How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  “Let’s have another drink,” she said.

  She sounded odd. But it may have been me. With the sun and not having eaten breakfast I was feeling a bit drunk.

  “There was something I wanted to ask you, too,” I said. Since you already said his name. Since you introduced him into the conversation. Better to get it out now, Bobby. In the open.

  The thing was, a few days before, Jim had answered the phone and started having a conversation with someone who could only have been Lisa.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Okay, I’m hot. I’m getting in the water,” she said. She stood up. The sun was on her back and shoulders. She put her sunglasses on the table. Her movements were abrupt but had that fluidity beneath them like a tree branch shaking in the wind.

  She was so slender that her belly curved in behind her hip bones.

  “Can we talk for a minute, Lisa?” I said. But she dove in.

  Later in the bungalow I questioned her about it directly.

  “Did you call the store the other day? Did you talk to Jim on the phone?”

  She said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Ridiculous was not a word she would use unless she was lying.

  •

  Monday morning when I was back at the store, I asked Jim. It was not really a question we were allowed to ask each other, but I didn’t care.

  “Yeah, she’s called a couple of times. I picked up the phone when she was calling for you, I guess, and recognized her voice. She said you guys are dating a little.”

  I admitted to myself that I was not as surprised as I should have been. He was lying, too. The conversation I heard only a second of before he hung up had nothing to do with Lisa and me. He had been telling her about his last trip to Vegas. The return of Lisa to our lives should have been electrifying news. They didn’t even have their stories straight. As developments go, it was oddly reassuring. By the way he said it I didn’t think they were having sex or anything. Maybe they were just worried about me. They knew how bad things were with Wendy and they were hoping to protect me, trying not to add new worries and complications into my life. It could be that innocent, I thought. It was better if I left it alone. Also, that way, if I was wrong, if they were up to something together, I could keep an eye on them. By playing dumb, I mean.

  So I understood immediately that it was Lisa he was hiding behind his idea of the trip.

  “Get on a plane. You can use the store’s AmEx. That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “Relax with Kizakov in Tel Aviv. The way he splashed the green around on that place of his you wouldn’t even think he’s Jewish. Of course, they are different in Israel than they are over here.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had always wanted to see Jerusalem. “That sounds good. Why not? I could use a little break. You’re right. Good idea,” I said.

  “Buy us some diamonds. We can run a promotion when you get back.”

  I didn’t think they were having sex. He wasn’t trying to get me out of town so they could have a weekend together. They wouldn’t do that to me. Jim wouldn’t look at the sex as a betrayal. He would view that part recreationally. But Lisa would.

  That was an advantage I had over them. Each understood what would count as a betrayal of me differently. I had double indemnity.

  Then I thought: But what would Jim count as a betrayal?

  “Keep it light. Don’t go crazy. Spend a few hundred grand. I need a D Flawless six-carat marquise. A fine make. Ideal make if you can find one. It doesn’t need to be certified. See what you can conjure up. Let Elie hold your hand.”

  So I left them both behind and flew to Israel. I stayed with Kizakov at his mansion in Netanya. I regretted this because I could not drink as much as I wanted or call a hooker. But the hookers seemed scarce in Israel. Hong Kong had been the same unfortunate way.

  I tried calling Lisa several times while I was gone. I knew better than that. But I was up at all hours anyway. I crept down Kizakov’s cool, breezy hallway in the dark and used a phone I had found on a hall table. There was no phone in my guest room, and my phone didn’t work in Israel. One time her phone went straight to voice mail so, quickly, I called Jim’s cell phone. His went straight to voice mail, too.

  After we settled on the diamond buy we went to the coast and had dinner. Israel is an ugly, sandy country under construction, with more bulldozers than trees, but the food was excellent. We had roasted duck and many small plates of delicious pastes and hot flatbread. Kizakov did not drink, so I had a bottle of white Israeli wine to myself. It tasted like copper.

  “Now you want to buy a piece of turquoise,” Kizakov said.

  “For my daughter Claire,” I said. “She was born in December. Two years ago. It’s her birthstone. You know how it is with your children. When you are traveling.”

  “Please, what’s to apologize?” Kizakov said. “I admire turquoise. The true turquoise.”

  Not the next day but the following day, the day before I had to leave, he flew me in his little leather-seated jet to Cairo and we met with the turquoise sellers.

  “This is turquoise de la vieille roche,” the wrinkled Egyptian explained. It was like in a book you read when you were a boy. We sat on a red rug together in our bare feet and he poured the blue stones from leather pouches. The high-ceilinged room was quiet and decorated with many brass and silver ornaments. There was a large Koran on an ornate stand. He explained the quality of different turquoises to me and I learned. His turban was black. There was something in this Bedouin’s ancient face that made me certain I could believe what he told me. But perhaps he merely came from an older, cleverer culture of sales. With Kizakov there, learning, too, serious and deliberate, I felt like a child among these men.

