How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  After I hung up, the Polack was back in my office. “She is who?” she said.

  “She’s a customer, Polack,” I said.

  “Okay. Customer. Fine. That’s what you say. Who? Who from? How does she know to ask your name? I do not know this customer. She sounds like someone I know.”

  “She’s a referral,” I said.

  “I said that. Whose?” the Polack said.

  “Not now,” I said. “Polack. Please. It’s Jim’s business. Okay?”

  “Good. I talk to him about it,” she said.

  “No,” I said. I almost called her Emily, to try to get through to her. But that would be a giveaway. “It’s his personal business. Drop it.”

  At lunch I told the Polack that the customer who had called was an old girlfriend of Jim’s, a girlfriend from the Lily days, who was now a hooker. I didn’t tell her it was Lisa. You know, the useful cliché, keep the lie as close to the truth as you can.

  “He does that? He pays these women to have sex with him?” she said. “So she asks for you. This is the story?”

  The Polack ate her mozzarella-and-tomato salad. She was also having a bucket of mussels. Unlike me, she preferred the large ones.

  “I kind of knew her, too,” I said. “I mean, she left Jim just as I was coming in the business. That’s why she asked for me. She wanted to know what Jim’s romantic situation was. Like she had some kind of interest in him, I guess. Other than his money. I don’t really know. But I cleared it up. I told her, you know, that she should just ask Jim. I told her that we didn’t really get involved in one another’s personal lives.” I always had difficulty lying to the Polack. She was so suspicious that she made you feel like you were saying, Okay now I am going to lie to you, and then trying to tell the lie. It doesn’t work. It’s self-contradictory.

  “I do not blame him. With this latest wife of his. Who would want to have sex with that? No. But, the hooker? For money? Do you ask, how many other cocks are in the hole? Now your cock is Mr. Lucky? We all fuck her at once! Shove in the cocks! More! Like a hotel. But we all sleep in the same bed!”

  Lately the Polack wore her hair pulled back but today she had let it down and it made her look more human. She had angular cheekbones, long legs, and, when she wore short dresses or skirts, the kind of bony knees that made her look like a French or an Italian woman in a photo on a runway. But with the unjust and vulgar way she explained the motivations of other people, and more generally her outlook on life, she could seem almost ugly. For an unpleasant moment I wished a magical truck would leap the curb—we were eating outside, on the patio—and run her over right before my eyes. Stop dead with a huge rubber wheel crushing her belly and the crumpled chair beneath her. With that bit of white mozzarella squeezed from her lips. Then I thought, Bobby. You’re cheating on the Polack, too. She’s only trying to have a real relationship with you. She deserves your affection as much as anyone does. Or nearly as much. If you will just give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “It’s not such a big deal, Polack,” I said.

  “This is bad for a married man. You should be telling him yourself. You are the brother. A married man should not go fuck some hooker. He breaks a promise.”

  “I’m married, Polack.” Why do you say things like that, Bobby? Are you so determined to make your own life worse?

  “I understand. And I am not the hooker. Or you forget?”

  “What I’m saying is leave it alone. Plus if you say something then he would know I told you. He’s my brother, Polack. He has to trust me. I should never have told you in the first place. But I knew, I mean, I thought you would show some discretion. This is important. I need to know I can tell you things, Polack. Without you running straight to repeat them to Jim. Anyway it’s none of our business.”

  “Okay. No problem. I will tell it like a joke. We joke like that together. Jim and I, we have our friendship. I know him long before you.”

  “But I told you.”

  Her salad and her mussels were gone. She reached with her fork and started on my gnocchi. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t hungry. But it made me sick to watch her forking it up like that over the table.

  “Go ahead and eat it,” I said, though she hadn’t asked.

