How to Sell

by Clancy Martin

  “Nice, Jimmy,” Lisa said. But she was smiling. “Real funny.”

  “Sheila started her out as a hostess,” he continued. “Then she nailed some big bullion contracts, working the phones, and she was on the floor two weeks later. If you really sell on the phones Sheila will know she is wasting you in the back.”

  What you did was, you sold the customer a quantity of precious metal as an investment, and sold him the security of storing it for him in your safes. When silver was at $5.60, a customer could buy a thousand ounces of silver at five dollars an ounce. “We can sell the metal at below the market price because we buy it off the street and smelt it ourselves, and it is in our interest to sell it below market value to you, sir, because then when you want to buy a diamond tennis bracelet for your tenth anniversary you will call me first.” Customers paid a nominal fee of fifty dollars per year, per thousand ounces, to store it in our safes. We never actually bought the metal. And that was how you made money in it. The official story around the store was we stored the metal off-premises but even the phone girls knew that was bullshit. So it was pure profit, and you were paid a straight ten percent commission on any metal contract. A ten-thousand-dollar contract meant a thousand-dollar commission. We were selling them by the hundreds.

  “Okay, that sounds good,” I said. “I want to learn how to sell metals contracts. I want to be one of the silver guys.”

  “I still think you’d be best out on the floor,” Lisa said, and smiled at me. Those wide-open smiles of hers were one of the best things about her. “And you shouldn’t compare your brother to that woman, Jim. What is it with you and her lately? Bobby is nothing like her.”

  “We’ll start you out on my Rolex calls,” Jim said. “That will soften up your phone manners. The phone is an art, Bobby. They can’t see what they’re buying. You have to learn how to pitch your voice. That’s all you got on the Rolex lines. The sounds of your own mouth.”

  Bobby, we need to talk to you.”

  It was three of the saleswomen. They hot-boxed me in the old safe room, the little closet-sized room near the front where we kept the appraisal folders, wrapping paper, pearl folders, and recent mailers now. Tracy, who was pretty, this old yellow-skinned bitch Rita, whom everyone hated and feared, and a fat woman, one of the hard-core phone saleswomen who used to train everybody but now had gone to part-time because of health problems, whose name I didn’t know. The Polack disliked her, because of a battle between the two of them from years before, and she called her simply “Pig.” She would say it directly to her face, with other people around, too. Even customers, if she was out on the floor looking for a piece of jewelry for a client on the phone. When you worked the phones the rule was you always held the article of jewelry you were trying to sell. If it actually existed, that is, and wasn’t only a picture in our catalogue. It’s surprising how much that helps with the sale.

  The fat saleswoman stood at the door and kept an eye out so that no one would overhear.

  “We don’t think you should be seeing Lisa,” Tracy said.

  “She is not a nice person,” the fat one said. “Okay, she’s nice enough. But she’s not the kind of person you think she is. Not nice in that way. She’s a slut.”

  I did not know what to say. Why did anyone know about me and Lisa?

  “She’s Jim’s girlfriend. I am not going to have sex with my brother’s girlfriend.”

  “What? What did you say?” Tracy said.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” Rita said. “For about a year now. Inseparable. No one knows what all they are up to. That’s what I would say. More than just you-know-what.”

  “Wow. This is good,” Tracy said. “This is juicy.”

  “I think it’s illegal for both of them,” the fat one said. “Remember that schoolteacher? And the high school boy? That was just last year.”

  “That’s because the boy murdered her husband,” Rita said. “A minor cannot be prosecuted for statutory rape.”

  “What about two sixteen-year-olds? What if they had sex? I used to do it all the time,” Tracy said. The fat one laughed. “I mean, like with boyfriends. A boyfriend. Not like this. Like we were both sixteen. Or eighteen, maybe. Maybe we were both eighteen. So that would be different. Because we were adults.”

  “I suggest you be perfectly candid, Bobby. Then I could take your side when the truth comes out. I would rather do that. I am not fond of liars. We are keeping an eye on you, Bobby,” Rita said.

  I looked away from her and tried to remember exactly what I had just said.