  The Egyptian had finished pieces also, set in orange twenty-two-karat gold, but I selected a stone about the size of the top half of my thumb. It was a color of blue that you have not seen. After the long, patient discussion of price, while they drank tea and he graciously served me a beer, we settled at seventeen thousand. I still have the stone today. That is, my ex-wife has it, in one of that Muslim’s simple leather pouches, in a safety deposit box at her bank, waiting for Claire to turn twenty-one.

  •

  Back in Fort Worth Jim was supposed to pick me up at the airport. I hung around the baggage check for half an hour or so, until the crowd cleared and I was there alone, watching the metal plates roll past, and then I called the store. At first there was no answer. I counted the rings. When I got to fifteen and the voice mail answered, I hung up in disgust and called again. Around ring eleven he answered. Of course, I thought. After eleven rings the owner answers the goddamn phone. I wished we could fire every salesperson we had and start fresh.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “I’m just chatting with my dear friend Shelley,” he said. I recognized his salesman voice. “You bring our big packages of diamonds, buddy? You find a bunch of bargains?”

  “I thought you were picking me up,” I said.

  “Oh, good, good,” he said. “Well, I better run, buddy. See you soon. See you as soon as you get those stones cleared through customs.”

  The diamonds were shipped under separate cover, of course, with insurance, and went through our customs broker.

  I took a cab. But the way things were, since he was supposed to pick me up and left me here, I thought I would go home first and take an hour or two before getting back in to work. Maybe Lisa would have time for an early lunch. But I called and she didn’t answer the phone.

  Where is she all of a sudden? Just since I’ve been away, she disappears, I thought. I wondered if she knew when my plane got back. She didn’t really work during the day. Obviously she wasn’t with Jim. He was at the store.

  •

  “It’s for Wendy,” I told Jim.

  A few days after I was back I bought Lisa an eighteen-karat gold and natural pearl bracelet that an antique dealer from Houston brought in. Normally I would not pay for natural pearls
from a dealer because it was all bullshit, no one had a reliable way of confirming whether or not pearls were natural, you could use badly formed pearls from a farm and they would look like old naturals. But Jim had known this dealer for years and he never misrepresented his merchandise. The bracelet had been made by Cartier in the fifties and it had little knotted bars of gold wound all the way around. It was stamped, and not just on the clasp, which could have been added later. In between the bars were the pearls. Eight millimeters each. Eleven of them.

  “Why would you divorce her and give her a bracelet?” Jim said.

  “We go into arbitration in a few weeks.”

  “Mediation.”

  “That’s what I meant,” I said. “Mediation.”

  “Lord knows I have given my wives enough jewelry,” he said. “But I never picked something out for my ex-wife.”

  It was only Lily he ever referred to when he referred to his ex-wife. The other two were like photocopies of Lily and with each new copy the image was inkier and more blurred. In the most recent divorce, which was only a few months old, Jim had relocated—on paper only, of course—to Nevada, for legal residence, and hired an actress to represent his wife in court. She never even knew they were divorced. She still thought they were merely separated. Tanner, their new little baby, lived with his mother, but Jim gave himself custody in the papers. “Because it was the right thing to do. I love my son. Also for leverage,” he said, “in case she ever acts up.”

  “On the other hand, maybe it’s smart thinking,” Jim said, changing his mind. “She’ll be generous, thinking she might still get you back if she isn’t too greedy. But that bracelet’s a find.”

  “This way it stays in the family,” I said. “It’ll be like a dowry for Claire.” I felt guilty when I said that. I didn’t like to use my daughter for material.

  We were in the car talking when I gave Lisa the bracelet.

  She said, “But Bobby. I don’t wear jewelry.”

  It was true. I had considered that. But that was why she might wear one piece. For me. For us, even.

  “You could try one bracelet,” I said.

  She knew jewelry and could see well enough for herself what kind of a bracelet it was. But I wished I could tell her they were natural pearls.

  “It’s very pretty,” she said. “It’s nice. But I’m so busy. I’m not one of these women who lives in a showcase, Bobby. I would just break it.”

  “It’s old,” I said. “It’s stronger than it looks.”

  “You know how much I love to swim. I would forget it by the pool or I would break it swimming.” She laughed. “I guess they are pearls, though.”

  “You are right,” I said. “You might not want to wear those pearls in a swimming pool.” I could not think about those pearls in water with chemicals.

  “Anyway, the point is I can’t wear jewelry in my business,” she said. “It’s asking for trouble. I would just have to take it off. And if I forget about it and leave it somewhere . . .”

  “You wouldn’t forget it,” I said.

  “I might,” she said. “Sometimes I’m in a hurry to get out.”

  •

  Lisa’s boyfriend drove a blue Toyota pickup. They knew my car, so I stayed back. They went to an apartment complex off Eastchase. It was not too far from the temporary furnished apartment I had rented when I first left the house. It was a gated complex, like most of them over there, so I parked around the corner, on the street. You could not park there but I didn’t think I would be long. I looked for a place to climb the fence. They would be on the second or third floor and the truck would be near the apartment. Most of the fence was metal and there was nothing to grip on but I found a section of old wooden fencing near the pool and used a plastic garbage can that was there to climb over. It was rainy and no one was at the pool. I walked into the laundry room to make myself inconspicuous. Often the manager’s office was near the pool and I didn’t know if I had been seen climbing the fence. It would have been better if I were not in a suit. I got a Diet Coke out of the machine. A man was there in a jogging outfit doing his laundry and he nodded at me.

