How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  He took the diamond from me, cleaned it with a yellow cloth, and placed it back in his briefcase. “Then we better slow down. We’ve got a big day. This is your first day at work.”

  “He has to work today? Why don’t you just show him the store today? He’s fresh off the plane, Jim.”

  Jim took the bottle of cocaine from me, handed it to Lisa, and laughed.

  “He’s a Clark,” he said. “He’ll be fine. Won’t you, Bobby? You want the day off? Hell, you haven’t even worked yet and you want a day off? I doubt it.”

  I did want the day off. But I could not disappoint Jim. Especially not on my first day. In our family you are eager to work. But I did not want to seem ungrateful to Lisa. I was awkward.

  “You’re both working now? Today?” I said. I directed the question to Jim but I looked aside at Lisa to see if she had heard me.

  “Of course we’re working. Lisa here is one of my top saleswomen. She has a deal on a pink gold Patek today. Patek Philippe. That’s the best Swiss watch in the world. Best brand, period. Skeleton back, moon phase. You’ll see when we get there. That’s why she’s coming to Granddad’s. I wanted you guys to meet. You would have met anyway at the store but I wanted you to meet just the three of us.”

  She smiled at him easily and looked out the window.

  “It’s snowing,” she said. “I love the snow.”

  “Inside and outside!” Jim said, and laughed. I was embarrassed for him in front of Lisa about the joke. For years he embarrassed himself and me both that way. Especially in foreign countries. “Hell, we may as well just finish this bottle. There’s more where that came from.”

  I kept looking back over at Lisa. I tried not to. But she looked like a woman in a magazine. She didn’t look like an everyday normal woman who might be sitting in a car with you. Though it was a limousine. She did look like a woman in a limousine. Like a dream woman in a dream limousine.

  She opened the window, with the electric button, and the cold rushed into the cozy warm red and white leather compartment of the big car.

  “Oops. Sorry, Bobby,” she said, and smiled at me again. Very gently and deeply, it seemed to me. “I just wanted to catch a snowflake on my hand.”

  “With a big deal like that it helps if you talk to the wholesaler,” he continued. “Plus this old guy, the customer I mean, is sick as a dog in love with Lisa—”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “Of course it’s true,” Jim said. “Like every damn guy in our store, for that matter. Myself included.” He laughed.

  “Don’t listen to your brother,” she said. “He’s being ridiculous. He’s joking with you.”

  “Granddad can show Lisa things about the watch that he could not explain over the phone. Plus she needs to see how he holds it, how he treats it. How he cares for it. This is not an ordinary watch. The only sad thing is that there’s not much juice left in it. It’s a twenty-thousand-dollar deal that we won’t make three grand on. Hell, I’ll show him the invoice. That’s how you have to do it with these big collectors. They’re practically in the business themselves. But you take care of them on these deals and the diamond studs at Christmas, the tennis necklace for the girlfriend, the steel Rolexes for his best employees, all the cherry stuff comes your way. Once you catch a crow you never let him go. Isn’t that right, Lisa?”

  “That’s what he tells me,” she said to me. “You’re making your poor brother dizzy,” she said to Jim.

  She was correct. I was disoriented and my mouth was dry. For a minute longer I tried to seem lively. Then I gave up and rested the side of my face against the cold, pleasant glass of the dark limousine window. I watched the long stripes of snow and the frozen highway outside. We were in the fast lane passing cars on our right. Everyone else was driving slowly and unsurely in the snow. Like they were walking and we were skiing past.

  “Texans,” Jim said. “You all right, buddy? Have another bump and then maybe take a little break. We’ll stop for lunch after Granddad’s and you can have a beer. That always helps me when I’m a bit coked up. A beer is what you need. Still getting over the flight, I bet. He’s always had a nervous stomach,” he explained to Lisa. “Can’t fly worth a damn, can’t get on a boat. Can’t even ride in the back seat of a car.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Really I’m fine. I feel great.”

  “Close your eyes for a minute,” Lisa said. “Hey, why don’t you come sit by me?”

