How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  He shook the ice in the empty glass.

  “The Macallan, Bobby. The thirty-year-old,” Dennis said without looking at me. We did not have any thirty-year-old scotch, but we did have Macallan, and I jogged out to the bar cabinet behind the bookkeeper’s office. As I passed the stairs to Mr. Popper’s office with the fresh drink I saw him coming the other way. He caught me by the shoulder.

  “What’s happening in there?” he asked. His face sparkled with happiness and anticipation. “Is he buying it? What’s he buying? He’s buying it, isn’t he? Is he buying the necklace? The alexandrites? Is he going for it?” Mr. Popper was bouncing in his shoes. He was shorter than I was and his round belly and the bouncing made him seem like a red rubber ball bouncing in a playground. You wanted immediately to hold him or hug him. He was that enthusiastic. He was one of those geniuses. I’ve only met three or four of them over the years. He was not human like you and me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”

  “Well don’t stand here jawing with me,” he said. He pushed me by the small of my back while holding my shoulder. We shoved our way into the salespeople around the watch counter, who when they saw I was with Mr. Popper parted a way for me to the door of the diamond room. “Get in there, son! Get in there!” Then he leaned forward and whispered, “If he buys it, it’s a thousand cash for you, too. A thousand dollars! Today! Close him,” he said. “Get him, Bobby, get him!” he said. Then he laughed. “Isn’t this wonderful?” he said, and held open his arms as though he would lift the whole showroom between them. “It’s almost Christmas, everyone,” he said. “It’s the most glorious time of the year!” Customers and salespeople laughed aloud with him. The air grew golden around us. We all shone together. The halogens brightened even whiter. The music of the voices of the salespeople and the customers in the showroom lifted like a chorus. There was music playing, of course, on the Muzak, Christmas music. The Chipmunks’ Christmas album. I looked for Lisa and saw her there spotlighted in the halogens with the big pearls she was selling around her neck. She was facing the other way and her customer, a narrow-shouldered man in an elegant gray suit, was helping her with the clasp. I bet that is a sale, I thought. The way he’s fingering her neck he looks like he’s buying. Then I opened the door and was in. Mr. Popper closed the door behind me.

  “There he is,” the customer said. “There’s your boy. Boy, we got a job for you.”

  All three of their faces looked at me.

  “This is a time for champagne,” the customer said. “Here, hand me over that scotch. There’s a good fella.”

  “I’ll get the champagne,” Jim said. “Bobby, you take this Rolex and have it gift-wrapped. Wait for it. Ask Lisa if she wouldn’t mind wrapping it, she’s the best. I am going to give this necklace one more steaming and then we’ll take a last look at it in its case. I better get Ronnie. We’ll be right back. Let’s start with the champagne and go from there. Congratulations, Mr. Redback.”

  Jim and I left with the Rolex and the necklace.

  “So he’s buying it?” I said to Jim.

  “He bought it. He already bought it. He bought the alexandrite necklace. Dennis, that son of a bitch, sold it. He sold it.” I looked at him to see if he was jealous but he was delighted. This was perhaps my older brother’s most compelling virtue: he enjoyed the luck of others, particularly if he loved them. He would never understand envy or resentment. I worry that I am wired the opposite way.

  “Get that woman’s watch wrapped,” Jim said. “Your customer closed the deal. Her COA sold that necklace. You sold it, really, Bobby, when you sold that clean, oil, and adjust.”

  In my excitement I had almost forgotten that the watch was not ours.

  “This watch?” I said. “Wait. I thought we were just showing it. You want me to wrap up her watch?” I cannot say, now, whether I was feigning innocence or I was genuinely confused. But that was what I said.

  “You know of any other like-new ladies’ two-tones lying around? Think you can get on the phone and have one here in the time it takes for Ronnie and Redback to count the cash?”