  I thought, Now I have to tell Jim the whole thing. He will want to call her, too. I did not think he would want to pay her for sex, like I was. But he would want to be friendly with her. He might even start dating her again. I didn’t know what his status was with his current girlfriend. Plus his latest wife, of course. I could ask him not to call her, I thought. But who knew what he would think about that. He might just laugh about it. “Like you said. She’s a hooker now,” he would say. But he would call her anyway. Then he would tell her the story about the Polack and the lie I told her about Jim. She might think it was a sweet story. But they might laugh about it together.

  Unless he has already called her, I thought. Then I didn’t have to tell him anything. Or I could just say, Lisa called for you, earlier, and the Polack asked about it. I wondered if there was a way I could get the truth out of Sylvia. But she had been a hooker and a madam for years. She could keep a secret better than anyone.

  There had to be a way to turn this to my advantage. It had that feel to it, like if I thought about it with my whole brain I could figure it out. Like a chess move that you know is there, and then you discover it.

  What couldn’t happen was that the Polack would find out about me and Lisa.

  I could watch Jim’s eyes when I told him. If he blinked too much I’d know they were already talking.

  But then, if they weren’t talking yet, and I told him, they’d start talking.

  How could I keep them from talking? That’s what I needed to figure out.

  Lisa and I were about to go away for a weekend—she knew about a house you could rent on the Oregon coast—when Dad called to tell me he was coming to town.

  “We’re pretty busy, Dad,” I said on the phone. “Christmas is practically right around the corner. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get away.”

  “It’s August, son,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Christmas isn’t for six months. I want to meet my granddaughter. Are you trying to tell me I can’t meet my own granddaughter?” He laughed. It was a deep, happy laugh, one of those good laughs I’d known for years, and it fooled me.

  My dad met his granddaughter in an IHOP off I-30. He told us he was on his way to Sedona. “To meet John Denver,” he said. “I gave him the title for his new album.” Uh-huh, I thought.

  Wendy met me there half an hour before he arrived. Claire walked in with her, holding her hand. With the other arm she clutched a stuffed black poodle.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I said. I picked up Claire and held her in my lap.

  “Daddy,” Claire said. “Hi, Daddy.” Suddenly she was shy. She placed her face against my neck. I took off one of my cufflinks for her to play with. I showed her how the back flipped on its platinum spring.

  “I wanted to see your dad,” Wendy said.

  “You won’t recognize him. What are you going to eat?” I asked her. “What should Claire have? What are you hungry for, honey? How about some pancakes? They have chocolate chip pancakes.”

  “She doesn’t like chocolate chip pancakes. It’s dinnertime. Why don’t you have a hot dog, Claire? She should eat some protein,” Wendy said. “Have you seen your dad yet? How is he?”

  “I want pancakes, Daddy,” Claire said. “I want chocolate pancakes. I do too like them. Yes, I do. I do not want a hot dog.” She spoke precisely, emphasizing every sound, as if she had invented the word at the moment she used it.

  “Yes, I saw him,” I said to Wendy. Dad had come by the store earlier. I didn’t want to talk about it. But Wendy always missed those cues or, more likely, ignored them. She used to tell me, “Don’t make that face,” and I would say, “You can’t edit my facial expressions.” But really she was in the right.

  Jim and I had cleaned out his car
that afternoon. It was full of clothing, books and tapes, old food, and cockroaches. There were other, smaller bugs. There was even a mouse. It jumped out of the car and ran away across the parking lot. Good for you, I thought. Better luck. Our dad had been sleeping in his car for weeks.

  “Your poor dad.”

  “You are the only one who ever feels sorry for him,” I said.

  “You, too. You do, too. You feel sorry for him.”

  “Well, I’m still talking to him. Jim won’t even talk to him now. But he helped me clean out his car.”

  My dad walked in the door. He had lost weight and there was more gray but he still had that aura around him, like his body was charged with a magnetic field that stimulated the nearby air molecules, atoms that were listless around the rest of us. His hazel eyes shone at me behind his heavy tortoiseshell glasses just as they always had. If things had been better in my own life I could have believed, maybe, looking at him and the easy way he walked, the same old Guccis and his gold rep tie, that he was not in this terrible state of degeneration. When he hugged me I smelled the cinnamon pipe smoke and the Yves Saint Laurent cologne in his beard.

