Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I got it from a woman, a Gypsy woman. You should have seen this old woman. Uglier than the south end of a northbound dump truck. She had it from her lover, a man who died on a hill in Spain during the resistance. They bombed him and his whole band — they were all guerilla fighters, those boys, commies but tough as blood — working behind the lines. She climbed the hill afterward to find his body but all she found was this weapon. She lost it to me in a bet. If I lost I would have had to fuck her. Can you believe that? Crazy Gypsy woman. I fucked her anyway, of course. She was a good old gal. I couldn’t have been eighteen at the time and she was seventy going on a hundred and twenty-five. She liked it slow. Of course, you don’t want to hear this shit. Let’s get down to business. Very nimble in bed, though, the Gypsy race. They take it seriously. Many of them are bullfighters and flamenco dancers. The flamenco dancers, those are the cowardly ones. Can’t say I blame them, though. You probably never killed a bull.” I shook my head. “It ain’t very much fun.”

Granddad was a still, restful man, like you imagine an ancient Chinese emperor might be, but his hands were always moving. He shuffled the watches around his desk while he talked, writing up my memorandum invoice as he proceeded. I had the job of wrapping each watch carefully in tissue paper before placing it in my briefcase. The boxes and papers, when he had them, went in a separate cardboard box. Granddad never dealt in any counterfeit boxes or papers. Everything was original. The watches, too, naturally.

He preferred to sell men’s watches.

“For a woman a watch is just another piece of jewelry, Grandson,” he told me. “There’s a reason the best watches are made for men. Women don’t understand the aesthetic.”

There were Patek Philippes on their straps, the finest watches in the world, repeaters that chimed the hour and quarter hour, moon face complications and platinum heads; there were the stainless steel Blancpains and IWCs, watches that the men in the industry all wore, because they were much more expensive than they looked; there were the old reliable sure-to-sell Rolexes, the bread and butter, which bored even me already; there were Breguets, with mysterious complications, modeled after the pocket watch Breguet himself had made for Marie Antionette and delivered long after she was dead; there were glamorous and fantastically expensive Ulysse Nardins, Vacheron Constantins, and Franck Mullers, the ones you sold only to Arabs, wealthy gay men, and the true connoisseurs, several of them with crystal backs so you could view the elaborate multicolored movements, and the tiny sapphires and rubies within the gears that helped them revolve; there were the square-headed Boucherons, mostly yellow gold and on gold mesh bracelets, that Granddad told me the French preferred; there were the coin-headed Corums, which my father always complimented when he noticed them on other men’s wrists, and which I had planned to buy for him one day, and never did. My dad wore his own watch with the head against the underside of the wrist, so you had to roll your arm over to see the time. “The only way a gentleman wears his watch, son,” he told me. “Because a gentleman is never in a hurry, and he does not need to know the time except when he desires to.” Granddad wore his stainless steel Patek the same way.

“Time, Grandson,” he explained to me one slow afternoon, when he insisted I wait for a shipment of sixty back-of-list Bulgaris on crocodile straps that Mr. Popper was running in a Saturday sale. “That’s why I love them the way I do. A watch puts you in the middle of the stuff of ordinary being. That’s what I like about them. They remind us of our position in the universe. Stranded in the goddamn seconds the way we are. But between our rounds here — in life, I mean — we get a taste of the other stuff. That’s why the Chinese call this the middle kingdom.”

I loved to sit and listen to him when he spoke in this way.

“Well, enough of this metaphysical bullshit,” he said, after the UPS man dropped off the watches. “Let’s send you back to the real world of buying and selling. Finish your sandwich, there, and get on I-35.”

He often waited for me and then we ate lunch together. He loved Reuben sandwiches. But he rarely ate more than a couple of bites.

“I bet ole Ronnie will make a killing on these Bulgaris,” he said. “Don’t think much of them myself. But it’s a good price point on a watch. People know the name.”

I watched him take one of the colorful Bulgaris out of its box, place it on his wrist, set it, and then put it back in the box again.

“You know the only thing I miss about retail, Grandson?” I did not believe he had ever been in retail. But since he said it, it reflected the facts. “Credit cards. I miss sliding those credit cards. A dollar has romance, no doubt about it. But a credit card can fuck.”

I ’m not hungry,” Lisa said. “Anyway I’m broke. Let’s go down to the Caves.”

“I can buy you lunch,” I said.

“I know where you get your lunch money,” she said. She meant from the cash box on the floor that we used to make change for our cash sales. But now I was pretty sure she stole from it, too. Everybody did.

“I have real money, too.” We had been paid last Friday. It was funny that she was already out of cash. “But we don’t have to eat if you don’t want to.”

At lunch Lisa and I often snuck down into the old box room, what was called the Caves, which was behind the rows of jewelers’ benches with the dirty, silent men in safety goggles and grimy aprons bent over their clamps and tweezers, with blue torches lined up one after another in their wire torch rests, hissing, barely audible, back to the very end of the basement where there were rows and rows of cardboard boxes holding thousands of silk pouches, seed pearl necklaces and earrings and rings — things Mr. Popper had bought from China for a hundred dollars a crate — and the counterfeit Rolex papers, and the counterfeit “Rottexx” watches we sold for fifty bucks a pop, and knockoff Mexican Swatches that looked exactly like the real thing (even the Swatch rep couldn’t tell the difference), and the hundreds and hundreds of empty jewelry boxes, in our signature forest green with red interiors, Christmas colors we kept all year round, waiting to be filled and sold, waiting to be unwrapped, admired, opened, and discarded.

We had sex with her sitting on a piece of dusty metal shelving and her legs around my waist. “Isn’t that cold on your bottom?” I said, and she said, “It’s called my ass, Bobby. Shut up and fuck me. I like it on my ass. It hurts. It feels good. Come on. Make me remember it. Really fuck me!”

Afterward I didn’t want to go back upstairs and face those swarming, oily customers, but then, smoking the crank, I felt like cleaning something. “I love to do it down here,” Lisa said, and the way she said it made me think she had done it with more than only me down here, so I changed the subject. We smoked the crystal off a square of tinfoil. I wanted to get on the floor and empty some ashtrays. Plus I was getting paranoid. Jim was surely looking for us.

“Let’s finish this last and go back upstairs,” I said. I knew if I told her I was worried about Jim she would make fun of me and become stubborn.

“Don’t worry about Jim,” she said. “He’s busy, too. He’s not always looking for us, believe me. He’s got more than enough to take care of right now. Plenty. Don’t be silly. Anyway, you shouldn’t exaggerate your own importance. It’s not attractive.”

She tapped out a little more powder onto the tinfoil and lit the lighter again. I could see how hot it was getting and worried about her fingertips burning. But she did not seem to notice. I wanted a glass of water.