  “No, I was just asking,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Don’t worry, your customer will get a watch,” Jim said. “She may have to wait awhile, and it won’t be that watch, but she’ll get a watch. Meanwhile, she can wear around one of our Bertoluccis. She may even get attached to it. Bertolucci is really a much nicer watch.” Even I knew that was false. “Hell, we would even be willing to trade her, which is an upgrade for her. Come to think of it, I know a used eighteen-karat Bertolucci we could lend her. Dennis paid too much for that thing, but she probably figures her watch is worth five, the Bertolucci lists at eighteen, you tell her we give her a discount apology to our cost which is nine thousand, that’s easy math. You can sell that. Just return her phone calls promptly. Make her earn every inch of it. She has to think she is beating you up. I’ll walk you through it. If that beat-up old gold Bertolucci is still here after Christmas that’s a perfect solution. We can tighten the bracelet with Teflon spray. It won’t last, but it will be perfect for this deal.” He was losing me in the whirlwind of the imaginary pitch I was going to have to deliver to the irate, cheated customer.

  “I don’t really want her as a customer. I mean, you can have her.”

  “Bobby.” Jim looked at me earnestly. It was like the time on the bus when I was five and he caught me crossing my legs at the knee. “Boys never sit like that,” he had told me, staring me straight in the eye. Another one was, “Never start a fight, but never back down from one, either.” I don’t remember how that came up, because I was not in many fights. “Bobby. It is time to stop pretending to learn the business and really learn it. Do you want to make real money or not? Do you want to be a salesman? Yes or no?”

  I didn’t think about my answer. I mostly wanted to get out from under that gaze of his. It was like a microwave. He did not use it often.

  “Black Friday is in four days,” Jim said. “Black Friday you go on the floor.”

  At that moment Lisa appeared, as though she had been listening to the whole thing, took the watch from my hands, and left with it. I understood she was going to wrap it for me. Often, this happened to me, when some angel descended to solve a problem, as if I were wired with a secret microphone. But she should have taken me with her.

  “This is your first real season,” Jim said. “Christmas is expecting you. Come on, time to play Santa Claus. Santa Claus and his band of merry elves.”

  That’s Robin Hood, I thought. But I did not correct him.

  “Feel these shoulders,” he said. He massaged my shoulders from the front like a manager would massage his boxer’s shoulders. “That is too much tension. We have got to get you laid.

  “Let’s get through the weekend and Sunday night we’ll pick up Lisa and one of her buddies and we’ll go have some fun. Lisa will know somebody. Let’s get through the weekend and we’ll get you a girl.

  “Come on, go grab that watch and let’s get back in there,” he said.

  There was a bookstore on the edge of downtown that was open on Sundays. We were working seven days a week now, but we got off early on Sundays and if Jim and Lily were having a fight, or out shopping, I would drive over to the bookstore and then maybe leave my car there and walk into downtown for a hamburger and a Coke at Ted’s. It was a nice place to sit and read a new book that you had bought. The first time I read D. T. Suzuki I was sitting at the red linoleum bar in Ted’s, eating my french fries one at a time, with Tabasco mixed into the ketchup.

  To get there I would walk a few blocks out of my way so that I could pass Lisa’s building. I thought she might be outside doing something, taking out the garbage, say, or looking up and down the street, or taking a walk herself, and then we would bump into each other and we could get a hamburger together or go sit in a bar I knew she liked and have a drink. But she never was outside her apartment. The whole street was always empty, in fact. Just p
arked cars and the brown brick buildings. I should have called her and asked her to meet me. But I was afraid to call her. I didn’t even know her number. She was always the one who asked me out, when we got together outside of the store.

  Jim had not given me any cocaine for several weeks, so Lisa had switched me entirely to her speed.

  “This is healthier anyway,” she said. “You don’t know what’s in that cocaine. It goes through so many hands before it gets to Texas. But with crank it’s manufactured right here in Fort Worth. I know the guy who makes it. It’s practically like buying it at the pharmacy.”

  I was leaving the customers’ bathroom, rubbing crank from the bottom of my nose with the side of my hand, when Mr. Popper caught me by the arm.

  “Bobby,” he said. “Come on up here for a minute. Come on up to my office. We need to have a little talk.”