  If Rita, Tracy, and that fat saleswoman knew about Lisa and me, I wondered whether Jim had heard. I doubted it. It was a big store, I told myself. Jim didn’t like gossip. He might have heard something and dismissed it. Or defended me and Lisa, even.

  I found Lisa in back at Jim’s desk changing tags for a sale Sheila wanted in the men’s jewelry case. Even at Christmas men’s jewelry is a tough sell. Lisa was replacing the tags with new tags that were twice the price, so that Sheila could put ALL MEN’S JEWELRY 50% OFF NOW UNTIL CHRISTMAS EVE! signs throughout the men’s case, and Mr. Popper could run a black-and-white banner across the bottom of one of the big full-page Christmas “Rolex and diamond” ads in the weekend Star-Telegram. Now and through the rest of the season Ronnie Popper was the biggest customer the Fort Worth Star-Telegram enjoyed.

  “Hey,” I said. I sat down and started removing the paper-and-string tags. This was before computer tags.

  “No, not like that,” she said. “Do it one at a time. Write the new tag up and then take the old one off. Otherwise you get mixed up.”

  I took a pink message pad from the desk and wrote a note to Lisa. It said, “Do you think Jim could know?”

  She read it, folded it back up, and fed it into Jim’s paper shredder. Because he ran the Rolex files he had the industrialsized paper shredder, not one of the little ones like everybody else had that sat on top of a trash can. His had its own separate trash receptacle.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” she said. “Or I can ask him if you want.” She smiled at me in a mysterious way that let me know she was smarter than me, but it didn’t bother her, she liked it that way.

  “I don’t want you to ask him. You can’t be the one to ask him. I don’t even know what to ask.”

  “Ask who?” Jim pulled a chair over from Dennis’s desk and sat down. He surprised me from behind the filing cabinets. He couldn’t have heard what we were saying back there. And we weren’t saying anything, I thought. I looked for the note but then remembered I had just watched Lisa put it in the shredder. It was never getting back out of that shredder alive, I thought.

  “Ask you,” Lisa said.

  “Ask me what? Ask me,” Jim said. “What is it, Bobby?” For a moment he looked concerned. Then Lisa shook her head and looked at him carefully, but with a small smile. I saw the communication pass between them. Jim laughed. He seemed relieved.

  “Oh,” he said. “That. You had me worried for a second. Okay. Good. I gotcha. Come on, Bobby,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Then I knew that he must know, but I continued to lie to myself about it until we were out of the store and in the street.

  “Here,” he said, and handed me his one-hitter. “Do a bump. Cup it in your palm like you are blowing into your hand from the cold. Just do it quickly and no one will notice.”

  I pretended to do a bump to satisfy him, but I didn’t turn the knob to put the cocaine in the chamber. I couldn’t walk in the street and sniff cocaine.

  He looked at the bottle when I handed it back to him.

  “You didn’t even do it,” he said. “You didn’t get any. Here, I’ll load it for you. Just be careful. Don’t spill it when I hand it back to you.”

  We were walking toward a little park Jim liked downtown that was a few blocks from the store. In the summer it had fountains, but in winter they turned the fountains off, usually, and it was just a square of black granite surrounded by trees on all sides. It f
elt protected when you sat there. Like a grove.

  He put one hand on my shoulder. Not his whole arm, we weren’t that kind of a family, but his hand, like he would steer me with it.

  “Listen, don’t worry about this Lisa thing,” he said.

  “Jim, I don’t, I mean, she is. I wanted to tell you.”

  I realized that if Jim told me that I could not see Lisa anymore, I wouldn’t. He was more important than any person. He was my brother. You can break up with your girlfriend, you could divorce your wife if you had one, but your brother is always your brother.

  “Don’t even worry about it, Bobby. This isn’t something you and I are going to be concerned about. Here, do another bump. Hit the other nostril. Careful. It’s loaded.”

  I did another bump. It was fun, walking through the quiet cold streets, in the open like this, sniffing cocaine. It was like we were the ones making the laws. Or the laws could apply to the other people and we stood above them.

