How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  Around the middle of the afternoon Mr. Popper disappeared. That was unusual on Christmas Eve. Normally that was the one day of the year he would spend the whole day out on the floor with us, Jim said. About an hour later the crowd began to water down. There were drunks among the customers and the Watchman was passed out in his chair at his desk. Sheila was nowhere to be found, probably doing a last-minute shopping run herself. The rent-a-cops were blinking their eyes. One of them was twirling his leather-billed hat like a top on the banks of video monitors. They were waiting for their Christmas bonuses. Soon Popper would be down with the envelopes.

  By shortly after five we had chased out our last panicky I-can’t-believe-it’s-Christmas-Eve-already husband, and locked the big double plate-glass-and-brass doors, and yet there was no Mr. Popper. People needed to get to their own families. But not without those December commission checks and the Christmas bonuses. We knew Cindy had been calculating and printing them all day yesterday and today. Mr. Popper signed them and then sealed them in an envelope, each with its bonus, which was secret and in cash. We were not allowed to discuss our bonuses. But I knew Jim was expecting fifteen grand or better.

  With all of us gathered idly around the showcases and wandering in and out of the back-of-the-house, at last Jim said, “I’ll go see what’s up,” assuming Popper was up in his office, but then Mr. Popper appeared at the front door. Outside the front door, I mean. We saw him through the glass. He had his keys in his hands and he opened the door. Then he stopped and opened the lock on the other door, the one we often did not bother to open, so that both doors could swing wide. He came into the middle of the showroom floor among the showcases. He was ringed with policemen and more serious-looking strangers, and then I knew with clarity what would happen next. They had lied to Jim about Rita to lure me back into the store. Or it might be, even, that Jim had lied. But no, that couldn’t be. They had tricked him because we were brothers and now I was caught. Lisa was right. She knew not to come back. Why hadn’t I listened to her? I thought I was so fucking clever. I outsmarted everybody. Now they would arrest me in front of everyone and take me to prison in cuffs. The doors were locked and there was no place to escape to. The salespeople and the rent-a-cops and the phone sales women and the Watchman and the other back-of-the-house guys and the Wizard and the gift-wrappers and the black-fingered jewelers in their aprons and the beautiful teenage hostesses and Jim all surged softly toward Popper, expecting. They didn’t understand what was about to happen. They could never feel sorry for me, not on Christmas Eve. It was like a pack. I tried to drift to the back. But they were thick around me. I did not know where to run. My eyes were starting to fill with tears. And Popper spoke.

  “Well, Merry Christmas, everyone,” he said.

  I thought perhaps I could feign fainting. Or faint for real, even.

  “I have some bad news. Don’t want to keep you good folks waiting around on Christmas Eve any longer than necessary. I really hate to do what I’ve been given no choice but to do.” Run, Bobby. The doors are unlocked. Run! “Seems these fellas here”—and he waved his arm generally at the men around him, who moved in closer—“think we’ve—that is, I’ve—been up to some kind of wrongdoing. They aren’t too specific on the particulars, and you all don’t need to worry none. Don’t worry about any single little thing. Our lawyers will have this solved in no time, you can rest assured of that.” And he gave one of the men in particular a hard look. The man looked away at his shoes. “But they’re closing us down.” A wind went through the room. “And I’m afraid they won’t let me write you your Christmas checks. These boys won’t let me put a single damn dollar in your pockets for your families’ Christmases. And I know better than anyone how hard you’ve worked and how much you deserve it. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. And, for what it’s worth, Merry Christmas.”

  He was tearing up. He smiled this strong smile.

  “All right, fellas, let’s get this done.”

  There was silence. Someone started to cry. Then a couple more joined in. Someone said, “Goodbye, Mr. Popper.” I expected a round of applause. They bundled him up and took him away. Three or four of the serious men in badly cut blue suits stayed behind to collect the store keys. They even collected case keys. The people who had safe combinations wrote them down. The men answered every question with a business card that had a lawyer’s phone number on it. They would not even respond to the questions of the rent-a-cops, who were important regular off-duty Fort Worth policemen.