  They must have a hidden camera in there, I thought. He’s been watching me on a monitor in his office. I had masturbated in that bathroom, too. I hoped he wouldn’t make me watch the tape. But I was going to be fired. Jim told me to be especially careful about drugs around Mr. Popper and Sheila.

  “They are not hypocritical people,” Jim had said. “They aren’t Bible-beaters or anything like that. But they hate drugs. One time they did a big drug testing and they fired five or six people over it. They couldn’t fire everybody who tested positive or they would have had to find a whole new staff. Dennis and I tested positive, of course, and the Watchman, and a bunch of other people. They looked past it. But we all had to promise to quit, and watch a video about the dangers of narcotics. They even made us sign a contract. They brought in a couple of speakers from AA. It was a big deal. We had to read some of those damn AA comic books at our regular sales meeting. ‘Take them home,’ Popper said. ‘Commit them to memory.’ Comic books. You remember the ones. The same damn ones Mom used to bring home from her AA meetings. I’m just saying, because you’re you, be cautious.” So I knew I was fired. But it did not sound like they were the type to press charges.

  Popper sat down at his desk. The banks of video monitors were flickering on his credenza beside him, and there were more behind him. I tried not to look at them. I wondered which one had caught me.

  “I don’t know if you like to drink or not, Bobby. I am not much of a drinking man myself. But I will take a glass of good scotch from time to time. Have you ever tasted a good single-malt scotch? I go over to Scotland once or twice a year with a couple of buddies of mine, good old boys from the construction business here in town, and we play a little golf, go fishing for those powerful salmon they have up there, and hit the distilleries. They put you up in a castle. Here, you should try a glass. I drink it neat, but for your first taste you might want some ice and a splash of water.”

  Mr. Popper stood, so I stood, too. He laughed.

  “Sit down, son! Relax! Boy you Canadians come nervous. Your brother’s near half as jumpy as you are. You been up to something you don’t want me to know about?” He smiled. The way he smiled, like we were in on the secret together, made me think maybe he didn’t know about the drugs after all, or that if he knew he didn’t mind. I sat back down.

  He poured the drinks at the bar on the other side of his office. It was a built-in bar, made of brass and beveled glass, and I had polished and cleaned it many times, always while Mr. Popper was working in his office and on the phone. I stocked it, too, with ice cream and diet sodas. Mr. Popper ate two or three pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream a day. All different flavors, though his favorite was strawberry.

  “Here you are,” he said, and put the pretty, golden drink on the desk in front of me.

  “Drink it slow. You don’t want to hurry through a liquor like that one.”

  I took a sip. It was strong. But like warm caramel and honey. It was nothing like scotch I had tried before. Because of the richness of the flavor I thought of it as the first properly American liquor I had ever tasted.

  “Bobby, some of us got a gift. I have it. Your brother has it. And watching you on that alexandrite deal . . .” He laughed. “That was some kind of deal, wasn’t it? I thought we were never getting rid of that sunuvabitch. The things my wife will buy. Anyway, observing you, I got a feeling you have it, too. An instinct for what the other fella needs to hear. What will clarify his own decision-making process for him. How to unify a man’s will.”

  I knew he didn’t expect me to say anything. I took a swallow of my drink.

  “Look here, Bobby. I’d like to show you something. Something special to me. You might find it interesting.”

  He took a large red-and-gilt leather-bound book from a shelf beside his desk. It was the size of book you expected an old-fashioned Bible to be. It was obviously heavy and he carried it in both of his arms around the desk and laid it open in front of me. He turned through the thick, cream-colored pages. Inside he had glued copies of newspaper columns, pictures cut out from other books, newspaper ads featuring items from our store. Everything was jewelry.

  “This is a scrapbook I keep. Gives me ideas. And reminds me of what works and what doesn’t. It’s a tool my own mentor showed me to use. He was a coin man. No interest in jewelry at all. But they are more or less the same business. Look at this here.”

  It was a headline from the L.A. Times, dated May 7, 1953. It read: “Five-Million-Dollar Fake Gem Plot Uncovered!”