  “This is your grandfather, Claire.”

  “Yup, she’s a girl, all right,” he said, and sat down. “Did you order for me, son?”

  Claire hid her face in my neck. I hugged her closer.

  “Hello there, Claire. She has her mother’s eyes,” he said, and smiled at Wendy. You can’t even see Claire’s eyes, Dad, I thought. But Wendy looked encouraged already. He was crazy, but he was sure the same good old Dad, too.

  “Are you two doing all right? Are you better?” he asked my wife. She looked at her pancakes. She had ordered the chocolate chip pancakes and split them with Claire.

  “Always take care of your family, son,” he said. “A man takes care of his family.”

  I felt Wendy eyeing me, so I did not look over there.

  “Let’s talk about you, Dad,” I said.

  Over dinner he told us about his travels and his plans. He was going to open a church in Las Vegas or buy a motel in the mountains near Carmel. “I think Shirley is interested in investing, son,” he said. “I’ll ask her about jewelry if you like. But I think she prefers natural stuff. She’s not into the material thing, you know. She’s well beyond that.”

  “What’s he like? John Denver. In person, I mean. You guys have been friends for years, right? Didn’t you first meet at Ananda?”

  I gave Wendy a look to say, Please don’t encourage him. But that started him off. Claire and I sat back and played until he was done.

  After Wendy and Claire left the pancake house my dad tried to extract the whole story from me.

  “Fess up, son. I can see what’s going on here with my own two eyes. Your old man’s not an ass.”

  I did not tell him about the separation. I explained that business was booming.

  “Not the way your brother tells it. He says you guys are in serious shit with one of your big investors.”

  I was surprised that Jim had told him that. We had two one-year notes coming due for nearly a million bucks and our line of credit at our other bank was maxed out. And even Granddad was in no mood to float us. He said he wanted to see some green coming the other direction, for a change. But we had made it through the summer. Everybody was hurting in the summer.

  “Dindy says you guys spend more time playing backgammon than you do balancing your books. He says you’re three months behind on your P and Ls. That’s no way to run a business, son.”

  “So where are you headed next, Dad? A new church, huh? That’s the plan? What are you going to call it?”

  “We are talking about your marriage, Robby. Your brother tells me things are on the rocks for you two. You can’t afford a divorce, son. Emotionally, I mean. You can’t do that to that beautiful little girl. That’s what your mother did to me and look at the problems it’s given you boys. Your mother’s the reason you’re in this mess right now.”

  Was Jim on drugs? Surely all of this wasn’t coming from my big brother.

  “This is not about Mom, Dad. And Wendy and I are fine. Jim doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Are you sure you got this from Jim?”

  “How’s your sex life, son? How are things in the sack with you two? Marriage can cool things down. You know the old saying. It’s a great institution, if you want to live in an institution.”

  “It’s fine, Dad.”

  “You can tell me, son. Does she have orgasms?”

  “Dad, I do not want to talk about this.”

  “I understand. That can take time. That may be the heart of the problem. It can take years to learn how to make a woman come. But it’s important, son. I can give you a book. If you need a little help, I mean.” He gave me that sideways glance.

  •

  Why did you get married at all?”

  Lisa came up with that question from nowhere I could see. We were lying in the sun with our eyes closed and our sunglasses on, side by side, holding hands between the deck chairs. I had thought she was asleep. Even with my new Persols on, the sun was as red as grapefruit through my eyelids. We were drinking those fresh-squeezed lime juice margaritas they have at the Four Seasons that are the best in Texas. The best north of the Rio Grande Valley.

  I didn’t mind telling her the truth.

  “It was after you left me. Dumped me, I mean.”

  “Hey,” she said. I lifted my glasses and saw that she was smiling. She wasn’t looking at me, she was just lying there smiling. She looks so nice, I thought.

  I should have gone ahead and said that to her.