  Jim handed in his keys and we drove home.

  “I wonder how long I’ll get to keep the Porsche,” he said as we stepped cautiously up the icy steps to his door.

  The day after Christmas I went back to Wendy and Calgary. Lisa had taken the money, that morning, but I had my stash in the closet, and the other five grand was waiting for me at the Royal Bank of Canada. I used it to buy Wendy a car, a preowned Fiat Spider convertible. I gave it to her for Valentine’s Day. That was my first car. Then, a year or so later, Jim called and asked me to join him in his new business. We called it Clark’s Precious Jewels.

  PART TWO

  We were sitting in Jim’s office beneath the new Lalique crystal chandelier. “It will interfere with grading diamonds for color,” Jim had said while they were hanging it, “but I don’t give a damn. The thing is so expensive it will put people in the mood.”

  “Speaking of money, how are we doing? Did you call Donnie today?” I asked him. Donnie was our principal Fort Worth banker. Not for our loans but for our operating accounts. The borrowing bankers were all in Dallas. We called Donnie every morning to find out our balances. “Did you make that deal with Alan?”

  “He’ll be in before the weekend. You know Alan. He’s very reliable when it comes to business. Plus the bracelet is right here.” He shook a bulging job envelope on his desk. “He says he’s got a big party this weekend. He won’t show up without this bracelet on.”

  It was an eighteen-karat yellow gold Rolex-style bracelet with round diamonds bezel-set on the small outside links, and baguette-cut diamonds bar-set all the way up the center link. The clasp was invisible so the diamonds went all the way around the wrist. An ugly thing, bulky, inelegant, but technically successful and sturdily made.

  Jim would sell Alan and our other drug-dealer and celebrity clients crap like this because it was what they wanted and it was very profitable. I made the mistake of trying to sell them what I wanted to see them wearing. I still believed I could be proud of my customers. The ones I liked, I mean.

  We were sorting a package of the tiny round diamonds called diamond melee at Jim’s desk. As he aged I noticed, more and more, how much Jim looked like our father. They carried their shoulders in the same way. Especially when he bent over the desk to inspect the diamond melee he might have been our father, viewed from behind, with a few extra pounds and with shorter hair.

  “How did the sweeps come out?” I asked Jim. “Did you send Granddad his cut?”

  “Great,” he said. “Yeah, I sent it to him. I had Sosa run it over. He said he seemed nervous. Probably should have brought it myself. I’ve got your envelope, too. It’s right here in my drawer.”

  At the end of every month we gathered the gold sweeps from the benches and the casting area and sent it over to the smelters. Half of that cash went to me and Jim, and the other half went straight to Granddad, in the same courier package with the profit-and-loss statement and the ledger on his merchandise accounts. Initially our system had made Granddad anxious. Like most multimillionaires, over the years he had learned to avoid cash.

  “What about the IRS?” Granddad had asked. “I can’t do a damn thing with this, Grandson. Can I deposit it in the bank?”

  “Spend it! It’s pocket change for you. It’s the sweeps, Granddad,” we told him. For us these days he was like that rich duck who visits Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

  “It’s untraceable income. You know how it works. We just sweep up the gold dust from the drilling off the f
loor. You sweep every night and this is what you have at the end of thirty days.” We did not mention the extras that never went to the smelter, or that we kept half of every sweep for ourselves.

  “But you probably shouldn’t deposit it in a bank, no,” Jim had said. “A safety deposit box would be fine.”

  “I don’t think you’re listening to me. I wasn’t asking. I was telling. This is a great system you’ve thought up, Grandson. We all go to jail together,” Granddad had said.

  It was strange that Jim had not told me about the sweeps coming in.

