How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  The 800 lines at the store only worked in the continental United States. You were supposed to use one of the dedicated lines if you were going to make a long-distance call. But there were no technological reasons you could not pick any line and dial whoever you wanted to call, in any country. So I usually called Wendy from the store. I would wait until Jim was up in Popper’s office discussing the day’s sales and then I had a free half hour or so. I would untangle gold chains with two pairs of tweezers, or package up loose color in their little plastic boxes, while I talked to her. That way if Jim rounded the corner I could hang up in a hurry and to his eyes I was hard at work at his desk.

  “I think I’m in love with another woman,” I told Wendy on the phone. “Not a girl, I mean. A woman.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “What’s her name?”

  “I’m not lying, if that’s what you think. Her name is Lisa,” I said.

  “This is a real woman. You are not making this up.”

  I was making up part of it. I did not think I was in love with her. At least, as far as I could tell.

  “She is a jewelry salesperson. She’s in college, too. Or she was. At SMU. Southern Methodist University.”

  “Some Christian school. Isn’t that nice. I bet she’s real smart. What does she look like? This Christian saleswoman. Is she skinny?”

  “She has black hair. She is nice. You would like her. She knows all about you.”

  “Sure. I would love her, too. Is she skinny?”

  She is believing me. She is buying it, I corrected myself.

  That was an important distinction I had recently learned. “Don’t take responsibility for other people’s beliefs, whatever you say to them,” Jim had told me. “For one thing, it’s presumptuous.”

  “I don’t know. I guess she’s skinny. I haven’t really noticed. You would say she’s skinny, I guess.”

  “Are you fucking her? Are you fucking this skinny Christian? Or does she not do that? Because of Jesus.”

  “Wendy, it’s not like you aren’t doing the same thing. With Andrew.”

  “That’s not the way you made it sound. It’s a little fast, Bobby. I don’t mind. It’s fine. Do what you want. You didn’t exactly make it sound like you were going down there to start fucking Christian girls. Women, I mean. Excuse me. You said you were in love with me. I never said I love Andrew. I said I thought you needed a change.”

  “I don’t love her like I love you,” I said. Back down now and the whole effect is lost, I thought.

  “I can tell. I have to go, Bobby.”

  “Okay. We’re pretty busy here, too.” Wait. At nine o’clock at night? You can do better than that, Bobby.

  “I have to go find someone to fuck. Maybe some nice Christian.”

  She hung up.

  •

  Then our dad came to town. Now I can remember but it was hard for me to believe, at a certain point in my life, how happy Jim and I would both become when our dad unexpectedly arrived. “He’s already in New Orleans,” Jim said. “He’ll be here on Friday.”

  Jim said we would borrow his former landlord’s house for the visit.

  “We can’t show the old man our apartment, Bobby,” he said. “It’s not what he’s expecting. I’ll see if Sean’s in town. He owes me a favor from the deal I made him on that rose gold Vacheron. Let’s see if we can’t get Sean Munrow’s place for the week.”

  He was frowning his eyebrows in that playful, irresponsible way and we both loved the joke.

  Sean Munrow owned a mansion on Kerry Place, just east of Forest Park Drive, on a faded but magnificent street. Jim and his wife had lived behind it in a small converted apartment, an old coach house and servants’ quarters, when they first moved to Texas and he was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Munrow was a DUI and fix-a-ticket attorney who had branches all over the metroplex. He owned a yacht and vacation houses and was rarely in Texas. So Jim tracked him down and Munrow said, “Sure, you know where the key is, it hasn’t moved,” but then we went over there together and it was too much work. He had pictures of his kids everywhere—he was divorced and had those dad’s guilty portraits—and many of the rooms were closed up with the furniture draped or pushed up against the walls. It looked like he only lived in two rooms and the kitchen. I was astonished. Here was a rich, successful man. It was so forlorn.

  “This will never work,” Jim said. “We don’t have the time. I’ve got a better idea.”

  We booked the Presidential Suite at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Eleven thousand dollars a night.

