How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

“So let’s have a new conversation now. You start. What should our conversation be about? It’s your turn. You think of a subject.”

  She was easy to talk to until I began to consider her sexually. Well, I had always considered her sexually, ever since I had met her, but she had seemed remote until the past few days. Now the sexualness of her kept happening every time I looked at her, like I would reach out and grab her at any second and start having sex with her, right here under the table, without having any control over it, and that drove everything else out of my head. Not one word that I might speak was in my brain.

  I took a sip of my margarita.

  “Now you’re just going to sit there and look at me?” She laughed. “Sometimes you really remind me of your brother. And then sometimes I swear you are complete opposites.”

  I wanted her to explain that. So I could fix the opposite parts, I mean.

  Every salesman had to write his own appraisals, so as part of my training Jim gave me his to do. We did them at closing before going home. Often Lisa and I would hang out at Jim’s desk and do them together. Though normally she let hers sit for a few days before she sent them out. Jim nagged her about that.

  “It’s crucial they go out in the morning mail,” Jim said. “It’s called confirming the sale. When the customer gets this appraisal in the mail a day or two after he bought the piece and reads it and sees the appraised price, it reconfirms his decision. Then he tells himself he made a good decision when he spent that money. An investment.”

  “What did we pay for these, Dennis?” I was appraising a pair of diamond studs, three carats total weight, set in fourteen-karat yellow gold with push-backs. As a rule when you did an appraisal the jewelry was already out the door with the customer, but Jim was having these studs converted to screw-backs.

  “What would you call these for color and clarity?”

  Dennis Panier, the manager of the back-of-the-house, was also in charge of diamonds. “Most diamonds we just use our own made-up grading system,” Dennis explained to me once. “We can’t use GIA. It would discombobulate the average Texan.”

  I showed Dennis the ear studs. He looked up at them, in a hurry.

  “I’d call ’em K SI3s if I were you. That’s close enough for lookin’, anyhow. I pay twelve hundred a carat for goods like those. Pull them and weigh them and you’ll know what we paid.”

  I looked at the diamonds more closely myself. It seemed to me that Dennis was right. But Jim had told me “white, eye-clean,” which should translate to H or I, and SI1 to SI2.

  “Are you sure? I mean, I’m sure you’re sure. I’m sorry to ask. But Jim said they were—well, something else.”

  He laughed. Dennis’s startling, musical laugh was one of his best selling tools. Any person who heard his laugh started to laugh after him, a beat or two after he began. He may have deployed it as a tool or it may have been entirely natural, you could not tell. It was like the pied piper. He looked a bit like the pied piper, too. He was from the swamps of Louisiana and he had the rubber-band-like body and the milky coffee-colored skin of those old French Creoles. Popper had found him tending bar at the Dungeon in New Orleans. He was five feet two or three inches tall, and he had a long nose, slightly pinched at the sides, with a broad round tip. He had a lot of brown hair, and stray curls at his temples, like a girl.

  •

  When I gave Jim the appraisal he was confused.

