How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  “Good idea. Hire the hooker. Free blow jobs with every Rolex.”

  “Like they don’t get them already.”

  “Maybe I should call her.”

  Here it is, I thought. He’s warming me up for it. The truth.

  “You called her? She said something like that. I thought you had called her.”

  “I didn’t call her. But maybe I should.”

  “Sylvia said something. She said she had given you her number.”

  “Don’t you think I would tell you if I called her? Why don’t you ask her? Do you think I would lie to you about a hooker?”

  He had lied to me thousands of times. He lied to me almost as much as he lied to his customers. But that was beside the point. And if you told him he lied he would deny it with a sincere heart. He was extraordinarily healthy. Psychologically, I mean.

  “She’s not your type. I mean, not now, not anymore. She said something about it.”

  “I wasn’t talking about having sex with her, Bobby. Jesus. Lisa and I used to be pretty good friends, you know. But maybe I should call her for sex. She would do it. Maybe that would show you. The point is you don’t know anything about that girl. That hooker, I mean. I think she was fucking Popper, too. Did you know that? Did I ever tell you that? I bet she didn’t tell you, did she? She’s attracted to men like us. I bet she would like this new belly of mine.” He patted his stomach. “The king muscle. Smart hooker.”

  I took the tweezers I had been playing with and put them back on his desk pad where I had found them. I folded the three carats back into their papers.

  “The package looks fine to me,” I said. “I like your bracelet idea. I bet Fadeen will go for it. But you better get terms,” I said. “I have a few deals closing this week. But not enough to pay cash for these. You have anything working?”

  I could not say anything directly about our numbers. But he had been behind me for months.

  “Where are you going? I was kidding,” Jim said. “Are you going to get your feelings hurt over a hooker?”

  “Call her,” I said. “It makes no difference to me.”

  I almost wanted him to. Or rather, I almost wanted him to believe that I wanted him to. If he already had.

  “I was joking. Ha ha, a joke. I’m not going to call her. Hell, let’s make her a gift wrapper if you want,” he said. “I don’t care. I remember she’s good with her hands. That’s a joke, too. Joking.”

  “Here. Here’s her number.” I wrote it in big, awkward numbers on his desk pad. The number he already had.

  Bobby, I said to myself. Stop this now. Control yourself. If you let them know that you know it’s real, then they can let you know it’s real. And then it will be real.

  I felt sick to my stomach. Like I’d been climbing the rubber-matted walls of one of those centrifuges we used to ride at the Calgary Stampede when we were kids. Jim was the only one who could ever get all the way up on his knees, or who dared to go to the top of the wall. The rest of us stayed on our backs about three-quarters of the way up.

  “I’m not going to call her. I should, though. Remember those hookers in Vegas?”

  In Vegas one time, at the Jewelers Circular Keystone Vegas show, we had been robbed by three black hookers of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of loose uncertified diamonds and thirty grand in cash. These women knew what they were doing. They demanded more money when we were in the middle of sex—I had two of them in bed with me, and Jim and the third one were already asleep, wrapped together in the next bed—and when I punched in the code to get a few extra hundreds, they must have watched me from behind. The next morning Jim woke me and said, “Did you move the diamonds? Because the safe is empty. Bobby, where are the diamonds?” I understood immediately what had happened, though it took a few hours before I could admit it to Jim. I remember rising from that bed, walking to the huge wall of glass that was one end of our enormous suite, and resting my forehead against it. There was Vegas, many floors beneath us, stretching out flat for brown and yellow miles, and farther out the line of the mountains.

  Then I caught them. It was after midnight, and I had left my coke up at the store so that I wouldn’t go through it all, but once I was home I changed my mind and drove back to the store. There they were, the Polack shouting in Russian or Polish on top of a jeweler’s bench with her hands on the back of Jim’s head. I watched them for a few minutes. She looked better with him than I imagined she did with me. I had never seen her naked from a distance like this. Naked, across the room like that, she didn’t look like she thought about money as much as I knew she did. She looked so trustworthy. I thought, If you sold naked, no one could outsell you. In my desk I saw they’d found my cocaine and it was all gone. Naturally Jim’s was gone, too. So I rifled the cash box to let him know I’d been there, and before he got the same idea.