  “Anyway. I went back to Calgary. I got a job selling encyclopedias. Then my dad offered me eight grand to fly down to Florida and drive across the country with him. Even if he hadn’t offered me the money I couldn’t really say no. I had turned down a trip to India and a monastery in the Himalayas so I could hang out with Wendy. I still felt guilty about it. He called the Himalayas the Himahooleeyas. ‘This summer me and my son here are going to the Himahooleeyas,’ he would tell the checkout girl at the drugstore, ‘want to come along?’ So I flew down to Florida. We spent a few days in New Orleans and then we came across on I-10 to visit Jim and see his new store.”

  I took her hand and put it on my stomach. I was getting fatter, lately. I was sweating in the sun. We should get in the water, I thought. Cold water sounds nice right about now.

  “If we would start doing drugs again I could lose this weight,” I said.

  “That is not funny, Bobby,” she said.

  “There was this cocktail waitress. I told my dad, ‘That’s the kind of girl I would ask out on a date if I had the balls to ask any girl out on a date.’

  “‘So ask her out,’ he said, and I said, ‘That girl is way out of my league.’”

  “You really do not get women at all,” Lisa said.

  “That’s what my dad said. He was always telling me when I was a teenager, ‘If you want to get laid, son, you have to learn to think like a woman.’ And I would ask him if we could talk about something else. Anyway, when our waitress came back to the table my dad said, ‘My son here thinks you are out of his league but I am betting you would go out with him. What do you think?’”

  “That’s a dad for you,” Lisa said. She smiled. My dad and Lisa could have been friends, I bet, if I weren’t in the middle of them. But because she was my lover my dad would not think of her with his usual generosity. He would treat her like I imagine he treated his own lovers, when he was married to my mother. He would treat her like she was only invited to join our civil company because she was providing a married man with his necessary recreational sex. For him she’d be one step up from a porno magazine on a newspaper stand. Or maybe even one step down.

  “So what did she say? She didn’t say okay.”

  “No. She said, ‘I like both of you. I think you’re both nice. Either one of you might ask me out and I might go.’”

  “Well, that was honest of her
. She was a friendly girl, wasn’t she?”

  “So he asked her,” I said. “He asked me if it was okay when she left the table.”

  “I do not even believe you,” she said.

  “I know. That’s how charming he is. He does it without even trying. It’s like some old nurse who was a witch taught him the secret smile to use when he was born. I bet he got even more girls when he was drinking.”

  “I meant, for you,” Lisa said. She sipped her margarita. I could tell her eyes were frowning behind her sunglasses and I felt like I was telling the story wrong. It wasn’t anything against my dad, I wanted to tell her.

  “It wasn’t hurtful. It was just one of those things. He was teaching me something. Like hitting me on the head with a stick.” Like a Zen master. He was helping me. To get free of him, maybe. Of trying to be like him.

  “Okay,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t hurt to get hit with a stick?”

  “I’m not explaining it right. Really it was a good thing. But anyway, that made me see things differently. Wendy, I mean. It made me see the value of Wendy. More clearly than I did, I mean.” Was that what he wanted? “I mean, she loved me. She believed in me. I understood that I wasn’t one of those guys I always wanted to be. With women, I mean.”

  Telling the story was making it less clear in my own mind.

  “I need another margarita,” I said. “Do you need another margarita?”

  She was quiet. Her straw made a sucking sound at the bottom of her drink.

  “Hey, not to change the subject, but when is Jim’s baby coming?” she asked me. “Isn’t their baby due any day?”

  One of our salesmen had gotten a girl pregnant and Jim and his latest wife were adopting the little baby boy, who would be born in a week or two. They were going to call him Tanner.

  “Plus, you know, honestly, nobody will ever love me the way Wendy does,” I said. “I mean, except for Jim, I guess. But he’s my brother. That’s reason enough to get married right there.”

  She reached out and took my sunglasses off. It was bright as a lightbulb out there by the surface of the pool.