  “Look, Bobby, the appraisal is not a lab report. I know I told you it is important to get it exactly right. But there is more to being right than being good at arithmetic. We are not calculators, we are people, and so are our customers.” When he had first shown me how to write one I made the mistake of comparing it to writing up a lab in IB chemistry or physics. “This is not a scientific thing. It is a sales tool. Plus it protects the most important person in the transaction. Who is that? The customer. It protects our customer, Matthew, here. Matthew Randolph.” He tapped the appraisal and looked at me seriously. “Mr. Matthew Randolph is protected from the insurance industry if his wife’s new diamond studs are lost or stolen. You know what those insurance bastards are like. They’ll take your money all right but they don’t want to give it back to you. So we have to make sure that Matthew has plenty of money to work with if something does happen. Do you want to explain to Matt that his wife has to downgrade her diamond studs, now, even though they were appraised and insured, because the cost of diamonds has gone up and we failed to account for that in the appraisal? Or that god forbid we appraised the studs too low? Would that be fair to Matt? Would that make him a lifetime customer? This business is about building relationships, Bobby. Relationships of trust. What if some joker pulled every stone on his new tennis bracelet? Those things can weigh out half of what’s on the tag. For crying out loud. We have to trust them to treat our expertise with respect. They have to trust our expert opinions. This is how we do it. Stick to the store’s grading system. Take the information from the tag. That’s why we tape the tag to the original store copy of the receipt. So there can be no mistakes. Then, whatever he paid for them, whatever he actually paid, times it by three. Your retail replacement value. Some customers will ask you to lower this number because of the cost of the insurance. If they ask, fine, it’s their business, their decision. The point is we want his wife to see this appraisal and she’ll think that’s about what he paid for them. She’ll be thrilled. But always call the customer to ask where the appraisal should be mailed. Never forget that. Or you can have a real mess on your hands. It can even turn legal. You understand.” There was a blue pen on his desk. I picked it up and played with it between my fingers. “In case the studs aren’t for his wife, say. And you accidentally send them to the home address. You make that mistake once and you never make it again.

  “Okay, sit down,” he said. “It’s my fault. I’ve been letting Lisa show you. Nothing against Lisa, but she doesn’t always follow policy. Let’s write this one together, step by step. Carats total weight? Three, right? Three-point-oh-seven. That’s accuracy, Bobby. That’s what I am trying to teach you. Just like it says on the tag.”

  Lisa was good on the floor, and I watched her to learn, but the best saleswoman we had, and Mr. Popper’s personal favorite, was a woman—almost a girl—named the Polack. She sold without lying, and she had an energy you admired. People said she was the most beautiful woman in Fort Worth, Texas. She had won contests. Except for her eyes she could have been Jewish, or Moroccan. There was something about her that reminded you of a wide, shadowy desert. She had a thick eastern European brow and greasy lips. There were hail dents on the roof and the hood of her big green Mercedes. One time she took me to lunch in her other car, a wine-colored Cadillac convertible.

  I was jealous of her. Jim treated her with an odd respect, because she was the one who had convinced him to come into the jewelry business. Jim was only a customer when he first met her. This was three years before I joined Jim in Texas. He was twenty-one years old and Kirby vacuum cleaner’s youngest regional sales manager. He was buying a stainless steel Cartier for an institutional client of his, Jim said. And he thought he would buy a case of Montblancs for his top sellers if they would make him a quantity discount. It was almost Christmas and the sales floor stood ten deep with buyers. It was the fat time. Jim stood in a corner away from the entrance doors next to a tall marble pedestal ashtray and smoked.

  I had heard him tell the story a hundred times. After a while Jim grew bored of watching all the selling and he shouldered his way to the Patek and Breguet case. There was the Polack. Industry people said that the Polack took her first job as a jewelry salesperson because she liked the sex that went with jewelry. But that was not it. She was there because she liked the way the money smelled. “She didn’t know the first damn thing about jewelry,” Jim always said when he told the story. “Back then she didn’t even know how to sell. That was the first thing I noticed about her, in fact. Money. She even smells like it. That woman knows money better than anyone I’
ve ever met.”

  She was showing a platinum Patek Philippe to an elderly Vietnamese man in a black suit. Jim stood next to the old man.

  “You don’t want one of those,” Jim said to the customer. “No name recognition. You want the Rolex. The Rolex is what you need. See?” He pulled back his cuff to show the old man. Jim had won it two years before. “Ten thousand Kirbys in one year,” he said. “That’s more than thirty vacuum cleaners a day. Five million seven hundred thousand dollars gross.” It said Kirby right on the dial. Not every company can do that with a factory dial. Kirby had a special deal with Rolex USA.

  “That looks pretty good,” the man said to Jim. “But I prefer this one.”

  “What do you think? The Rolex or that one there?” Jim asked the saleswoman.

  “Let me take the links out of your watch,” she said to Jim. Jim always wore his watches loose, the same as I did. That’s where I learned to do it. The Polack probably planned to keep the links for the store or for herself. “To wear it like that is not good for the watch. This man knows what to buy.”