  “He better not stay longer than the weekend,” Jim said. “American Express will cut us off if they try to run a second approval.”

  “What about Lily?” I said.

  “You know how he is. He can’t stand her. He only wants to see us anyhow. I’ll tell him we’re having problems. That will make him happy. He can give me a bunch of marriage advice. Plus it gets me off the hook for titty bars and the girls. I won’t have to listen to the practice-fidelity-never-take-your-marriage-for-granted-keep-your-promises-look-what-happened-to-your-old-man bullshit.”

  That made sense to me.

  “We have to tip the hell out of every valet parker, Bobby. We have to eat in the restaurant twenty times in the next week. Everybody has to know our names. Here’s a roll of twenties. Anybody does anything for you, if they push a damn button on the elevator, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and say, ‘My name’s Bobby Clark. Thank you very much.’”

  I felt like I was running for mayor of Dallas. We drove back and forth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and took a customer or a top seller with us every time. We hung out at the hot tub—it was too cold for the pool—and had cocktails in the evening. Lily didn’t say much, we were already working sixteen-and seventeen-hour days. Lisa tagged along for dinner and mocked us both.

  “You are not going to fool your father,” she said. “He’s your dad.”

  “He has a lot of imagination,” Jim said. “All we have to do is provide the right setting. Plus this is what he is anticipating. I don’t want to disappoint him.”

  “He thinks you live in a hotel? Like Howard Hughes?”

  “Like Howard Hughes! That’s good! That’s perfect, Lisa. I had not thought of that. When he says, ‘Jimmy, what the hell are you doing living in a hotel?’ I’ll say, ‘You know, Dad, like Howard Hughes.’ He’ll like that. That’s the kind of thing he would come up with on his own. Come to think of it, that’s the way to play it. Better if he comes up with it in his own head. Like it was his idea. Bobby, when we are pulling up to the hotel, say something about airplanes. We’re in Texas, for crying out loud. Say something about the airport and airplanes and making airplanes. It doesn’t matter what. He’ll think Howard Hughes and then when we show him our suite it will make perfect sense. Howard Hughes but without the fingernails, that’s what he’ll think.”

  We were at the store and Dad walked into the showroom with his arm around the waist of a woman. She was slightly taller than he was and I saw immediately how the other saleswomen noticed her. She was a redhead. Wendy was a redhead, too. It is true what they say, they are more sexual than other women and usually sexually deviant.

  “That is mine,” the Polack said when she saw them. We were side by side, working the buy counter. “That one I am cherry-picking.”

  “He’s not here for jewelry, Polack,” I told her. It had taken me weeks to grow comfortable with using that name. But she preferred it.

  “You do not know, Bobby Clark,” she said. “You have not the nose for the business. Look at that woman. You think she is here for her fun? Why is she with that short man? I tell you why! She brings the man to buy. She tells him, ‘Yes, fine, I fuck you, Mr. Short Man, now I want my diamonds!’”

  “He’s my father, Polack,” I said. “That man there. He is here to see Jim and me.”

  She looked from one to the other of us, back and forth.

  “Okay,” she said, “he is wasting my time. You, too.” She
returned to her buy.

  After we showed him the suite we went down to the bar. We sat in the sofa and chairs that faced the enormous empty fireplace. I was drinking a margarita, Jim had a glass of wine, and our dad had his usual club soda with an extra slice of lime.

  Our dad was getting a little gray in his beard, I noticed. It had a nice effect, though. It added to that wise-man impression he wanted to make. He truly did seem like a wise man at times. A wise man in the sense of a yogi, I mean, or a Christian mystic. Like a Thomas Merton kind of wise man.

  “Listen, boys, this is important. We need to get you both into the Masons. Bobby, how old are you now?”

  “Sixteen. Seventeen in May.”

  “That’s too bad. You have to be twenty-one, son. You can join the DeMolay. But Jimmy, we can sign you up immediately. Let me see who I know in town. You’ll need a sponsor. What’s the name of that fellow who owns your jewelry store? Cooper?”