  That sounds like a very good idea, I thought. I looked at Jim, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was smiling like he was simply excited to see me. I switched seats, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

  “That’s enough for right now. There’s no hurry. You could put your head in my lap if you like.” Did she say that or was I already asleep? I was not sleepy, though. But with my eyes closed and my head lying back in the already-hot-again car it seemed like I had disappeared.

  “Relax and we’ll be there before you know it. Take off your tennis shoes,” she said.

  No, I was wide awake. I did not want to take off my shoes because my socks were wet with sweat. I did not want Lisa to smell my feet. I am in the United States in a limousine with my head on the legs of a woman with black hair, I thought, and her fingernails on my eyebrows and ears. I opened my eyes again to look at her.

  “Close your eyes. We’ll be there soon.”

  “You’re spoiling him.” Jim laughed. “It’s not fair.”

  “Let him go to sleep. You don’t have to torture him all the time. That’s how my brothers always were.”

  “Still, you are kind of boyish,” Jim said.

  “It won’t work. I am playing with Bobby right now,” Lisa said. Her fingernails scratched an itch I didn’t know I had deep in my scalp. “Rest a minute.”

  I could not fall asleep but I pretended I had. I did not like to deceive her. But I wanted her to keep on talking in those same words.

  The hands on the watches in a showcase are motionless. Even with the quartz watches you withdraw the crown so that the watch will stop and the battery will last. It stimulates the customer when you give an automatic watch a twist before placing it on his wrist and it begins to run. Popping in the stem with a quartz has the same effect.

  My first job at Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange was setting the Swiss watches at ten past ten. With automatics the hands are still unless the watch is moved, and winders you only wind every few months, so that the oil does not settle and clog the movement. They are set at ten to two because years ago Rolex began displaying their watches in photographs with the watches set at that time. If you try different hand positions on the watches you will see they got it right. A watch looks best set at ten to two. Many years after this a Rolex man in Zürich, Switzerland, told me that the V made by the hands is V for Victory. “But it does not work in German,” he said, and laughed.

  At the end of the day in any jewelry store many of the watches have been shown and so their hands have moved, which means that in the morning someone must reset them. Also the automatics may be quickened into motion by being shuffled in and out of the cases. They rest in trays, and the trays are placed in plastic tubs that stack when you put them in the safes. They move again when you remove them from the safes in the morning.

  Another task was polishing the brass numbers that were kept on the table at the entrance to the store. As you entered you saw a tall, narrow hexagonal table, about as high as your bottom rib. The table was elaborately constructed of long brown and white steer horns and darkly stained, brightly lacquered cowhide straps. The top was a solid piece of polished cherrywood. On the table was a brass stand, and on that stand hung two hundred brass plates, each about the size of a regular Christmas card, with numbers on them in black enamel from one to two hundred. To get a salesman or saleswoman you had to take a number, like at the seafood counter at the grocery store. That’s how frantic the store would get. “Like a shark pit, Bobby,” Mr. Popper once told me with delight. “That’s why I do the f
ree giveaways in the paper. You have to create a feeding frenzy. Who wants to eat in an empty restaurant? It’s un-American. They got to fight for it. That’s the secret of marketing, Bob. Like stags in the rut.” I made sure these numbers were all in order in the morning and I polished them at night before we went home.

  •

  The front-of-the-house was the glamorous half of the store but, as in a restaurant, the real work was done in back. That’s where the safes were, and the phones, and the steam cleaners and the stand-up polishing wheel, and Jim’s and the other managers’ desks. Their trash cans had to be emptied every morning.

  “You’re doing a great job on the front,” Jim told me, after my first week. I vacuumed the carpets, and cleaned butts out of the sand-filled ashtrays with a slotted spoon. We had a wooden hand press you used to flatten the sand and make a diamond imprint in it once the butts were out. “Everybody says so. But you have to take the same care with the back-of-the-house,” Jim said. “That’s what Popper will really notice. Take special care of his office and his stairs.”