  “Glad you asked. I was about to tell you,” he said, and gave me a look. He pulled the envelope from his desk drawer and slid it over to me. “Forty-four hundred. Almost twice what we got last month. I love it when we are building this much custom. The extra cutting and polishing make all that much more gold dust. Even the platinum was up this month. If we knew what we were doing we’d start our own smelting company.”

  That reassured me. He didn’t sound like he was making that up.

  “Wendy will be happy,” I said. “Seems like that’s the only thing I can do these days to please her.”

  He didn’t look up as he spoke.

  “It’s just the baby. It’s called departum depression. When the baby departs the womb. She’ll come around. Concentrate on work, Bobby,” he said. “That’s what I do. Take one worry at a time. Focus on things you can fix. The other problems will solve themselves.”

  “She wants me home more, she says. But as soon as I walk in the door she hands me the baby. I feel like all I do is work, and then I work more when I get home.”

  “She won’t even drive up here to meet you for lunch,” Jim said. “I mean, I don’t want to say anything. But she should make an effort, too. It takes both of you. I hate to say it, but I told you not to marry a Canadian. They don’t understand the business environment. It’s foreign to them. They don’t understand what it takes to make it down here. Lily was no better than Wendy is, in that way. That’s why this time around I bought American-made in the wife department. Look at Wendy’s old man. He’s a professor, for chrissake. A Canadian college teacher. He probably drives a damn Volvo. I bet he was home every day by three o’clock. That’s what she’s comparing you with.”

  I tried to remember if Wendy and I had been happy before the baby was born. But as far as I could remember the last time we had had sex was when she got pregnant. That was nearly two years ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday. Now I was almost twenty-six years old, and the baby was about to turn one.

  Wendy hated the store and over the years she had come to dislike Jim. She would even come out and say it. “I hate that fucking store,” she would say, and I would say, “Wendy, that store is our life.” But I was trying to make us rich. This was what it took. Then we’d have time together. And great vacations. It wouldn’t be like this much longer. I told her that, too. The night before, when we started to fight about it again, I tried to explain this to her. I had said, “I promise, it’s temporary. I love you. Give me five years. I love Claire. I want to be home more.” That last was a lie, but all the other parts were true.

  “You never see Claire,” she had said, and handed her to me. “You never even see your own daughter. When was the last time you changed a diaper, Bobby? When was the last time you bathed her?”

  Claire started to cry. I did my best to hold her the right way. It is a tricky thing to hold a baby properly. Even your own baby. I handed her back to Wendy.

  “Hush,” she said to the baby. “That’s enough, Claire,” she said more firmly.

  “She’s just upset,” I said.

  This is not working, I thought. We had only been married for three years. It was too soon to get a divorce. My mother will love that, I thought.

  Claire continued to cry. Her eyes and her fists were closed. Something about her mouth in its lonely curl reminded me of myself.

  “Stop that, Claire! If you don’t quiet down I’ll give you back to your father.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Well, if it works,” she had said, and walked out of the room.

  “Come on, cheer up,” Jim said. I looked up and saw him watching me carefully. His phone was ringing. It was after hours, so we had the ringers off, but I could see the red light blinking like the light on a police car. The private line. One of the women. Wendy, or Jim’s new wife, or possibly his ex-wife. He sensibly never gave the private line to his girlfriends. His new marriage was going well, however: she was thoughtful and she did not call often. Or it could also be the Polack. The Polack had the private line, naturally.

  “I’m cheerful,” I said. “I’m just sick of sorting melee. Do you mind if we get out of here?”

  “Let’s put the rest of this package in the papers and go have some fun.”

  After the last of the diamonds we went to a dark topless bar in Euless Jim liked. The girls were not as pretty as in the Dallas titty bars but they worked harder. Lap dances were two for twenty dollars, and for fifty you could get a hand job in the back room. You don’t get that kind of treatment in the upscale places. We each blew five hundred bucks or so of our sweeps money. It was a pleasant evening.