  The Patek cost as much as five Rolex Presidents. But Jim did not know that, then.

  “It’s comfortable that way,” Jim said. “Let’s see it on his wrist. I bet that watch looks great on him,” Jim said to her.

  “It is a handsome watch,” the Polack said. “Old,” she said.

  “Not old,” Jim said. “Distinguished.”

  “That is what I said,” she said. “Sophisticated. You listen,” she said.

  She wiped the Patek she was selling with a diamond cloth. The salesman next to her winced. But he did not correct her. Dust from the diamonds would scratch the soft metal of the head and the sapphire crystal.

  “Try it on,” Jim said to the man.

  The Polack put the watch on the man. She handled the man’s fingers and wrist like she was fixing a broken machine.

  “Do you have a mirror?” Jim asked her.

  “Of course,” she said. “I have a mirror,” she said. She went to find one. Jim nudged the man with his elbow as she walked away.

  “Look at that. That’s something.”

  They smiled at each other. The old man was missing all of his top teeth except two, one on either side, which looked like yellow fangs. He admired the watch on his wrist. He had slender, muscular wrists and the elegant Patek looked right on him. The pale platinum belonged on his leathered skin. He could see himself feeding his enemies to the crocodiles in the moat behind his mansion. The Polack returned with the mirror and angled it on its brass stand to show him the watch on his arm. There they were, the three of them, together in his own country. The deep jungle. Tigers coiled and watchful beneath the shadowy canopy. Hot wind in the saw grass. The rain boiling in the low clouds.

  “Oui, c’est ça,” he said. “That is the one.”

  “Power,” Jim said. The old man looked at him. “That’s what it says. Achievement. Victory. That’s triumph right there. Strength, too.”

  The old man studied the watch.

  “When’s the last time you bought yourself a Christmas present?” Jim asked him.

  He fought the smile, but it appeared on its own. “I admit this is the first time,” he said.

  You wait for that smile. You come to doubt you ever saw it. Then some customer lights it up at you and you recollect that you are not duping them at all, but helping them.

  “I like this watch,” the man said. He nodded to the Polack.

  She ran his credit card and then found Jim on the showroom floor.

  “Good going, Mr. Suit,” she said. “But you are a suit. I can throw you out. I do not need a man to do it.”

  “Nice sale,” Jim said.

  “We have good watches,” the Polack said. “These are my own watches.”

  “A guy like that is hard,” Jim said. “He worked for his money. Doesn’t trust anybody. Orientals are tough, the toughest.”

  “So, Suit, you sell for Rolex? You are here to arrest me?”

  “Arrest you? I sell vacuums,” Jim said. “But today I’m here to buy. You want to make another sale?”

  “You don’t look like a vacuum cleaner man,” she said. “You are too young. My mother is someone who loves vacuum cleaners,” she said.

  “Sensible woman,” Jim said. “But don’t kid yourself. Everyone loves a good vacuum cleaner.” When I was thirteen and fourteen, visiting him for the summer, I drove around with him and heard this pitch over and over. It was one of my favorites. “Love is the word. A good vacuum cleaner is an investment. A good vacuum cleaner you own for life. Pass it down to your grandkids. Save it for the next generation. Change the belt once a year and it will never age a day. Hardwoods, concrete, carpet. Everyone wants clean floors. Clean floors are like expensive shoes. Walk into someone’s house, what’s the first thing you notice? The shoes and the floor. They go together. Nothing worse than a dirty floor. White trash. Slovenly. It doesn’t matter if you have a maid, you still need a good vacuum cleaner. You can’t expect her to get your floors clean with a Hoover. You think a Hoover will last twenty years? Cheap plastic, too many parts. You can buy one at Target. Can you buy a Rolex at Target? Manolo Blahniks? Kirby vacuum cleaners have been the world’s leading professional vacuum cleaner for the home for more than half a century.”

  The Polack laughed. “Ha!”

