How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  Son. I need to tell you something.”

  Our dad was calling from a pay phone in Coral Springs, Florida. He had just told me they had repossessed his car, which was a serious problem because he was still living in it. He had checked himself into a hospital but they kicked him out after a few days. He had no plans to go anywhere next. That worried me more than the rest of his situation.

  “I have to go, Dad,” I said. “I’ll send the money. I’ll have one of my salespeople go and wire it as soon as I get off the phone. The sooner I get off the phone, the sooner I can send the money, Dad,” I said.

  “Listen to me, son,” he said. “This is important.”

  I could hear the murmur and rattle of the road traffic behind him.

  A customer was sitting at my desk draping three different diamond tennis bracelets over the back of his hairy, pale hand. I smiled at him in apology for being on the phone.

  Hang up, Dad, I thought. I promised I will Western Union you the fifteen hundred bucks, and I will Western Union you your goddamn, undeserved, one more time, always “this is the last time, son,” one thousand and five hundred. Measly. Fucking. Dollars.

  “Son. Pay attention. What are you doing? Are you waiting on a customer? Listen to what I am telling you, Bobby.”

  I sat there.

  “Son, it is as easy for the dead to talk to the living as it is for the living to talk to the dead.”

  I looked at the tennis bracelet dangling off the reddish-green skin of my customer’s knuckles. With those wiry hairs.

  “Wait. What? What did you say, Dad?”

  I had not spoken a word to my father about Lisa. What had Jim told him? But Jim wasn’t speaking to him.

  “Dad? Dad, are you there?”

  He had hung up.

  Years later, if I was at a restaurant with Claire, or if we were just riding around in the car, she might be looking the other way and then I would search her features for that other child of mine, that second child who disappeared back into Lisa.

  Was that what Dad meant? I wondered. Was that how he might have reincarnated in a new life to speak with me?

  To hear her voice for a minute I thought I might try to call her old cell phone number to see if it was still on. She didn’t say who she was on the voice mail. Because of her work. When it beeped I started a message. I couldn’t really say what I needed to, and I was afraid her phone was going to disconnect me, so I started to tell her a story about my mother and father, a story about one time when they were having a party and the song “Mr. Bojangles” was playing and my father picked me up to dance with me, in that crowd of dark and tall adults. It was after my bedtime. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t told her this story before. I was starting to say that and then the cell phone stopped. “If you want to hear the message you have recorded, press one.” Et cetera.

  I pulled over to the side of the highway and sat there, with the car running, and watched my headlights stare off into the night.

  Joe Morgan was in my office picking up his wife’s Christmas present when the call came in from Florida. While resetting Joe’s diamond one of my jewelers—in fact, surprisingly, it was Old John—had overheated an invisible seam in the six-carat radiant I had sold Joe a few weeks before and turned it into a frightening long inclusion that looked like an internal crack. When I saw the diamond I knew I could not show it to Morgan. He would think either that we had cracked it or that the crack had always been there and somehow he had failed to notice it. Either way we lost. I thought about drilling and filling it, but that would take two months, and I did not have more than twenty-four hours. And it might be a crack and not fill at all but just drain out in another place. So I was trying to up-sell Morgan to a much larger diamond that I did not yet possess but had invented in my imagination. The way the crack was placed I could have the six-carat radiant recut to a terrific-looking two-and-a-half-or maybe even nearly three-carat marquise, and the cutter might even salvage a couple little third-carat rounds to use as accent stones. So as long as I could sell Morgan this fictional nine-carat oval it would all work out for everyone concerned.

  Saving this deal represented something to me in my mind.

  But it is awkward to sell a man a very expensive diamond he cannot even see because you cannot return to him his now-damaged diamond that he also is not permitted to see. Even when he is one of your best regulars it is real exercise. Morgan was going for it.

  I had an advantage. It was December 22 and the new mounting was Margaret’s big Christmas present. But a nine-carat oval was much more impressive than a new mounting. Morgan thought his wife did not like ovals, which was true, but I had confided in him that she had oohed and aahed over a seven-carat oval that I had in my office the other day (false) that unfortunately was unavailable (true), perhaps because, carat for carat, ovals look about fifty percent larger than most radiants (true). So this nine-carat was perfect. This is how to sell. A golden lie in a nest of truths. I had chosen an oval despite the fact that Morgan’s wife, Margaret, did not like ovals, because the day before Christmas a big oval would be all I would be able to find, and even that only if I got lucky, and because big ovals are cheaper than any cut other than heart shapes and I knew I could never get Morgan to go for a heart shape, and even if I did, Margaret would return it, which would be still worse than the present mess, because then I would own it. But as I poured Morgan a fourth bourbon-and-champagne—that was what I had him drinking now, Pappy Van Winkle twenty-three-year-old mixed half-and-half with Veuve Clicquot—and began to walk him gracefully toward closing, Jim half opened the pocket door that separated our offices. I waved him away without looking. Morgan was telling me one of his cowboy stories. Never interrupt a customer’s story. My father used to tell us, “No one will pay you to hear you talk, but everyone will pay you to listen.”

  Jim said, “Bobby,” and the way he said it I looked at him. He was crying. Morgan stopped his story. You just killed the deal, Jim, I thought. The whole room changed because of his red face and tears.

  I said, “Sorry, Joe,” and took Jim into the back-of-the-house. There, with the phone girls around us, with their headsets on and the phones ringing, with their hands on us, like women in the Middle East mourning in a movie, with the wires from their headsets tangling in a circle, Jim cried in my arms. “He’s dead,” he said. “He’s dead, he’s dead.”

  I had Dad’s ashes in a box in my lap, along with the paperwork so that I could take it on the plane.

  “Do you want to get some coffee?” Jim said.

  I looked at my wrist and then remembered I didn’t have a watch. I had left all of my jewelry on my desk. Lisa’s pearl bracelet, too.

  “I guess we better get moving,” I said.

  “If you’re in a hurry,” he said.

  We got on the highway.

  “It’s supposed to snow,” Jim said. “Look at that. Look how low the sky is.”

  I-30 was clear. We would be at the airport in half an hour.

  “One of us has to take care of the store. But I’m still sorry I’m not going with you,” he said.

  Outside the windows, dry yellow grass lined the sides of the highway.

  “I don’t want to ask,” he said. “I don’t want to be pushy. But could you tell me when you think you’ll come back? I mean, so I know what to say to your customers.”

  But he didn’t say it like a question.

  “No, Jim,” I said. “Tell them you don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank the following people for their help with this book:

  Deb Olin Unferth; Laura Kirk; Jim Hankinson; Karen Vorst and UMKC; Deborah Wilkes; Olivier Deparis; Lary Wallace; Jordan Bass; Hank, Wayne, George, Jim, and Bruce; Simon Gatsby; Paul, Megan, and Jimmy; Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins; Blair Moody, Lisa Moody, and my mother, Vickie Moody; my Links: Joe, Margaret, Matt, and Emily; Pat, Adrianna, Gabrielle, and Carter; my father, Bill Martin; Alicia; Darren and
Tanner; my teacher Diane Williams; my editor, Lorin Stein; my agent, Susan Golomb; my daughters, Zelly, Margaret, and Portia; and above all my dear, dear wife, Rebecca.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO