of him and concerned that the public not misinterpret his great picture or get the wrong idea about him, and all of this was to a degree that she couldn't imagine topping even for a guy who
was
her beau.

They shot the whole card deck in one weekend, starting with the shop closing at five on Saturday and working all Sunday.

They did the queens first, with crowns they cut out of shirt cardboard. Four years of rationing now made the idea of using tinfoil for this feel wasteful and unpatriotic, so they settled for merely bejeweled by gluing on the contents of a box of Jujubes Reenie hadn't finished the last time they went to the pictures. Sal constructed a scepter out of an old curtain rod, and they were in business. The queens were Sal in her natural blonde hair, Sal in her black wig, Reenie in her natural black hair, and Reenie in her redhead wig. One was outfitted in Sal's late mother's fauxmink
stole, another in her bathrobe, another in Reenie's high school prom dress, and another in something she had to wear as a bridesmaid at her brother's wedding. The queens struck hilariously regal poses, thrusting to the heavens with the scepter and allowing the costume to fall open slightly, revealing Her Majesty's surprisingly fine legs or deep cleavage. In one, which he was pretty sure they would
have
to use, Reenie appeared to be screaming in a way that had to have been inspired by the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland.

For the jacks, they put their hair in ponytails and pigtails and posed on the floor, in short skirts, as if they were playing jacks. Wink had to admit, he never would have thought of this. The girls dreamed up this one on their own. In one shot, they might have their legs angled out before them, the toy jacks scattered on the floor in between. Another, they might be on all fours, hovering over the jacks and dropping the ball. He was pretty sure all other parties bidding for this job wouldn't have come up with anything quite like that, as simple as it seemed.

As for the kings, he didn't have any good ideas himself, other than maybe something political, dressing them up like Stalin and Churchill and Truman and … who would be the fourth? The late FDR? Except, strictly speaking, dressing them up as unattractive men, let alone dragging tense postwar politics into it, hardly qualified as a good idea. He was afraid, too, that they might want to try something similar to the queen shots—maybe don the robe and crown and just add a beard … ? Not very sexy, either.

But they didn't. They came up with something even better.

“I'll set up the shots in these,” Sal said, motioning him away from behind the camera. “You just sit.”

They had a chair for him and a velvet footstool they sometimes
used for family photos, for the youngest one who always knelt in front. Reenie tugged at him, giggling. “You're the king.”

“Oh, no!” This wasn't right. He wasn't having any of this. He could just see it, if he allowed himself to be a model for these things, the double takes of old war buddies—dressing up in a cardboard crown like some burlesque comedian; like those clownish oafs in the worst girlies, with their greasepaint mustaches and overblown leers—not to mention he might be a serious artist one day, somehow, or at least a news photographer, and he couldn't afford to risk his potentially professional reputation.

Besides, the chair she was leading him to could hardly pass for a throne—nothing but a wooden straight-backed chair, the one from his room that he sat on every morning to tie his shoes and test the endurance of his ancient laces. “Nice throne,” he said. “No, we've got to do better than this! I mean, the
king
— now that's an important card.”

But they promised they weren't going to show him in the shot—Sal had it framed so his upper torso was cropped away. All that would appear would be his legs, stretched out on the footstool, maybe an arm, and the girls, in various wigs. He was king by inference, only. It was brilliant.

“Mr. Elvgren always says,” Reenie explained, “that the second most important subject in his pinups isn't
in
the painting. It's the guy looking at it.”

It was true. Elvgren's stuff often drew you in because the girl looked back at the viewer, like she was in on the gag. It always felt participatory and entirely possible.

In the king shots, Reenie straddled his legs, helping him on with his slippers, her skirt hiked up as she braced herself, and Wink remained unseen behind the newspaper he was reading. In another, a blonde Reenie, in a French maid's outfit, bent at the
waist, lifted his feet off the ottoman, feather duster attending to his shoes. In another, Sal was lighting his pipe, but starting it herself, both elbows out in a tomboyish pose. And in the last, Sal, looking more like Sal than he'd ever seen in any of these photo sessions, decked out in a frilly hostess dress with a respectable expanse of cleavage and pearls, offered him a martini.