  “I’m married, Bobby. Lily and I have enough problems as it is. You are a free man. I am happy for you. Not much has been going on with me and Lisa lately, if you want to know the truth. It’s all ancient history. Pretty much.” Then he did another bump. He handed the bottle back over to me. “She told me immediately, anyway,” he said.

  “She told you?”

  My hands started shaking. I was afraid my eyes might be getting wet. That could just be the cold. I didn’t know where to look. I tried to focus on the trunk of a tree on the other side of the park. I could not imagine what he might say next. It was going to be awful, I knew that much.

  “When? I mean, when did she tell you?”

  “Don’t be mad at her. That’s how she is. She told me when you two started and she wanted to tell you, too. But I asked her not to. There wasn’t any reason. You needed some time. You came down here without any confidence at all. It was that girlfriend of yours. She had you like a whipped puppy. But look at you now. You’re becoming a man. So, deal with it that way. Like a man handles things.”

  He was not accusing me of anything.

  “I wouldn’t take this thing with Lisa too seriously, Bobby, if I were you. Sometimes it’s better to stay on the surface with somebody. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I understood him, but we both enjoyed it when he gave me advice, like this. He didn’t do it often enough.

  We sat down on a stone bench. We passed the one-hitter back and forth. Above us was the noise of the traffic of downtown, and beyond it the deep-lunged breathing of the two enormous highways, I-30 and I-35, that intersected at the southeast corner of downtown Fort Worth. For about five minutes we sat there together. My fingers hurt with the cold. Suddenly I worried that the time was awkward rather than natural. I couldn’t decide. I blamed it on the cocaine.

  Jim patted me twice on the back. He stood up, and put the one-hitter away in the breast pocket of his jacket. Even if I was upset I could have used one more, I thought.

  “Okay, Bobby,” he said. “We’re squared away. Let’s get back to work.”

  Everyone liked to watch for the Neiman’s deliveries in the afternoons. They came in once or twice a week. More often at Christmastime, when the money was really flowing. Sheila went shopping in the morning at the Fort Worth Neiman’s and had everything sent to the store. They had three children, two sons and a daughter, but as far as I could tell they were never at home. I didn’t even know their kids’ names, and there were no photographs of them, not even on Sheila’s desk. They kept their dry cleaning in a big armoire in Mr. Popper’s office. Sheila changed in the office if they were going out in the evening.

  I was taking a break from the phones, working the buy counter—the Polack was there, too, in a dress that fit her like a ballerina’s leotard, working the buys beside me—and a young mother came in with a kid under one arm and another in a stroller. I noticed her all the way from the entrance because the regular Neiman’s delivery guy came in just ahead of her and, with his hands full of bags, held the door open for her with his foot. I guess she wasn’t even twenty years old. A teenager, same as me. I hoped she would pick someone else but she saw me looking at her and came straight for me. She wanted to sell her wedding ring. She took it from her ring finger and handed it to me with a hopeful expression. But not too hopeful.

  “It was his mother’s,” she said. “It is supposed to be worth a lot of money.”

  Even before I cleaned it I could see it was a real diamond. But after it soaked in the ultrasonic for a few minutes and then I steamed it off it blazed. I needed to show it to Dennis before I made an offer.

  Dennis was at his desk. When I handed it to him he gave me one of his standard lines: “How we lookin’? Are we cookin’?” Then when he slowed down and saw the ring he was quiet. He louped and handled the diamond ring greedily. Now he was all business.

  “Where is she?” he said. From his desk you could see the buy counters through the one-way mirror. I pointed.

  “Okay. Listen to me. I am going to let you handle this one, Bobby. If you’re goin’ to stay in the flood you got to swim sometime. But don’t you fuck this up. Offer her five grand. You hear me? She hesitates, up to six. Six thousand. Tell her it will be cash money. Cash today. But take it real slow. Do not let her walk. She does not leave the store with this ring.”

  I nodded. I was not convinced.

  “Hell. Maybe I should handle this one,” he said. “If it’s all the same to you. What’s the hurry? You can grab the next one.”

  I started to agree with him. Then Jim was there at my shoulder. He took me by the arm.

