Clancy Martin - How to Sell

The Polack laughed. “Ha!”

I remember the first time I heard that laugh. Like a dog’s bark. At first it disoriented you, then it made sense.

“I don’t really sell them anymore,” Jim told her. “I teach other people how to do it. But I’m proud I can. Never be ashamed of being a salesperson. It’s one of the few honest trades. Jesus Christ was a salesman. Muhammad. Allah. World’s greatest. Paul. Those Jews. Think about Christ without Paul, huh? Ron Hubbard. Santa Claus. You ever think about him? Think about a mother telling her child about Santa Claus. She’s not lying. That’s selling. So where are you from? Would you like to join me for lunch?”

The Polack was never a customer, though.

“Today you buy a watch, yes?” she said. “We do business, vacuum man.”

It was one of Jim’s best stories, and the whole thing was true.

L isa had a pale blue silk comforter on her bed. The comforter was very warm, much warmer than you expected it would be from looking at it.

We opened the windows and listened to the thunderstorm. Texas has thunderstorms like no place in the world. Because the sky is so high. We were curled up under the comforter.

“I bought it in Vegas,” she said, petting it with her hand. “I love it.”

“I like it too,” I said.

The thunder rolled. The rain was falling underneath the sound of the thunder. We could hear it on the pavement and on the roof.

“Do you think Lily is prettier than me?”

“Lily is my brother’s wife. I don’t think about her like that.”

Maybe this was a lie, I’m not sure, but as the days went past and Lisa and I spent more time together, it was becoming less and less a lie. And yet it was not a very salable lie to tell my brother’s girlfriend.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t know if I can explain that properly. You are very pretty.”

I still had a list of people I tried not to deceive more than necessary.

Lisa kept bamboo in clear glass containers on her bedstand next to her phone, by her windows, on her bathroom sink, and next to her refrigerator. The water was trapped in black rocks in the glass. It was green and growing but it was untidy bamboo. Ever since, I have associated bamboo, especially the disorderly, un-Japanese kind, with guilty sex, crystal methedrine, and simple unfeigned affection.

“Are you sleeping with me because I sold that Rolex?” I asked her.

I was lucky she was a kind person. She might have said this sort of thing, too, when she was only sixteen.

“Yes. That’s exactly why I am sleeping with you,” she said. “Because you sold that Rolex. One lousy Rolex that we lost money on.” She laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I guess that’s what Jim would think. If he knew about us.”

She was quiet. I watched her. She was hard to figure out.

“Here,” she said. “Take another. Take some more.” She handed me the pipe. I reached for the lighter. “No, let me light it for you,” she said.

Jim bought his methamphetamine from her and they both shared it with me. She liked to smoke it, but he told me only to sniff it. “Never smoke meth with Lisa,” he told me. “Once you start smoking it you may as well inject it. You’ll never quit.”

“I need a new haircut,” she said. “I wish I had different hair. I was born with the wrong hair. It is my father’s fault. He had nice features and perfect teeth, like yours, but not very good hair. It’s my baby hair, my mother used to say.” I was quiet. I knew her mother had died when she was young. Jim had told me that. “It never changed. To my grown-up hair, I mean. It’s the hair I was born with.”

“Your hair is nice. It is soft.”

“You can touch it if you want to. It’s soft all over. Yours is thick. It is one of your better features. I wish my skin was as nice as your hair.”

“I don’t want to mess it up,” I said.

My face felt hot from the crystal, and I worried that my ears were red. I wanted to ask her for a beer. But I was shy to. I could hear each of the raindrops outside, one by one, as they struck the roof and the sidewalk and the leaves of the trees. I could even hear them as they fell.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

I’d been waiting for this. Not waiting for it, but I had known it was coming, and I would try to prepare for it, when I would let myself think about it, which was not often and not for long. I tried not to panic. What if she’s already told Jim? I could handle her telling me that we couldn’t have sex, even, so long as she hadn’t said anything to Jim. That might be best, in fact.

“It’s that store,” she said. “You have to be careful of that place. It has a bad effect on people. It makes some things too easy.”

Wait. I was confused. Is she talking about Jim and me?

“Jim says I should go home for Christmas,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t introduced his name. She hadn’t said “Jim” yet. “My girlfriend Wendy is back there.”

“I know you have a girlfriend,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me that. It is nice to have a girlfriend. I don’t mind your girlfriend.”

She lit the pipe for herself, smoked it, and then quickly handed it to me while the drug was still bubbling in the well of the glass.

“It’s the cash drawer,” Lisa said, releasing the smoke very slowly and talking over it. I couldn’t do that. “Have you ever noticed how no one keeps the cash drawer? They say they reconcile it but they don’t, really. That’s what Jim says. They just add up the receipts. But we take in money a lot of different ways. Plus what if you don’t turn in your receipts? What if you just hide them and take them home? Or what if you tore them up and flushed them down the toilet? Then on a cash sale no one would ever know about the cash at all. It would just be like invisible money. We only do an inventory once a quarter. As long as what you sell isn’t anything big, no one would even notice. No merchandise, no paperwork, no money. Who would know the difference?”

This isn’t about me and Jim at all, I thought. That was a relief. But this was a different problem that I had not even imagined. She knows something, Bobby. I had been taking money from the drawer for several weeks.

I wondered if this was a trick of Jim’s to trip me up. He could have asked Lisa to mention it to me first. It was only lunch money I took. Twenty or fifty dollars, once a day, sometimes twice. Jim might have found my hiding spot in the closet. Seven hundred and sixty dollars, a gold Seiko for Wendy, a rope of pearls, a pair of carat-and-a-half-total-weight diamond studs, an emerald ring for her birthday in May, a half-ounce gold Krugerrand for her father for Christmas, a fourteen-karat cloisonné bangle for her mother, a white gold box chain with a white gold panda pendant for her little sister. If he found that, would he accuse me or observe me? Or seek a confession? Had Lily snooped it out?

“Let’s do it again,” she said. “I like doing it with you more. If you want to know the truth.”

I didn’t want to hear anything about how she had sex with my brother. I said so.

“I wouldn’t say anything about that,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything like that. Give me some credit, Bobby.”

I looked at the pipe. There was a bit more to smoke in the bottom, before she reloaded it.

“I love your brother,” Lisa said. “But I like it better this way. I can love him from a distance. It feels natural to love somebody who can’t really love you back the way you might want. We should probably slow down with this stuff. I don’t want to. But I’m talking too much.”

“That makes sense,” I said. I didn’t want to slow down, either. I was in the mood to go faster, in fact. “I understand that. It is the same way for me.”