  “Cold for October,” he said.

  I tried to look as though I belonged. I opened the top of a washing machine.

  “They work fine,” he said. “New machines. But a buck-fifty a load is steep.” He eyed me like he knew something was up.

  “That is steep,” I agreed. “I guess because they’re new.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. He looked like the kind of person who would go to the office to report a suspicious person.

  “My name is Plater,” I said. “Adam Plater.” We shook hands. He had a limp handshake like he didn’t want to shake my hand.

  “I’ve seen you on TV. You are that jeweler. Are you thinking of moving here?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But I’m not that jeweler. I get that all the time, though.”

  “No, you’re him, all right. You got a girlfriend here or something? Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. He was baring his teeth. “If you ever need anything,” I said, and hurried out of the laundry room.

  I almost climbed back over the fence. Then I realized I could walk out the front. But I didn’t want Lisa and her boyfriend to see me if they were leaving. Or if he was still in the truck, waiting. I knew that the man from the laundry room was watching me. But I could not look back over my shoulder to check. I walked into the manager’s office. It was right there next to the pool. I came in a back door and sat down at the rental desk in front. I ate a candy from the dish on the desk. A vase on the desk held fake birds-of-paradise. There was dust on the orange and blue blossoms. In a minute an attractive young woman in a cheap nylon suit came around a corner with half a sandwich in her hand.

  “You caught me,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “I want to rent an apartment,” I said.

  “Good!” she said. She looked like a pleasant person. She was wearing a silver charm bracelet and CZ earrings.

  “What sort of an apartment are you looking for?” she said. She looked past me into the parking lot for my car. She wanted to see what sort of apartment I could afford.

  “My car’s around the corner,” I said. “I had some difficulty finding the office.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you looking for a one-bedroom or something larger?”

  •

  By the time I left the apartment complex with my copy of the application form in my hand my car had been towed. I sat on the curb for a few minutes. I took off my shoes and socks and rubbed my feet in the sand and pebbles in the gutter. The cold gravel felt good on my feet. But the rain was picking up and I was getting wet. I called Jim.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “I’ve been calling you for an hour. Morgan was here. He waited and then gave up. I finally showed him the opal myself.”

  “Did he like it?”

  “No,” he said.

  “That opal was perfect for him,” I said.

  “Is it a doublet? It looks like a doublet.”

  “No, it’s not a doublet. It’s eight grand a carat, Jim.”

  “I told him I thought it was a doublet. It looked too good. There was no price on the paper.”

  “I don’t believe you told him it was a doublet. He’ll think I was lying to him.”

  “Just tell him you screwed up. Where are you?”

  It had taken me a month to find that opal. It was the perfect opal for Morgan. I was competing with a new dealer on Preston for the sale. I did not know how Morgan had found this independent dealer. He had been my best customer for three years. Now Jim had told him it was a doublet.

  “My car was towed. I need you to come get me.”

  “We’re stacked up over here. I can’t come get you. Where the hell are you? Are you drunk? Are you at a titty bar?”

  “I’m over on Eastchase. I parked illegally. I’m sitting in the rain. Send a salesman, then
. Send Sosa.”

  “I’ll send the Polack. Where are you? On Eastchase? What the hell are you doing on Eastchase?”

  “No, don’t send the Polack. Don’t say anything to the Polack. If the Polack asks, I went to lunch. I’ll explain when I get there.”

  I am going to catch a cold, I thought. That would be okay. I could use a few days off.

  It started to rain more heavily. I pulled my blazer off and held it over my head. I held my phone with my chin.

  “Bobby! Are you there? I can barely hear you. I thought you were going to lunch. What the fuck are you up to? You had better get your act together. You are fucking up. We needed that Morgan deal. You had better get your shit together.”

  We made the swap outside, at the curb.

  “Thanks for coming to the store,” I said.

  It had been my day with Claire. I had taken her to the new meerkat show at the Fort Worth Zoo.

  We could have met at the house but I avoided our house now, because she tried so hard to get me to come by the house. For a few months I carried a beeper she bought for me and it went off constantly. I kept my cell phone turned off. One night at three in the morning she beeped and then the cell phone rang because I had forgotten to turn it off. When I answered she told me she could hear a burglar outside. “He’s out there right now,” she said. This was my wife. I had married this woman. That comes with certain obligations.

  My girlfriend was there in bed with me.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. “She lies to you,” the Polack said. “You do not leave me in bed to go to her house in the middle of the night.” “She doesn’t lie,” I said. “Say what you like about Wendy but she doesn’t lie.” “Maybe she does not know it. That she is lying. But, you trust me, she lies,” she said. “And one more thing. Do not say her name like that when you are lying in bed with me. I do not want to hear that name,” she said. “I told her I would go,” I said. “I have to go. What if there is a burglar there? It’s not just her. It’s Claire, too. It’s my daughter, too. My daughter, Polack.”