  “That there’s the so-called Szirak Treasure. Some ole boys claimed they had found a collection of five-hundred-year-old crown jewels, orbs and tiaras and what have you, and sold the whole lot to a collector. Five million back then is like fifty million today. They got busted, but just through ineptitude.”

  He turned the page to a clipping from a paper in San Antonio. “Ten-Million-Dollar Coin Collection Revealed as Fake!”

  “I knew that fella. I knew him rather well.” He patted me on the shoulder. “What he used to do was, you took a new coin, changed the date with a little drill-and-stamp apparatus we employed, and then to get the look of age you blew cigar smoke over them in a paper bag. It was no more complicated than that. If he had stuck to counterfeiting he could still be the most famous coin dealer in the Southwest. But he fell in with an insurance man and a safe salesman and they conjured up this deal where they’d sell the coins, insure them, sell the security system, then wait a few months and steal the whole damn thing back from the customer. They got caught stealing their own coins—from some helicopter manufacturer, as I recall—and when the FBI brought in their experts they discovered all the coins was fake, to boot. Boy, that caused a commotion down in San Antone.” He turned the page. “Take a gander at this one here. This is from the British National Archives. Calendar of State Papers, from the time of King James the First. Sixteen hundred and six.”

  He traced the lines of text with his slender, leaflike fingers as he read. Not with one finger but with two or three, like a priest or a magician.

  “‘Query on the equity of a Chancery decision on fraud committed by Robert Davis, at the instigation of Richard Glanville, in selling counterfeit jewels to Francis Courtney.’ That’s beautiful, isn’t it? ‘At the instigation of.’ That is the proper usage of the English language. Like poetry. Listen to that.” He laughed and took another drink of the scotch. I took a mouthful, too.

  “In these parts we’re amateurs, Bobby. Those old boys were selling paste to the crowned heads of Europe while our forefathers were scratching their asses in the potato fields. Goes back to the alchemists. The first blue diamonds, sold by Tavernier back in the seventeenth century, were London Blue topazes with fancy faceting. Hell, he made the market for the damn things. Until he told ’em they were blue diamonds nobody had even heard of such a thing! You have to be extra careful when you’re dealing with the Belgians and the Dutch. I avoid those fellas, they got too much expertise in contrivance for the likes of us Texans. Hell, the crown jewels of England are just plain old everyday garnets. Sheila and me have been to the Tower of London to view them. I wouldn’t pay ten bucks a
carat for those stones. And these days, with the Thais and the Indians, even I can’t tell half the time what’s real and what’s fake. Course that’s my point. It don’t really matter, so long as she’s done right. I know a boy who got out of the museum business because he claimed he’d never sold a real painting. Nothing but counterfeits and copies. ‘The dream of acquisition,’ he calls it. One of the leading experts on German Expressionism in the world.”

  He took his ChapStick from his pocket and rubbed it quickly around his nostrils.

  “I suspect the problem, Bobby, if you want to know the plain honest truth of the matter, is people getting hung up on this notion of intrinsic value. It’s the silliest damn thing. There ain’t no intrinsic value to a diamond except in a drill bit. And that’s an instrument. Outside of religion you simply won’t find a dadblamed thing that will stand up to the scrutiny of intrinsic value. Least of all the truth. What I’m getting at, Bobby, is you may notice, over time, as you study and learn, a certain amount of chicanery in this business of ours. But don’t let that dismay you. It’s just the nature of the business we’re in, part and parcel of the good old capitalist system that’s gonna make us both rich men before we die.”

  He paused on that and looked at me carefully. I understood it was time for me to speak.

  “I understand, Mr. Popper,” I said. “I mean, I believe I understand. If I have any questions I’ll ask Jim. I sure hope I can do as well as you have done, sir. Half as well, I mean.” The scotch had settled into my stomach and I felt comfortable and happy. I finished the last swallow.

  “That’s an excellent idea. If you have any questions, you just ask your big brother. He understands this business better than almost anybody I’ve got working for me. Reminds me of myself. Hell, you both do, I don’t mind telling you.” He stood, rounded the desk, and patted me on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry too much, son. You and your big brother are going to be just fine.”