  I skipped work the next day and when Jim called at a quarter after ten I didn’t answer the phone.

  I wanted to kill her then. When I came in, after the weekend, I sat behind my desk with my diamond tweezers pinched around my pinkie finger or on the lobe of one ear and imagined her with that tiny red laser-targeting dot following the back of her slender skull.

  First it was Jim and Lisa. Now it was Jim and the Polack. Or maybe it went in the opposite order.

  When she finally came into my office I had a customer at my desk. Janie Krantz, one of my favorites, who was a publicist and on the side wrote books about child therapy. She was looking for a medium-sized cabochon-cut pink tourmaline. I loved these stones myself, so we were having a good time together shuffling gently with our rubber-tipped tweezers through the large cotton-wrapped parcels. She looked up and frowned impatiently at the Polack.

  “We speak,” the Polack said. “I explain something to you now.”

  “I am with Janie, Polack,” I said.

  “I’m on the run today anyway, Bobby,” Janie said. “I should let you get home to your family.” She gave the Polack a stare. Okay, Janie, I thought. “Put these three aside for me.”

  “Thank you, Janie,” I said. We gave each other our private smile—I tell my salespeople, cultivate as many of those private smiles as you can—and she left.

  “You said you wanted to talk to me,” I said. “I really don’t have anything to say to you at the moment.”

  “It is over. I leave the business, too! Time for me to go. Not the business. But this store. You and Jim. I have enough of this, now. I stay for the season. Then, I go!”

  “Wait a second. What are you saying? I catch you screwing around with Jim and you dump me?”

  “You are making me nauseated, Clark! I look at you and I want to vomit! I cannot watch this ugliness anymore. Fresh air. You need it. This place smells bad. And it is you! You are the cause! Why do I fuck your brother? He, at least, is a man!”

  I rubbed my fingers against my thumbs, like you might if you were rolling a bit of earwax between them. My eyebrows were itchy.

  “You’re fired, Polack,” I said. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Fired?” she said. “You are joking me? I quit.”

  She walked out the front door of my office, and then out the front door of the store.

  We were in the car, fighting. I was drunk and I shouldn’t have been driving. At one point I thought I had somehow drifted over the line of the road and into oncoming traffic. I swerved back to the right, and then I realized that the lights I thought were headlights bearing down on us were just construction beacons.

  “Let’s tell the truth, Lisa,” I plunged ahead. “You don’t want me to leave my wife. And you won’t be honest with me about why. I think it’s because you are ready to leave your boyfriend. That’s all I can guess it could be. And you don’t want me to think that now it’s going to be the two of us when you do. And Jim is in this somehow. I am just going to say it. I don’t know how, but I know Jim is in this, Lisa.”

  I looked over at her. She looked back at me like I had thrown an object at her.<
br />
  “You say you don’t want to fight but you give me that. Nice.”

  She was shivering. I could have turned up the heat in the car but I knew I needed to keep both hands on the wheel.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Lisa?”

  You are not selling her anything, Bobby, I told myself. Therefore you do not have to try to read her mind and repeat her thoughts. She is your girlfriend. Or your hooker. Your girlfriend-hooker. Calm down, I told myself. For that matter, come to think of it, I am the customer here, I told myself. Or at least I should be. That is how the natural order of this is and ought to be structured.

  We better get home, I thought. We need to get in bed.

  “Bobby. Bobby. Don’t you get it? Did you even listen to a word I said to you? I’m pregnant, Bobby,” she said. “That’s what I have been telling you. If you would fucking listen. I’m pregnant.”

