How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  I looked at Jim. He shook his head. Shrugged. Gave me a thumbs-up sign. He handed me a pen and a pad of paper.

  “Schopenhauer,” I said. “Schopenhauer is his name. That’s right, sir, like the philosopher, Arthur, yes, that’s right, sir. I did not know myself until poor Schopenhauer told me. Impressive that you would know that, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so. But our man is Swiss, not German. But the problem is this fire, you see. You would not have heard about it—oh, you have heard about it? Yes, that’s right. Well, that’s the holdup. Our man Schopenhauer was there. Yes sir, we just heard this morning, it’s terrible. He was in the fire, you see. We don’t know all the details yet. The owner is talking to his wife this morning. My understanding is that he was only injured. Yes, you are right, it’s awful, just awful. Of course this is not your problem, sir. I understand that. But you see, he is brokering a shipment of about one hundred Rolexes for us at the moment, and your wife’s new watch is in that shipment. There are about ninety-nine other people also waiting for watches, if that is any consolation, sir. No, yes, I see that, I have it right here, your ordering date. I know how long we’ve had your money, sir. The watch is here, sir, it is in Chicago waiting to be shipped to us. As soon as it clears customs it will be on the next plane to Dallas–Fort Worth. Yes sir. They have other brokers. We do need our regular broker, sir, you understand, customs is very complicated. I don’t know if Schopenhauer’s office is even aware of the situation yet, sir. The fire was just last night. Our owner is on the phone now solving the problem, sir. If you can just bear with us. I know how long you have been waiting, sir. But we have our health, don’t we? Better than poor Schopenhauer can say. No, that was not a joke, sir. Do I recognize the seriousness of the situation? Schopenhauer is a dear friend of mine, I have known him for ten years. Well, thank you, sir, I appreciate that. I am sure Schopenhauer would say the same. Don’t worry sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Myers. Goodbye.”

  “Perfect,” Jim said. He was very pleased. He grabbed me happily by the shoulder. “Great! Now we can tell him the paperwork was burnt up in the fire. That guy—what is his name?—that Chicago broker could have accidentally taken the paperwork with him.”

  “It was a nightclub.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We can all be mad at him! What kind of a moron takes his important papers to a nightclub? Where did we find this joker? We are never doing business with him again! But the watches are in limbo until customs gets the new papers. It could be weeks, even months. But it’s not our fault. It’s that damn broker. And hard to be too mad at him, after all, with his burns and recovery. There you go. That’s exactly what I was trying to teach you. Let’s use that same line on everybody this morning. They all get the fire story. What’s that guy’s name? Here, write it down for me. I like how it sounds, what did you say it is? French?”

  I showed him where I had written it down on the page of legal pad that would go into Myers’s file. “It’s German,” I said.

  “Huh. That spelling doesn’t help. How do you say that? Say it for me again. I like that name. Let’s use that a lot. Poor ole Shoopenhauer.”

  “Schopenhauer,” I said.

  “Right, got it. Shoopenhauer. Burned up in the great Chicago fire of 1987.”

  He picked up a line. “This is Brad Reynolds on Rolexes, how can I help you? Mr. Branson? Oh, yes sir, one moment, let me look up your information on the computer, sir. No sir, I’m afraid Jim Clark is out at an auction today. But I can certainly help you, sir. A men’s Explorer? Beautiful watch, I used to own one myself. Now, sir, your watch has arrived in the United States, but let me explain to you about the customs process. You see, there was a fire last night in Chicago. Oh, you heard? Yes, ghastly. Just terrible. Well, the problem is this.”

  •

  Out on the highway, on the runs, was like working the back-of-the-house. The back-of-the-house had a camaraderie and ease that the sales floor lacked. In back you could feel that the customers were not people. Being out on the highway, doing the runs, you listened to whatever music you pleased, you could stop at Hardee’s and eat an order of chicken strips with that mustard sauce, you could find a park and stop there for a while—there was a cemetery near Granddad’s where I often stopped in the late afternoons—and read a chapter of a book or just lie on your back and watch the clouds. I wished Lisa could come hang out with me there. Even in the cold I would lie there, some afternoons, for half an hour, between the gravestones, and smoke a joint, and smell the winter air.

