The Animated Pinup.

by Lewis Parker.

[Sidenote: You're not expected to believe this story since it's the kind of thing that science calls impossible. But anyway, she happened. Who?

Why--]

To make it clear how normal everything was when the evening started out, I'll let you in at the time w.i.l.l.y phoned me. I was in my apartment with a lady from down the hall....

I had asked her what she liked and she'd purred, "You." I had asked her with soda or gingerale and she'd said, "Straight," so I'd obliged and poured myself a triple too and sank into the sofa beside her.

The phone rang.

"Oh d.a.m.n," she said.

"Your earlobes--" I began.

"The phone, James."

"Your shoulders--"

"James? Don't you think you'd better answer it?"

So I sighed and handed her the gla.s.s and told her not to hold it till I got back or she'd melt the ice. I crossed the room to the telephone.

"City morgue," I said.

"Uh--unh--"

"Hullo w.i.l.l.y," I said, recognizing the stammer.

While he gulped and stuttered a couple more times I threw a kiss to the lady. She failed to throw it back because she was placing a bet with herself that w.i.l.l.y was short for Wilhelmina.

w.i.l.l.y straightened his tongue out. "Jim, I've got to see you."

Now w.i.l.l.y was a nervous little guy from faulty thyroid but neurotic in a bearable way. He sounded even more upset than he usually did. I didn't particularly like him, but he was a topflight ill.u.s.trator and I liked the way he drew women, and besides I'd been trying for a year to tag him for our agency. All the slicker art agencies were after him, that's how good he was. We'd made the highest bid for him but he still had this bug in his noodle for free-lancing, which showed he had more business sense than the rest of his ilk but which wasn't doing my position at the agency any good. I'd been joed to bag him.

Which was why I hesitated and reconsidered the impulse to brush him off.

This was the first time he had definitely asked to see me. Sunday midnight is one h.e.l.l of a time to suddenly decide to see a d.o.g.g.i.ng agent, but like I said w.i.l.l.y was neurotic. So I just tested the impulse.

"Well, w.i.l.l.y," I said, "I'm pretty busy at the moment looking after the interests of the agency artists. They always come first, you know. Could it wait--"

"Jim, I've got to see you. It's--It's driving me nuts trying to figure out what to do."

"Tax trouble? Or maybe one of your models?"

"No, nothing like that. Listen. Will you come over tonight?"

I let my instincts juggle the stress between pleasure and business. Both were practical, well-balanced personal interests. The thunderous night was young and the lady had nice earlobes and my apartment had that feeling about it. On the other hand the little fair-haired artist was in a jam and if I played fairy G.o.dmom bigger and better apartments and earlobes were in the offing from the agency.

So I made the mistake of my life.

I said, "I'll be there in half an hour," and hung up.

"_Jim_-mee," the lady said. She was pouting, so I pinched her earlobe and patted her shoulders and bemoaned the tyranny of the business world and helped her into her coat. She went back to her own apartment. I tidied up the place, stacked the etchings in their corner, and took a cab outside.

I tossed that part of it in to make it clear that on the face and the underneath of it I could be readily cla.s.sed as a normal, practical sort of a guy.

I am. I shun unnatural, illogical things, like mysteries, or falsies, or counterfeit bills. Or fourth dimensions. I like an item right on the table where I can eye it and touch it and say, "That's a spade," or, "That's a buck." If there's water on Mars I'll believe it when I drink it, but until then I'll say, "So what's with Mars? It's one h.e.l.l of a long way off."

You see what I'm driving at? With me, James Gilbert Crisp, things are either down to earth or they're nowhere. I'd never admit messing around with something I couldn't put my hands on. If I touch it, I accept it, and if it's willing I'm able.

"Jim!" said w.i.l.l.y, grabbing my hat. "Come in, come in!"