  The air took a kind of slide to the left, as though someone had divided the world’s atmosphere into two halves, and then bumped the bottom to one side with her hip. I tried to steady the car. Someone blared their horn, and then again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I expect you to say now. Oh, fuck,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to see you tonight.”

  “Let’s go back to my apartment,” I said. One step at a time. “You’ve never seen the whole apartment. Do you want to see Claire’s room?” Why did I say that? It was just a baby thing. It said itself.

  “What a thing to say. Jesus. I need to get the hell out of here, Bobby,” she said. She looked like she might start to cry. “Pull over. Pull over right now.” I had never seen that expression on her face before.

  “I am trying to talk to you. Give me a second, okay?” I said. “You just told me that we are having a baby. Can I catch up for a second? Can we talk for a minute?”

  “Let me out of here. Get away from me, Bobby. Get your hands off me. Drive the fucking car, Bobby!”

  I slammed on the brakes. There was a long, frightening noise, and I thought, that’s it. But we missed the telephone pole. We were up on the curb. The lights didn’t look right. I felt my face with my hands. Lisa pushed open her door and took off walking. I hurried out my door but I knew better than to try to grab her arm again. She needed her coat. All she had on was a skirt and a blue tank top. I had bought that tank top for her at Barneys one day, when I was in a hurry. I thought it was the wrong thing and almost didn’t give it to her, but then she loved it. Occasionally she would let me buy her clothes. But it was loose, you could see her whole body beneath the holes under the arms, she couldn’t wear it like that, walking down the street at two o’clock in the morning. Plus it was freezing. She would get sick. Who knew who might try to pick her up from the side of the road? She didn’t even have any shoes on.

  “Lisa!” I shouted after her. “Lisa, you don’t even have your purse!”

  She kept on going.

  I turned around and looked at the car. I don’t even know if the damn thing is going to drive, I thought. I climbed back in and tried to start it but I couldn’t find my keys. When had I taken the keys from the ignition? I have to be at the store in six hours. I have a nine a.m. diamond appointment. My hangover was already starting.

  •

  When I arrived in the cab the two customers were outside our front door already, their hands in their coat pockets, waiting for me. I opened the door with my keys and let them in. Everyone smiled falsely up at them from their positions bent over the open showcases. Thousands of pieces of jewelry, our inventory twice as heavy as normal with the coming Christmas season, sat on the showcase tops in the white and blue plastic tubs. My salespeople were thinking: one less on the cases.

  I had planned to switch these two to Sosa. They were referrals of mine but a young couple and easy to switch. I was exhausted. But I looked around for him and he wasn’t in yet, naturally. So the hell with it. I would sell them myself.

  I took a deep breath when I sat them down at my desk. Okay, I thought. Maybe this is what you need right now, Bobby. A clean sale. A bit of sanity to start the day.

  How do you sell a diamond to a young couple? It is very, very easy to do. Find out who’s in charge. Usually it is the woman. Then focus your attention on the other one: explain everything to the weak one, act as though the power’s over on that half of your desk. He’s grateful, he trusts you, he thinks you understand him, he thinks you like and respect him. Now, when you are getting down to selecting a diamond, subtly betray him. Let her know that you understand that she is the decision maker. How? Push on one stone that he likes. She won’t like it, for the obvious reasons. When she insists that that diamond, some other diamond, is really the prettiest one, agree with her: You know, I think she’s right. On your hand (ask her to extend the fingers of her left hand and hold them tightly together, and then with diamond tweezers lay the stone carefully in the groove between her ring and her index finger), there is something about that one, you are exactly right, I didn’t see it myself until now, but that one is just right. You picked it. That’s the one.

  Sold.

  It works just as well the other way, if the man is in charge. Maybe better, because they need it more. The belief you can give him. The belief you can sell him, sell them both. That way it’s not just jewelry they are buying. You can sell her belief in him.

  They purchased the stone. It was a carat and a quarter radiant, I VS2, pleasant. A faked GIA certificate. Sosa had made it for me a few days before on our copier.