  My first and my best crow at Clark’s was Joe Morgan. I picked him up at a giant tent auction we held that summer under a circus tent we erected in the parking lot. The whole parking lot was beneath this enormous white and red tent that the rental guys inflated like an air balloon with enormous fans. We parked the twelve vintage Rolls-Royces we were auctioning at the far end on either side of the auctioneer’s stage. It was the full-page color ad featuring those Rolls-Royces that brought in Morgan, he later told me.

  Many crows are women, and the luxury jewelry business lives on them. Wealthy women who shop for jewelry in the way normal women gather shoes. But a rich male crow is even better than a woman, because women are buying for themselves, but men can at least pretend to be buying for their wives. It is easy for a husband to tell a wife that she does not need another diamond bracelet. But it is difficult, and very unusual, for a wife to tell her husband that she has enough jewelry. Even if she has more than she wants, she does not want to discourage his affection.

  I was selling Morgan an eighteen-karat white gold diamond-and-emerald bracelet that had been assembled a few days before by our antique dealers over in Dallas. They had put it together for a “Grand Jewelry” event Neiman’s was putting on—these two fellows were among Neiman’s largest consigners—but they brought it to us first, because Jim and I had acquired a reputation for turning enormous pieces quickly if they were flashy enough. As soon as I saw it I called Morgan.

  I did not own this bracelet, it was on memo, and I told Morgan that I was preparing to purchase it from a wealthy client and old friend of mine who needed some cash in a hurry.

  “She needs some money that her husband doesn’t know about,” I said.

  He gave me a sly look. “She’s got something on the side, you think?”

  He had a Jack and Coke in his hand. He was a tanned old Texas rancher who had made a fortune, young, in the Gulf, by building and leasing enormous steel barges. He liked to stir around the ice cubes in his drink with his large brown index finger. Usually he would have three or four while he was in the store, and I told the Polack to keep them coming and pour them strong.

  “I don’t think so, she must be in her late seventies.” He was in his early sixties. I tell my salespeople: make the old ones feel young, and the young ones feel grown up. “I think it’s for her daughter. She’s in some kind of trouble.” I knew that his daughter had left her husband and moved back home several years ago.

  “Hell, that happens,” he said, and took a drink. “That’s kids.”

  I knew Morgan would buy this piece but the courtship period was crucial. It would take three or four visits before I would see the check, and in the meantime there would be other buyers he would hear about on the phone: someone would fly in from New York or Toronto, a dealer would ask if he could
take it to a show, an expert on Colombian stones would appraise the emeralds. All this was theater, of course, I had only one customer who could buy this piece. And I only had the bracelet for a week.

  He had the bracelet in his hand. He held it up like it was a fish he had caught by the tail.

  “My wife, she does love platinum, don’t she? That is some kind of pretty platinum bracelet. I don’t think she has many emeralds, does she, Bobby? That’s something she could use. I like those dark emeralds. Those ones with a bit of blue in them are the good ones, ain’t that right?”

  “That’s right, Joe. You want that dark intense green with a blue undertone. Those are the very best.”

  In describing the emeralds, the diamonds, and the provenance of the bracelet—I was improvising a riff on a story I remembered by Jorge Luis Borges—I had forgotten to tell him that it was not platinum but eighteen-karat white gold. If I had dealt with that at the outset it was manageable. I could have explained that old South American pieces were always done in white gold in imitation of the grand European platinum pieces because they had not yet discovered platinum in South America at the turn of the century. That could have led us into a helpful conversation about the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was a surefire winner for a male customer, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford raiding gold mines in Brazil, robbing banks, riding horses, and jumping over waterfalls. But it was too late now. He had been telling himself for an hour that his wife would want it because it was platinum.

  “Joe, let me give her a quick steam for you. All my sales-women pawing the bracelet has put some oil on the stones. Of course, they are all dying just to try it on. Let me steam her off. I want you to see her in all her glory.”