I grinned at the little guy a.s.suringly and shook the rain from my coat and tossed it on an easel. He shunted a chair at me and seated himself nervously, rubbing his neck, on the other side of a monster coffee table loaded with paints, bottles and oil-stained cartons. I was familiar with this studio, the working half of w.i.l.l.y's ranch-style chalet. The studio itself was as big as a barn and had more windows than walls; rain pecked at the gla.s.s in the northerly-exposed roof.

w.i.l.l.y was tidy for an artist. Most of the boys on the agency's hook have la Boheme delusions that cla.s.s them apart from us hucksters; their studios, which we see in spite of ourselves, _look_ like barns. But w.i.l.l.y's neuroses, although conventional, were bearable because in a lot of ways he was practical. He kept things where he could put his hands on them. Like the cigarettes he now fished from a box on the coffee table labeled 'caseins'.

I shifted uncomfortably; these new-fangled chairs they twist out of wire will never replace the Morris. w.i.l.l.y drew furiously on the f.a.g he had forgotten to offer me. It was taking him longer than usual to warm up to his subject. I shifted again.

"What's the problem, w.i.l.l.y?" I asked.

He jumped, then looked at me with his scared-spaniel eyes, b.u.t.ted his smoke and reached for another. Just watching him was giving me the heebies, but I flashed my old fairy G.o.dmom smile.

"Jim," he said finally, "I called you because, well, you're a practical guy and can face things in a practical way. I've got to tell _somebody_ about it. I'm--it's driving me crazy, Jim."

I stifled a yawn and fixed my smile and found my mind wandering back to the lady's earlobes. Now I'm not against a guy letting down his hair, but I was sure that with w.i.l.l.y it couldn't possibly amount to anymore than another fruitless crush on a model. He had them frequently, but they always fizzled out before the girl got around to compromising him.

He was always a foot short of them, but he had money; the usual solution was little more than another illo a.s.signment which required a horsey model of another color. I'd begun to suspect that the cause of neuroses in little artists like w.i.l.l.y was too many here-now gone-tomorrow beautiful babes. Transference, or something like that. It makes them so dizzy they forget which is the real ent.i.ty--the canvas reproduction or the model. This and other things like a pithless pituitary loosens the screws, and then they make from Bohemia. I don't pretend to be a psychologist, but that's the way it adds up.

So I was half-thinking of getting the lady at the apartment to give w.i.l.l.y a real down-to-earth tumble when he started his spiel. I must have missed a few paragraphs of his monologue, because when I caught up to the subject I was away off base.

"... so I've got to give it up, Jim. If I don't there's no telling what it would lead to. You could--help me, with your drag at the agency you represent. I could do account execking, or maybe be a consultant art director-without-portfolio, anything--"

"Whoa down, w.i.l.l.y," I said, startled. "Give up ill.u.s.trating? Just because of a dame--"

w.i.l.l.y shook his head sadly. "She's got nothing to do with anything _else_ I draw. She isn't at all like the models. Oh, I know what a goop I've been about them, but Red has cured me." He paused and looked at me quizzically, shaking his head. "I knew you had a level head, Jim--that's exactly why I've told you this. But even so, your reaction--" He frowned. His hurt-dog eyes narrowed resentfully. "You don't believe me."

I cursed myself inwardly for not having paid more attention to him, but his voice was the kind that would put a sympathetic Father Confessor to sleep if he concentrated too hard on it. I'd been prepared to let him get it off his skinny chest, pat him on the back and tell him to leave everything to old Jim Fixit. But the quitting business was a looper. He was too canvas-happy to give it up without a fight.

"Look," I said to cover up the fact that my ears had been closed, "what you told me may seem unusual to you, but to me it's just one of those things that aren't quite what they seem. Now, uh--go over it again in detail and I'll apply myself to it completely from your angle this time.

Tell me _exactly_ where Red fits in, and where the--uh--trouble started."

w.i.l.l.y slapped his knees and looked even more forlorn, reaching for a smoke while he still had one in his mouth. "Sorry I doubted you, Jim, but you can understand how I feel about it. Look--"