  She loves it. It will appraise for twice that price! Sosa arrived and walked casually through my office. I asked him to take the job envelope to Old John: I was going to set it while they waited, so she could try it on before she left. He might give it to her then. They often did. Propose right in front of the jeweler. Well, the diamond would last.

  I introduced them to Sosa. “One of our best salespeople.” I said it sincerely, but he laughed sarcastically to make them think I was mocking him. Why did he do that? I wondered.

  The young woman, her hand oddly out as though the diamond were still balanced on her woven fingers, gave me an inquisitive, unhappy look. She did not want to believe I could be tricking them about anything, or that I was the kind of person who would ever do that. The particular sales technique I had used on them depended, like all lazy lying, upon unimpeachable sincerity. But he just kept on going, right through the office, and closed the rear door abruptly behind himself. I smiled at them and said something funny, “He’s late, and I get in trouble,” to put us on the same side, and they were fine again.

  I rang up the card (you never really expect it to go through, and then like a locked door opening it does, and everyone feels reassured, both about themselves and one another), walked them to their car, opened her door for her, and told them I’d see them tomorrow. Old John was behind and couldn’t mount the diamond before closing, plus the platinum mounting took time to size.

  Then I went into Jim’s office.

  “Do you have time for lunch today?” I asked him. “We need to talk about the Polack.” He gave me a look. He was on the phone. It sounded like it was a customer he was talking to, at least.

  He shook his head at me. While he was talking he wrote on his desk pad, “Let her go.” Then he tapped his pen on it. He smiled at me.

  Okay, I thought. That’s how we were going to handle this. I went back to my office and sat in my chair. I tried to call Lisa. She was on the other line and she didn’t pick up. Or her phone was turned off. Or she didn’t have her phone because it was in her purse and her purse was still in my car, in the tow yard. I looked in my desk drawer for my coke. I was out. I picked up the phone and called Maria, my connection. One thing at a time, I thought. Another appointment had come in and was waiting for me there on the showroom floor. It was a custom order. He was coming to preview the diamonds for a necklace. I still had not picked the stones. I tried to decide on the best lie to tell him. Maria didn’t answer the phone. I use
d the beeper option, and then stood up to go greet my customer.

  •

  The ceiling of the room was partially lit, through my curtains, by someone’s headlights outside my bedroom window, a floor below. I could hear one voice and then another voice. Go back to sleep, Bobby, I thought. This is no time of the night to think about things. I closed my eyes. But just then there was a tiny movement on my pillow. I opened my eyes and there was a movement, again, in the dark. It could have been my body pulling at a sheet that tugged the fabric of the pillowcase. I reached and turned on the light. There was a very small brown bug on the pillow. I put on my glasses. It was a baby cockroach. About the size of the ash on a cigarette, but a cockroach. I crushed it between my thumb and forefinger. I would have let it live if it had been some other kind of bug, I thought. But, even in my present circumstances, I could not let a cockroach run around in my bed at night.

  That made me think of another time, visiting my father in West Palm, in the summertime, when I was eight or nine. I had finished my eggs and I started to put my dishes in the dishwasher like we did at home. “Nope, not in there, son,” my dad said. He opened the dishwasher so that I could see, but not too widely. Dozens of cockroaches scampered around the plastic walls. “There’s a whole family of them living there,” he said. “I just wash the dishes by hand.”

  Larry’s bench was now behind Old John’s: Jim had moved Larry up in the jeweler’s line after he had successfully hand-fabricated a gold breastplate modeled after the breastplate of Aaron for a Jewish cardiologist in Houston. Except for Old John, who was working on a pink gold and chalcedony necklace for a client of mine, one of my Highland Park ladies, everyone had gone home. I sat at Larry’s bench and watched Old John’s deft, pretty torch-work. He had sections of the clouded, grayish blue stone masked off with tiny pieces of balsa wood to protect it from the heat.