Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I can tell. I have to go, Bobby.”

“Okay. We’re pretty busy here, too.” Wait. At nine o’clock at night? You can do better than that, Bobby.

“I have to go find someone to fuck. Maybe some nice Christian.”

She hung up.

•

T hen our dad came to town. Now I can remember but it was hard for me to believe, at a certain point in my life, how happy Jim and I would both become when our dad unexpectedly arrived. “He’s already in New Orleans,” Jim said. “He’ll be here on Friday.”

Jim said we would borrow his former landlord’s house for the visit.

“We can’t show the old man our apartment, Bobby,” he said. “It’s not what he’s expecting. I’ll see if Sean’s in town. He owes me a favor from the deal I made him on that rose gold Vacheron. Let’s see if we can’t get Sean Munrow’s place for the week.”

He was frowning his eyebrows in that playful, irresponsible way and we both loved the joke.

Sean Munrow owned a mansion on Kerry Place, just east of Forest Park Drive, on a faded but magnificent street. Jim and his wife had lived behind it in a small converted apartment, an old coach house and servants’ quarters, when they first moved to Texas and he was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Munrow was a DUI and fix-a-ticket attorney who had branches all over the metroplex. He owned a yacht and vacation houses and was rarely in Texas. So Jim tracked him down and Munrow said, “Sure, you know where the key is, it hasn’t moved,” but then we went over there together and it was too much work. He had pictures of his kids everywhere — he was divorced and had those dad’s guilty portraits — and many of the rooms were closed up with the furniture draped or pushed up against the walls. It looked like he only lived in two rooms and the kitchen. I was astonished. Here was a rich, successful man. It was so forlorn.

“This will never work,” Jim said. “We don’t have the time. I’ve got a better idea.”

We booked the Presidential Suite at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Eleven thousand dollars a night.

“He better not stay longer than the weekend,” Jim said. “American Express will cut us off if they try to run a second approval.”

“What about Lily?” I said.

“You know how he is. He can’t stand her. He only wants to see us anyhow. I’ll tell him we’re having problems. That will make him happy. He can give me a bunch of marriage advice. Plus it gets me off the hook for titty bars and the girls. I won’t have to listen to the practice-fidelity-never-take-your-marriage-for-granted-keep-your-promises-look-what-happened-to-your-old-man bullshit.”

That made sense to me.

“We have to tip the hell out of every valet parker, Bobby. We have to eat in the restaurant twenty times in the next week. Everybody has to know our names. Here’s a roll of twenties. Anybody does anything for you, if they push a damn button on the elevator, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and say, ‘My name’s Bobby Clark. Thank you very much.’”

I felt like I was running for mayor of Dallas. We drove back and forth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and took a customer or a top seller with us every time. We hung out at the hot tub — it was too cold for the pool — and had cocktails in the evening. Lily didn’t say much, we were already working sixteen-and seventeen-hour days. Lisa tagged along for dinner and mocked us both.

“You are not going to fool your father,” she said. “He’s your dad.”

“He has a lot of imagination,” Jim said. “All we have to do is provide the right setting. Plus this is what he is anticipating. I don’t want to disappoint him.”

“He thinks you live in a hotel? Like Howard Hughes?”

“Like Howard Hughes! That’s good! That’s perfect, Lisa. I had not thought of that. When he says, ‘Jimmy, what the hell are you doing living in a hotel?’ I’ll say, ‘You know, Dad, like Howard Hughes.’ He’ll like that. That’s the kind of thing he would come up with on his own. Come to think of it, that’s the way to play it. Better if he comes up with it in his own head. Like it was his idea. Bobby, when we are pulling up to the hotel, say something about airplanes. We’re in Texas, for crying out loud. Say something about the airport and airplanes and making airplanes. It doesn’t matter what. He’ll think Howard Hughes and then when we show him our suite it will make perfect sense. Howard Hughes but without the fingernails, that’s what he’ll think.”

We were at the store and Dad walked into the showroom with his arm around the waist of a woman. She was slightly taller than he was and I saw immediately how the other saleswomen noticed her. She was a redhead. Wendy was a redhead, too. It is true what they say, they are more sexual than other women and usually sexually deviant.

“That is mine,” the Polack said when she saw them. We were side by side, working the buy counter. “That one I am cherry-picking.”

“He’s not here for jewelry, Polack,” I told her. It had taken me weeks to grow comfortable with using that name. But she preferred it.

“You do not know, Bobby Clark,” she said. “You have not the nose for the business. Look at that woman. You think she is here for her fun? Why is she with that short man? I tell you why! She brings the man to buy. She tells him, ‘Yes, fine, I fuck you, Mr. Short Man, now I want my diamonds!’”

“He’s my father, Polack,” I said. “That man there. He is here to see Jim and me.”

She looked from one to the other of us, back and forth.

“Okay,” she said, “he is wasting my time. You, too.” She returned to her buy.

After we showed him the suite we went down to the bar. We sat in the sofa and chairs that faced the enormous empty fireplace. I was drinking a margarita, Jim had a glass of wine, and our dad had his usual club soda with an extra slice of lime.

Our dad was getting a little gray in his beard, I noticed. It had a nice effect, though. It added to that wise-man impression he wanted to make. He truly did seem like a wise man at times. A wise man in the sense of a yogi, I mean, or a Christian mystic. Like a Thomas Merton kind of wise man.

“Listen, boys, this is important. We need to get you both into the Masons. Bobby, how old are you now?”

“Sixteen. Seventeen in May.”

“That’s too bad. You have to be twenty-one, son. You can join the DeMolay. But Jimmy, we can sign you up immediately. Let me see who I know in town. You’ll need a sponsor. What’s the name of that fellow who owns your jewelry store? Cooper?”

“Popper.”

“He’s probably a Mason. We had better make sure he’s a Mason. Is he Scottish Rite? I expect you to know these things, Dindy. These things matter.” Dindy had been Jim’s nickname since he was a baby.

“How’s his reputation? In business. And around town. Is he an honest man?”

The waiter brought us our check.

“On your room, Mr. Clark?”

“Thanks, Steve.” Jim signed the bill.

“You’ll meet him tomorrow, Dad. He’s brilliant.”

“Reason is a limited tool, son. There’s a lot more to a man than his brain. I am asking you about his consciousness now. Is he an old soul? Is he developed? I can see the influence this man is having on the two of you.” He looked pointedly at our jewelry. Maybe we were wearing a few too many pieces. I worried about my quarter-ounce Chinese panda pinkie ring. The diameter was too large for my pinkie, so I wore it on the ring finger of my right hand. “I want to see if the man has character. He’s successful in business. That is a good sign. But not always, son.”

On the way back to the suite I saw a young woman at the front desk look at my dad carefully from behind a large stand of those white and purple orchids that expensive hotels like to erect. My dad saw her, too. The redhead whom he had brought into the store, a doctor’s receptionist he had picked up in Baton Rouge, was already on a bus back home.