  “Popper.”

  “He’s probably a Mason. We had better make sure he’s a Mason. Is he Scottish Rite? I expect you to know these things, Dindy. These things matter.” Dindy had been Jim’s nickname since he was a baby.

  “How’s his reputation? In business. And around town. Is he an honest man?”

  The waiter brought us our check.

  “On your room, Mr. Clark?”

  “Thanks, Steve.” Jim signed the bill.

  “You’ll meet him tomorrow, Dad. He’s brilliant.”

  “Reason is a limited tool, son. There’s a lot more to a man than his brain. I am asking you about his consciousness now. Is he an old soul? Is he developed? I can see the influence this man is having on the two of you.” He looked pointedly at our jewelry. Maybe we were wearing a few too many pieces. I worried about my quarter-ounce Chinese panda pinkie ring. The diameter was too large for my pinkie, so I wore it on the ring finger of my right hand. “I want to see if the man has character. He’s successful in business. That is a good sign. But not always, son.”

  On the way back to the suite I saw a young woman at the front desk look at my dad carefully from behind a large stand of those white and purple orchids that expensive hotels like to erect. My dad saw her, too. The redhead whom he had brought into the store, a doctor’s receptionist he had picked up in Baton Rouge, was already on a bus back home.

  “I’ll meet you upstairs, boys,” he said. “Go on up without me.”

  I held the elevator door so that I could watch him for a minute. He stood at the front desk and smiled that smile at her. He leaned across the counter and whispered something in her ear. She laughed. It was a thick laugh full of musical notes like a lioness’s cough.

  By the time he came up, two hours later, Jim and I were full of champagne and in the suite’s side-by-side oversized marble tubs.

  “I’m going to bed, boys,” he said. “I’m exhausted.” He winked at us both.

  The next day over dinner our dad confronted us. We were eating Steak Diane in the private dining room. Jim and I were splitting a second bottle of Montrachet—he always preferred whites—and our dad was drinking a Fresca. Then he ordered a near-beer.

  “Okay, boys, enough. You two set this up just to impress your old man. This is foolishness. Come on, son,” he said to Jim firmly.

  I stepped into the background and focused on my steak. As a younger brother that was my expertise and my privilege.

  “You need to start covering your nut. Put this cash aside. When are you going to go out on your own? You’ll never get rich working for somebody else. This ought to be part of your seed money, son.”

  Then he turned his attention to me.

  “Let’s have a talk just the two of us, Bobby. Dindy, I need to talk privately to your brother.”

  “We’re in the middle of dinner, Dad,” I said.

  “Finish up, then,” he said. He pushed his plate away. “Come on, Rob, let’s take a ride. Dindy, you go chase a skirt in the bar. Find one for us both. For that matter go find three of them, son. We’re in a hotel, aren’t we?”

  While the valet brought up his car my dad took me by the biceps the way he sometimes would. I tried to flex, subtly.

  “Look, your old man’s not a fool. I visit you guys astrally. That’s the best way for me to keep tabs on you both. And not just at night, son. I can keep an eye on you anytime I meditate. Something the monks taught me up in Srinagar. I won’t tell you how often I come take a look. It’s more often than you think. You have to remember I spend thirty or forty hours a week in samadhi now. Like William Blake. These days I spend most of my hours in paradise, son.” I had a photo of him from the time he was in Srinagar glued in the inside cover of my copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His head was shaved and he was wearing an orange down parka. I thought that was odd. I had expected him to be in robes. In my wallet I had a similar photo, but without the parka, from his last trip to Tibet.

  When the valet handed him the keys he passed them on to me.

  “You drive, son,” he said.

  We got in the car.

  “I told your mother it was not the right time for you to be down here. Your brother is an old soul, it’s less dangerous for him.”

  “There’s nothing going on, Dad. I am still going to go to college. I am still going to finish high school. I am just making some extra money.”