  I vacuumed the stairs to Mr. Popper’s office every morning before the store opened. In the darkened stairwell yellow light shone from beneath the door and, with the security of his extra lock, which opened with a special key like a credit card, it seemed like the cave of Aladdin, or the lair of a sleepy dragon.

  One morning, two weeks after I started, I was on the stairs on my hands and knees when I felt a tap on my back. I looked up and saw Mr. Popper.

  Mr. Popper was short. He had a round white face and a huge potbelly. He was wearing a pink Hermès tie. He always wore Hermès ties, which were purchased for him by his wife, Sheila, who was hated by everyone at the store. Except for Jim, because he did not hate anyone, and because she had made Jim her protégé.

  “Good morning there, young fella,” Mr. Popper said.

  I wondered if I should turn off the vacuum cleaner or keep vacuuming. Mr. Popper held his green ostrich cowboy hat in his hand. The hat had a feather.

  Mr. Popper gave me a look and I realized I was blocking the stairwell. So I turned off the vacuum cleaner, stood, and pressed myself against the wall.

  I was pleased that now Mr. Popper knew who vacuumed his stairs.

  It was not what you think of when you think of a jewelry store. There were not those stretched-out, noiseless, frightening afternoons we would come to know later, in our own store, when only one or two customers wandered in—tire-kickers, you understood with a look—and waved away the salespeople, rubbed their sweaty fingers across the top of a clean showcase or two, and then walked out again without asking even to see a wedding band or a pair of diamond studs. There was always business in The Store. We had more customers than salespeople. And we had lots of salespeople. Nearly one hundred, during the season, when Mr. Popper brought in college students from TCU and SMU. All day, every day, there were boxes being wrapped, receipts being written, credit card machines singing. When we opened in the morning it was like a soccer game in South America or the first morning of the new school year.

  “Son. Let me see that watch, there, son. That big daddy there. The gold one.”

  I was Windexing the Rolex case. It was Monday morning after the weekend Halloween sale. I had done the trash, the ashtrays, and the vacuuming but I was behind on the showcases because Jim had sold one hundred and eighty thousand over the weekend, so he slept in and we drove in late.

  “We’ll get there at nine,” he had told me. When I woke him again fifteen minutes later, nervously, he said, “Nine-thirty. Take the car if you want. Maybe I’ll take the day off.” I saw his coke next to the bed and because I could hear his wife, my sister-in-law, Lily, downstairs in the kitchen I quickly did a line myself and then made him a line and fed it to him. After a minute he sat up in bed and said, “Cut me another one of those, would you? Go ahead and have one yourself if you want.” I cut us both two fat lines and he did one and said, “I’ll save that one for after my shower.” I did two more small lines while he was in the shower and tapped a couple of bumps into a piece of foil from his pack of cigarettes for later. Lily met us at the bottom of the stairs in her blue flannel pajamas. They had sheep and rabbits on them. I had had a crush on her for years but now that I lived with her she held less interest. She smoked too much and her teeth were yellowing. She had thin lips and large, clumsy hands. But when I looked at her I also thought about how I once saw her in her underwear leaving the bathroom after a shower. Her hip bones were narrow and angular against the cotton of her white underwear. Her face was wide but the bones of her skull were visible beneath her wet hair.

  “Are you two going to be coming home late tonight? Should I make some dinner? I was thinking of roasting a chicken.”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said. “The same as always, I guess. If that’s late. We’ll eat at work.”

  “Well, I can’t eat a whole chicken by myself.”

  She smiled at me and then frowned at Jim.

  “You look nice this morning, Robert,” she said. She bent over and rubbed her thighs. Her breasts swung beneath her pajama top. Then she crouched and stretched out her arms like a bird. “I need to get a job, Jimmy. My muscles are sore. I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do except smoke pot and exercise all day.”

  “You don’t have a green card yet,” Jim said. We both had green cards because our father had got them for us when he first moved to Florida. He guessed, correctly, that we would want them later in life.

  “I want to go home, then,” she said. “I want to see my parents.”