  As Christmas approached and my phone sales improved they let me leave the store less and less. I was often at the top of the daily phone sales board, and a couple of times I made the top of the week. That meant a five-hundred-dollar cash bonus. So Sheila kept me on the phones all day long, but in the evenings I still did my Dallas runs.

  This December night it was after eight and I called from Kizakov’s to tell Jim I was going to drive straight home after I made the last Dallas drop. But he wasn’t there. I asked for Lisa and she wasn’t there, either. So I changed my mind about going straight home and thought I would swing by the store and see if they were back yet. They probably just went out for a quick bite of dinner, I thought. Maybe all three of us could go get a beer before we went home. And then Jim and I could ride home together.

  In the parking garage I saw the two of them. Lisa was sitting on the nose of Jim’s car with her hands between her legs and Jim stood a few feet away from her. It was dark and cold in the garage but light came through the open-aired space from the next building over. When you were getting into your car you could look into their office windows at night.

  Jim and Lisa had not seen me. I had parked the car at the other end and was heading for the elevator when I saw it was them. I moved between two cars to watch them.

  Lisa was crying.

  I could hear Jim saying, “Oh, Lisa. What were you . . . ?”

  I held my breath to listen more closely.

  She said, “I don’t know what to do now. I’m afraid to go home.”

  I listened closer still.

  “I didn’t even remember my stupid shirt,” she said. “I’m such a moron. I didn’t even want to tell you.”

  “I want to help you, Lisa,” he said. He ran his fingers down the side of her face. “I mean, I’m here for you. That’s not what I’m saying. But this time you need to clean up this mess of yours yourself.”

  I drove home. I should get on I-35 and drive back to Canada, I thought. Due north. While you two go enjoy your own private lives together.

  It was the next night, after closing, and Lisa and I were alone in Mr. Popper’s office. She sat on his desk. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. Her yellow shoes dangled from her toes. Those curvy, high-arched feet of hers, in her black hose.

  She brought it up all on her own. That was welcome.

  “I need some money, Bobby,” she said.

  I had a little bit of money. It was money that had accumulated from my lunch-money borrowing from the cash drawer, and from a few larger receipts I had torn up and pocketed all of the cash. A tennis bracelet for nine hundred was my biggest hit. I had about fifteen hundred dollars hidden in a shoe box in the closet of my bedroom at Jim’s. Along with the Christmas presents I had stolen for Wendy and her family, and a rope of pearls I thought my mom would like. The exact amount of cash was thirteen hundred and sixty dollars. I often counted it at night before going to sleep.

  “I could give you some money,” I told her. “I could give you five hundred. Actually, I have two thousand dollars I could give you if you wanted.” I could steal the missing six hundred from the cash box tomorrow, if necessary. Or give her part of my paycheck.

  I did not care about the money. I never cared about the money, in fact. It was just fun to have it for a while.

  She laughed. But it was not her regular laugh.

  “I wasn’t asking you for money, Bobby. I was just telling you. To talk about it. I am in a little trouble. A real bit of trouble.”
<
br />   She pulled on her fingers that way she sometimes did.

  I wished I could tell her what I had seen the night before. I could help her solve the problem as well as Jim, I figured. Better. He thought you needed to learn from your mistakes. He would do that to me when we were growing up. “Consequences suck, Bobby,” he would say. I had been thinking up a plan. If Lisa and I went back to Canada I would get my old job at the gas station back. We might rent an apartment. If the police were involved they couldn’t get her in Canada. Or whoever it was that was after her. Calgary is a long way from Texas.

  “If you were ever, like, if you had broken the law or something, anything like that, I would want to help you,” I said. “Any kind of help, I mean. Not just money.”

  Then her mood seemed to change.

  She laughed again. But this time it was such a happy, kind laugh that it made me realize she hadn’t laughed that way in weeks.