  “There’s something dishonest about this business, son. I’m not worried about Dindy. But you know the problems you’ve had. With honesty. Not to mention stealing. You know the old saying, son. Opportunity makes the thief. You don’t want to be caught hiding your hands in your pockets again. I know you remember what I’m talking about.”

  He was referring to a time when I was five years old at a car dealership. He was buying a new Lincoln Continental and there was a dish of pink and purple candies on the salesman’s desk. No one offered one to me, so while they were talking I grabbed a couple or three or four and stuck them in my pockets. But then later when we were looking at the new car and the sales manager had come out to congratulate my father on his purchase, he looked down at me and said, “Why do you have your hands in your pockets like that, young fella? What are you hiding in there?” He was only joking but I did not realize it and I showed them the candy. It got a big laugh. But later my father wanted to moralize about it, and he brought it up again when I was first caught shoplifting in second grade, and on other occasions that had presented themselves over the years.

  “What about that Lisa girl? You want to tell me what’s going on there? What’s your brother up to?”

  This time he raised his glasses and gave me the real green-eyed stare. I tried to concentrate on my driving. Now he was not messing around. I did not know if he was bluffing because he already knew about me and Lisa or if he only wanted me to tell him about Jim’s extramarital affair.

  If I could have, I would have asked him if he could see anything about Jim and the Polack. Lisa had said that Jim and the Polack were up to something. “Nothing romantic,” she said. “But one of his other deals.” I figured she was jealous. It was good news if Jim was seeing the Polack. But I didn’t like the fact that Lisa was so interested in whether or not it was true. There was a good use for Dad’s extrasensory perception, I thought. To decipher a few clues for me about Jim and the Polack. But since Jim was married it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask Dad.

  “Nothing, Dad. She’s a friend of ours. She’s like a sister.”

  “A sister. Right. I had a dream about that girl. It was not a good dream, son.”

  We were silent for a few minutes. I picked up a Cat Stevens tape that was lying next to the ashtray where he kept his pipe and put it in the tape player. Then that song about the father and the son came on so I turned it off again.

  “Pull over, Robby,” he said. “Over there. Under the overpass. I have something to show you.”

  We were wandering around central Dallas—I didn’t know precisely where he wanted me to go, but we were just driving to drive—and I turned onto Lovers’
Lane. We had just passed that eight-foot painted statue of Lenin that stands there in the spotlights in front of Goff’s Hamburgers.

  “You know he was a Mason,” my dad said.

  “What?”

  “Vladimir Lenin. He was a Mason. Any great man you have ever heard of. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. They made a special exception for him.”

  “Here, Dad?”

  “Right over there on the shoulder. Below the underpass. That’s safe. Up there, son. Be careful. Slow down. It’s night, son! Watch what you’re doing! I’ve got something to show you.”

  I stopped the car.

  “Pop the trunk.”

  Other cars slowed to eye us as we walked around to the back of my dad’s Honda. It was not a place you could really stop, especially after dark. There were a few honks. They were short, friendly honks, though, offering help. Maybe our car had broken down. It was windy and cold. I wanted to get back in the car. Trash and paper lifted in the air.

  “Look at this,” he said, unzipping a black leather tie case. “See that?”

  He handed me a check, without letting go of it. It was a cashier’s check for three hundred and sixty thousand dollars.

  “That’s from Ruth Moody. Now, that’s trust, son. That’s how we’re going to open the new church,” he said. He squeezed my arm with his other hand. “That’s what a real salesman can do if he wants to. There’s a lesson in that for you.”

  I wondered why he had not cashed the check yet.

  We got back in the car.

  “I can’t bear to sit in that hotel and watch your brother piss away all that green.”

  I drove through the side streets of Highland Park so that Dad could admire the gigantic houses. I wanted him to see that Dallas was as good as Palm Beach and Coronado and the other cities he had lived in.

  “It’s some hotel, though, isn’t it?” he said. His expression was proud and happy. “Of course, he’s only a kid. You can’t see that right now. But the fact is your big brother’s still just a kid.”