  I remember the first time I heard that laugh. Like a dog’s bark. At first it disoriented you, then it made sense.

  “I don’t really sell them anymore,” Jim told her. “I teach other people how to do it. But I’m proud I can. Never be ashamed of being a salesperson. It’s one of the few honest trades. Jesus Christ was a salesman. Muhammad. Allah. World’s greatest. Paul. Those Jews. Think about Christ without Paul, huh? Ron Hubbard. Santa Claus. You ever think about him? Think about a mother telling her child about Santa Claus. She’s not lying. That’s selling. So where are you from? Would you like to join me for lunch?”

  The Polack was never a customer, though.

  “Today you buy a watch, yes?” she said. “We do business, vacuum man.”

  It was one of Jim’s best stories, and the whole thing was true.

  Lisa had a pale blue silk comforter on her bed. The comforter was very warm, much warmer than you expected it would be from looking at it.

  We opened the windows and listened to the thunderstorm. Texas has thunderstorms like no place in the world. Because the sky is so high. We were curled up under the comforter.

  “I bought it in Vegas,” she said, petting it with her hand. “I love it.”

  “I like it too,” I said.

  The thunder rolled. The rain was falling underneath the sound of the thunder. We could hear it on the pavement and on the roof.

  “Do you think Lily is prettier than me?”

  “Lily is my brother’s wife. I don’t think about her like that.”

  Maybe this was a lie, I’m not sure, but as the days went past and Lisa and I spent more time together, it was becoming less and less a lie. And yet it was not a very salable lie to tell my brother’s girlfriend.

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “I don’t know if I can explain that properly. You are very pretty.”

  I still had a list of people I tried not to deceive more than necessary.

  Lisa kept bamboo in clear glass containers on her bedstand next to her phone, by her windows, on her bathroom sink, and next to her refrigerator. The water was trapped in black rocks in the glass. It was green and growing but it was untidy bamboo. Ever since, I have associated bamboo, especially the disorderly, un-Japanese kind, with guilty sex, crystal methedrine, and simple unfeigned affection.

  “Are you sleeping with me because I sold that Rolex?” I asked her.

  I was lucky she was a kind person. She might have said this sort of thing, too, when she was only sixteen.

  “Yes. That’s exactly why I am sleeping with you,” she said. “Because you sold that Rolex. One lousy Rolex that we lost money on.�
� She laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I guess that’s what Jim would think. If he knew about us.”

  She was quiet. I watched her. She was hard to figure out.

  “Here,” she said. “Take another. Take some more.” She handed me the pipe. I reached for the lighter. “No, let me light it for you,” she said.

  Jim bought his methamphetamine from her and they both shared it with me. She liked to smoke it, but he told me only to sniff it. “Never smoke meth with Lisa,” he told me. “Once you start smoking it you may as well inject it. You’ll never quit.”

  “I need a new haircut,” she said. “I wish I had different hair. I was born with the wrong hair. It is my father’s fault. He had nice features and perfect teeth, like yours, but not very good hair. It’s my baby hair, my mother used to say.” I was quiet. I knew her mother had died when she was young. Jim had told me that. “It never changed. To my grown-up hair, I mean. It’s the hair I was born with.”

  “Your hair is nice. It is soft.”

  “You can touch it if you want to. It’s soft all over. Yours is thick. It is one of your better features. I wish my skin was as nice as your hair.”

  “I don’t want to mess it up,” I said.

  My face felt hot from the crystal, and I worried that my ears were red. I wanted to ask her for a beer. But I was shy to. I could hear each of the raindrops outside, one by one, as they struck the roof and the sidewalk and the leaves of the trees. I could even hear them as they fell.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

  I’d been waiting for this. Not waiting for it, but I had known it was coming, and I would try to prepare for it, when I would let myself think about it, which was not often and not for long. I tried not to panic. What if she’s already told Jim? I could handle her telling me that we couldn’t have sex, even, so long as she hadn’t said anything to Jim. That might be best, in fact.