  I was not sure what to say next.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

  Two gigantic light fixtures made of glass butterflies turned very slowly in the ceiling. They sent spots of every color across the room and the long, pale Arabian carpets.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Bobby. Don’t worry so much.” I must have looked crestfallen. “Come over here to kiss me,” Lisa said. “Come give me one of those Bobby kisses.”

  We kissed while I stood and she sat on the edge of Mr. Popper’s enormous metal desk with her knees bent around me, in her legs as I was, and her arms dangling like free tree limbs over my shoulders and neck and arms and my back.

  It was not a complicated theft. Lisa wasn’t why I stole the money. It was just there. I saw the ten thousand dollars on the bookkeeper’s desk, so I placed five thousand dollars in each of my shoes. The shoes were too big, which helped. Jim had bought them for me that first day I landed, the day with Lisa and the limousine, and I had wanted big ones. I was timid to ask for the correct, smaller size with Lisa looking on. They were my black alligators. It was December 17 and I was standing in my socks in the bookkeeper’s office with ten thousand dollars in my shoes on the floor. I tried pushing my feet in just as they were and it turned out there was no need even to untie the bows. They were that loose. Plus I was wearing silk socks.

  With the cash under my feet the shoes actually fit better. I hurried down the back hallway and out into the crowd of customers, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, while also trying to look like it was just ordinary me, on my way out the door to lunch. I couldn’t look back over my shoulder to see if anyone saw me leaving. Then I was outside. I walked through the icy streets of downtown Fort Worth to the bank a few blocks from the store and wired half of the money to my old bank account at Royal Bank in Calgary. It would be safe, there, in Canada. Lisa needed the money, but it was a good idea to put a little aside for myself, too. This was my first bank account and I had had it since I was seven years old. I had opened it for my paper route. For my collections money. Plus that way once I gave Lisa the other half, all the money would be gone, and I didn’t want any of it around. No evidence.

  The only tricky part about the stealing was the wiring paperwork. I figured I should save it in case the wire did not go through. Then when I came back to the store I lost my nerve and tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. This was in the executive bathroom right outside the bookkeeper’s office where I had discovered the money. The same bathroom by the stairs to Popper’s office, that we weren’t supposed to use that I always used. When I went back to the bathroom to check on the toilet, perhaps twenty minutes later—thinking I better make sure, because I had been afraid to look under the lid when I flushed it the first time—when I lifted the lid I saw the torn-up paper was still in the bowl. I tore up the wet paper smaller and flushed it again with some toilet paper. The third flush it finally went down. But if someone had found that paper that would have been it.

  Mr. Popper sat behind his desk and Sheila paced around the room. She nearly tripped over my legs as she walked, and then again over my feet. But she didn’t say anything to me. The bar fridges were on the floor, built into enormous Chinese lacquered cabinets on one wall, so I was on my hands and knees.

  I was stocking Mr. Popper’s two bar fridges with Diet Dr Peppers, Tabs, Perrier, and gold-lidded pints of strawberry and coffee Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

  Behind Mr. Popper a television was tuned to the news. It was on mute. There was a story about the ice storm that had closed much of the city. This was the big ice storm of 1987 and everyone said it was grisly news for the store because no one would come downtown in the ice, and we were only a week from Christmas. At this time of year we could see five hundred thousand dollars a day on the showroom floor. That was not counting the phones. But the ice storm could kill all of that.

  Three salesmen, plus Jim, Dennis, and Popper’s wife, Sheila, were seated at Popper’s desk. Everyone faced Mr. Popper, watching him. No one noticed me. This was a good thing about being sixteen. They did not see me in the same way they saw one another. To encourage them not to think about me I kept my eyes on my stocking. If I seemed interested I would suddenly be less innocent. I endeavored to restock the contents of the refrigerator in the manner of a child who, without knowing how it had happened, found himself playing a boy’s game among the legs, faces, and mysterious conversations of a group of friendly adults. But I also needed to stay in the office for as long as possible so that I could hear this conversation.

  As a teenager I was not frightened. Perhaps I was jumpy.