  “Maybe after Christmas,” Jim said. “Or you could go anytime, I guess. We’ll be all right.” He grinned at me. It was a very brotherly grin.

  “You two stay out of trouble today,” Lily said. “Don’t let my husband boss you around too much,” she said to me.

  Then we were in the car, coming west on I-30 in the rush-hour traffic we normally missed because we drove in before dawn, and there was downtown Fort Worth bright in the morning sun.

  “Come on, son, get with the program! Ain’t you had your coffee yet this mornin’? I want to see a watch! That gold one there. That there Rolex. The big one.”

  I didn’t have case keys. I knew if I went to borrow a set of keys whoever I borrowed them from, even Jim, would ask me why I needed them, and then if I said there was a large black man in a red suit with three gold teeth and a white tie with a diamond tie stud at the Rolex case who wanted to look at a men’s President I would be back to Windexing cases and someone else would be selling him. The reason I didn’t have case keys was that I was not on the sales floor yet. They didn’t even let me work the phones. But then I saw the case was open. All of the cases were open. One of the last things you did before opening the doors in the morning was push all of the locks on the showcases. But this whole side, even the men’s jewelry, all the way to the diamond room, stood open.

  The men’s President Rolex was displayed on the beige suede stand in the original walnut box all the men’s Presidents were housed in. It had the silver plastic crown on its gray silk cord and the original green hanging tags. Underneath the suede stand, I knew, were the original warranty, books, and authenticity papers. I handled the heavy watch carefully. I had almost dropped it as I slid it from its stand.

  “This one, sir?” I asked, and handed him the watch. I did not know to unbuckle it before handing it to him, and I did not know that it was short-links so that it would not close on his thick wrist.

  He smiled at the watch. He slipped it onto his fingers. Then he turned it and looked at the back of the bracelet.

  “What’s the trick? How do you get it open?” he asked me.

  “They call that an invisible buckle, sir,” I said. “See that crown there? That little gold crown? Just flip that with your finger.”

  He struggled with the bracelet of the watch for a moment and then popped it open with his thumbnail. I took a quick look around the showroom but no one seemed to be paying us any attention. Seven or eight
customers browsed the diamond jewelry counters. Lisa was showing cluster rings to a fat woman with white hair, a tall man in a cowboy hat picked malachite, lapis lazuli, and rose quartz beads at the bead board, and a young man with two children stood patiently at the buy counter. His baby cried from the little home in a backpack on his father’s chest. There were only three salespeople on the floor—everyone was still in back eating donuts—and it was so early we had not even put out the brass numbers.

  I looked back at my customer and he had the watch on his wrist. He was trying to close it but it wouldn’t fit.

  “I didn’t figure they made these things so damn little.”

  “You have got a big wrist,” I told him. “You’re lucky. Look at it on me.”

  I took the watch from him—something I would never have done a year later—and placed it on my own wrist and closed it. It hung there like a hoop. I shook the watch around my wrist.

  “See that?” I said. “I would love to own one someday. But I could never wear one even if I could afford it. You need a man’s wrist for one of these. My father always teases me about my wrists. He used to be a boxer. But really he’s got these same girlish wrists I’ve got.” I took the watch off and handed it back to him. “It looks silly on me. I mean, it makes me look silly. It looks proper on you.”

  He slid the watch back on again. It almost fit his wrist with the buckle open. It would take five more links to fit him properly, I figured. I knew how to fit the links. You always started with fewer than you thought you needed. But this man’s wrist was enormous.

  “How’s it feel?” I asked him. “I was surprised the first time I held one, how heavy they are.” That weight, the heft of quality, is part of the pitch.

  “What did you say is the price on this watch? Is this the one I saw advertised in the paper?”

  We were selling men’s Presidents for four thousand nine hundred and ninety-five dollars. $4,995.00. They were selling down the street at Waltham’s—Fort Worth’s registered Rolex dealer—for eleven thousand eight hundred. I did not know the details yet. I thought we were simply more honest and competitive. I thought we were just the best deal in town. That’s what I told him, too.