  “What?” he said. “No. We all have to learn, Dennis,” he said. “Give him a chance. Let me see the ring,” he said.

  “Wow,” he said when Dennis handed it to him.

  “I know,” Dennis said. “That’s what I have been saying.”

  Jim grabbed an ashtray from Dennis’s desk and rubbed the ring around in the ashes. He looked at it, spat on it, and rubbed it around again. Then he cleaned off the shank and handed it back to me.

  “Offer her five hundred bucks,” he said.

  “What? No,” Dennis said. “No, no, no. No sir. No way, nohow.”

  “Look at her, Dennis,” Jim said. “She’s got two little kids with her. She’s a kid herself, for chrissake. She doesn’t know what that ring is worth. She’s selling her wedding ring and her husband’s not with her. What does that tell you? She’ll just figure he lied to her about what it was worth. As usual. That’s what she’ll think. She’ll be so mad at him she’ll sell it for five hundred just to get back at him.”

  I did not want to do this buy at all.

  Then one of the phone girls ran up and put her arm around Jim’s shoulders. They all liked to fold themselves onto him. It irritated Lisa.

  “You’ve got a Rolex call on seven,” she said. “It’s a hot one. I think you better take it.”

  “Okay,” he said. He frowned at me. “Go on, Bobby. Show them how it’s done. Show them how the Clarks do it. Five hundred. Five bills. We’ll make seven, eight grand on this deal. We’ll walk it up to Popper’s office together. Watch this, Dennis. Just watch.”

  I went back onto the floor and told the woman we could offer her five hundred dollars. Her children were struggling and giving her trouble.

  “Five hundred? Oh, no,” she said. “That’s not going to help. We need at least a thousand. I have to get a thousand dollars or I am in real trouble. Can you make it a thousand? It was his mother’s ring. It’s very old. It’s like an antique. It is supposed to be worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Couldn’t you do a thousand?”

  “We can’t pay that,” I said. “But listen to me. Across the street from us just a block up Houston is a place called Edelstein’s.” I leaned across the counter. I handed the ring back to her. That was something you were never supposed to do during a buy. I tried to block her out with my back so that they could not see what I was doing from behind the mirror. “This ring is pr
obably worth at least five thousand dollars. But we will only pay five hundred. Take it over to Edelstein’s. They are Jews and they are smart buyers but they are fair. I bet you can get five thousand dollars or more.”

  “Wait a second,” she said. She was angry. “What are you saying? You are saying I will get more money somewhere else? Your ads say that you pay the best price in Fort Worth! You mean I came all the way down here with my kids just so you can send me somewhere else? If it’s worth five thousand dollars, then you should buy it for five thousand dollars!” She was getting loud. This was not the reaction I had expected.

  “I understand,” I said. “You are going to get me in a lot of trouble. I’m just saying. Believe me. I can’t explain it right now. I am trying to help you. It’s only a block. One city block that way.” I pointed with my thumb. “Take your ring there and say you need seven thousand dollars. Just trust me, okay?”

  She looked at me for a second like I was a person rather than some enemy behind a tie and a glass-and-brass counter and she saw I was telling her the truth. The truth went between us, I think you could say.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m not saying thank you.”

  “Go,” I said. I tried not to look over my shoulder. “Hurry,” I said. She would not be safe until she was physically out the door. I knew those two. They would run down the street to catch her.

  I watched her and her kids walk out into the cold morning. When I started to help another seller—I was so young that I hoped this would be the end of it—Jim caught me by the elbow and dragged me in back. He pulled me into the room where we kept the ring boxes, the same room where Rita and her friends had corralled me.

  “What the hell just happened out there?” he said.

  “She changed her mind. She said she was going to think about it.”

  “You little—” For half a beat he couldn’t say it. Then he did. “You little motherfucker.” He was so angry his eyes were wet. His cheeks were white and his chin and his ears turned red. But the terrible thing was the look on his face. I had never seen him wearing an expression anything like the expression he had on. “I heard the whole thing. This is my job, too, goddammit,” he said. “You are fucking with two jobs here, Bobby. Do you get that? Do you fucking understand that?”