  “It wasn’t Lisa,” Jim said. “She reported it.”

  “It could have been anyone.”

  “She wants to take a polygraph.”

  “A polygraph won’t catch an expert fucking prevaricator like that. Don’t fucking kid yourself. They don’t have a polygraph machine strong enough to trip up her kind of prevarication.”

  That was Sheila. She loved the word prevaricator. I asked Jim about it once and he said the story was that she had once accused her father of telling a lie and he had told her not to use that word because it was a hateful word—“Two words a Christian won’t use,” he had supposedly said, “hate, and lie”—so Sheila always said prevaricator, prevaricate, and prevarication. Apparently Mr. Popper had tried to switch her to dissimulation because it had a less rednecky ring to it, but no luck. She was always accusing everyone around her of prevaricating. That’s the kind of person she was.

  “She’s a cokehead. Everybody knows it. A cokehead will do anything.”

  “It might have been a customer. Someone using the bathroom.”

  “They would have been with a salesperson. Don’t be ridiculous. A customer is never back in that bathroom alone. Plus who would go into Cindy’s office?”

  “If the door was open. With the cash just sitting there.”

  “We can check the cameras.”

  “I can’t believe Cindy would walk away from her desk with that cash on it. What was that woman thinking?” This was Mr. Popper. I glanced up and saw the way he glared at his wife. Cindy the bookkeeper was Sheila’s responsibility. She reported directly to Sheila.

  I never had the courage to look at my own wife that way, later. That was a look men used to have with their wives that we men today have forsaken, relinquished, or lost.

  “There are no cameras in the bathroom.”

  “Not in the bathroom. To see who went in back. They have timers on them. We can check them against the time.”

  “I know it wasn’t Lisa,” Jim said.

  “The cameras are on the showcases. There are no cameras in back. The cameras are all on the floor.”

  “It could have been Cindy. Why not Cindy? I would be tempted if I were her,” Dennis said. What an innocent thing to say, I thought. You can learn from that, Bobby, I told myself. Dennis was that smart. That street-smart, I mean.

  “It wasn’t Cindy, you moron. For chrissake.”

  That was Sheila again. She always frightened me. She was not the sor
t of person who thought children—children like I am only a child, really, I wanted to remind them all—were naïve. Plus she did not even like her own children. She would have fired me over that first Rolex deal if I hadn’t been Jim’s little brother.

  “Cindy was in the bathroom. That’s why the money was on her desk.”

  “These fucking salespeople. No fucking gratitude.” Sheila swore frequently. In Texas they call it cursing. “Why do you curse so much, Sheila?” Roger or Paul would ask her, and she would say, “Fuck you,” to be funny. But to a Canadian it was unnerving.

  “Ten grand. It takes some balls to stick ten grand in your purse.”

  “Or your pocket. Why does it have to be a purse?” Jim said. He was a defender of women. Or maybe he was still thinking of Lisa.

  “A lousy ten grand,” Popper said. “Why take the risk for that? Frustrating. I don’t care about the damn money.”

  “Well I sure as fuck care about the money, Ronnie. And you should damn well care yourself.”

  “You’re missing the point, Sheila. The point is there is a criminal among us.”

  He was Ali Baba in the house of a thousand thieves and he trusted these people. I have since noticed that both trusting and trustworthy people often have this problem of insufficient skepticism and investigation of the truth. It may be a laziness they share.

  “Not even into that hallway? There must be a camera that can check that.”

  “They had to put the money somewhere. That’s a good point. That much money wouldn’t fit in your pants pockets.”

  “You wouldn’t walk back into the phone room. Too many people.”

  “You would be too nervous.”

  “We might see if someone let a customer through the gate.”

  “Why take the cash off Cindy’s desk when you knew it would be noticed? Why not just hit the cash box? You could hit the cash box every day and no one would ever notice.” I glanced up because of a familiar sound in the way he said it and there was Jim giving me a close look. I arranged the cans of soda. Dr Peppers on the left, Tabs on the right. In the door were Sheila’s Frescas and Perriers.