Later, looking at these king shots in particular, he was amazed at how titillating they felt. Of the batch, they showed the least amount of skin, but the
idea
of them felt much more powerful than all the rest combined. These king shots felt a lot like a column in
Esquire
magazine come to life.

Sal came up with the idea for the main shot, the one that would appear on the back of the entire deck. It was nicely simple—Weekend Sally, playing cards. They'd rustled up some poker chips and a bowl of pretzels, an ashtray with cigars, and, best of all, a green eyeshade. Reenie thought it was great, too, and insisted Sal be the model.

He shot it straight on, so the hand she held, fanned out, could cover her nipples. Reenie lit her cigar and got it going while she primped Sal, and he got the lights just right. They put a lacy bra on the pot in the center of the table, as if the game had devolved to strip poker. Reenie found a loose tress and pulled it down over Sal's cheek, just so, giving her that vampy tousled look, then stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders together a little, coaxing her into a more vulnerable attitude. Reenie was still puffing away on the cigar, coaching her. “You're in a tight spot, you've bet your last buck, but you
know
you've got the winning hand …” Sal adjusted her facial expression accordingly, and damn if she didn't get it. One eye narrowed, her lip curled with undisguised moxie. Reenie tipped the ashes on her stogie—it was considerably shorter now, the perfect, iconic seegar—and jammed it into the corner of Sal's curled lips.

He had it framed tight so you saw the smoke and disorder of the game, but only needed to imagine her opponents seated at the table. You were right there, in the midst and heat of it.

When he squeezed the bulb for the first shot, he knew they had a winner. He could see it finished, packaged, and practically selling itself once any normal guy got a gander. It was even easy to see what would ultimately be printed on these:
Playin' Around with Weekend Sally….
Or
Weekend Sally's Game.
Yes, even better—making a pun with the apostrophe
s.

They thought they were all set until Sal went through the list and saw the two jokers hadn't been checked off. In what Wink read as a gesture of grace and diplomacy, Sal insisted her friend do the two jokers, since she'd done the back of the cards herself. Unfortunately, Reenie had forgotten to bring the Harlequin mask—the masquerade-style kind, with feathers and sequins and a stick handle to hold it up to her face. Her brother Jamie got it at Mardi Gras when he went through basic outside New Orleans, and she'd been claiming it made her look like a court jester. “Except,” Sal told her, “for all the rest of you which would
not
be in checkerboard but would be naked and female and offering
nothing
worthy of ridicule, believe me. The man who laughs at you in the altogether is a little too lacy to be buying these cards.”

So when they learned that Reenie didn't have the mask with her, Sal came up with a solution on the spot. Wink suspected it had been brewing for a while, that Reenie's art director talents were beginning to rub off on her friend.

Sal had Reenie—topless but turned and cropped, arms and such obstructing, so you still only partly saw her bazooms— grinning and winking that exaggerated trademark wink of hers (throwing her whole jaw into it, as if trying to dislodge a seed stuck in a back molar), and pulling a different practical joke in both of them: in one, she was lighting a match, about to hold it
to a fan of Blue Tips jammed under the heel of a stiletto pump, worn by an otherwise unseen Sal, the imminent recipient of a hotfoot. In the other one, she was placing a tack on a wooden chair—again, crouched low to include her nude upper torso and wink and grin in the frame, and Sal posed as if about to sit, her can, in nothing but a lacy slip, roundly hovering over the thumbtack. “By rights,” Sal said, “you should be doing these leg shots, too,” but Reenie couldn't be in two places in one shot, unless they wanted to get into tricky darkroom work—double exposures and the like—and he did not feel up to that. This was hard enough, considering they might not even win the pitch. Mr. Price might not even be interested.

Wink felt proud of them both, though, for their creativity and hard work, and their generosity toward each other. These jokers, he knew, would be thought of almost certainly as Winkin' Sally, as much as the backs would further establish Sal as Weekend Sally.

Now if only they could get this Mr. Price to love it as much as he loved it.