Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I suggest you be perfectly candid, Bobby. Then I could take your side when the truth comes out. I would rather do that. I am not fond of liars. We are keeping an eye on you, Bobby,” Rita said.

I looked away from her and tried to remember exactly what I had just said.

If Rita, Tracy, and that fat saleswoman knew about Lisa and me, I wondered whether Jim had heard. I doubted it. It was a big store, I told myself. Jim didn’t like gossip. He might have heard something and dismissed it. Or defended me and Lisa, even.

I found Lisa in back at Jim’s desk changing tags for a sale Sheila wanted in the men’s jewelry case. Even at Christmas men’s jewelry is a tough sell. Lisa was replacing the tags with new tags that were twice the price, so that Sheila could put ALL MEN’S JEWELRY 50 % OFF NOW UNTIL CHRISTMAS EVE! signs throughout the men’s case, and Mr. Popper could run a black-and-white banner across the bottom of one of the big full-page Christmas “Rolex and diamond” ads in the weekend Star-Telegram . Now and through the rest of the season Ronnie Popper was the biggest customer the Fort Worth Star-Telegram enjoyed.

“Hey,” I said. I sat down and started removing the paper-and-string tags. This was before computer tags.

“No, not like that,” she said. “Do it one at a time. Write the new tag up and then take the old one off. Otherwise you get mixed up.”

I took a pink message pad from the desk and wrote a note to Lisa. It said, “Do you think Jim could know?”

She read it, folded it back up, and fed it into Jim’s paper shredder. Because he ran the Rolex files he had the industrialsized paper shredder, not one of the little ones like everybody else had that sat on top of a trash can. His had its own separate trash receptacle.

“Why don’t you ask him?” she said. “Or I can ask him if you want.” She smiled at me in a mysterious way that let me know she was smarter than me, but it didn’t bother her, she liked it that way.

“I don’t want you to ask him. You can’t be the one to ask him. I don’t even know what to ask.”

“Ask who?” Jim pulled a chair over from Dennis’s desk and sat down. He surprised me from behind the filing cabinets. He couldn’t have heard what we were saying back there. And we weren’t saying anything, I thought. I looked for the note but then remembered I had just watched Lisa put it in the shredder. It was never getting back out of that shredder alive, I thought.

“Ask you,” Lisa said.

“Ask me what? Ask me,” Jim said. “What is it, Bobby?” For a moment he looked concerned. Then Lisa shook her head and looked at him carefully, but with a small smile. I saw the communication pass between them. Jim laughed. He seemed relieved.

“Oh,” he said. “That. You had me worried for a second. Okay. Good. I gotcha. Come on, Bobby,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

Then I knew that he must know, but I continued to lie to myself about it until we were out of the store and in the street.

“Here,” he said, and handed me his one-hitter. “Do a bump. Cup it in your palm like you are blowing into your hand from the cold. Just do it quickly and no one will notice.”

I pretended to do a bump to satisfy him, but I didn’t turn the knob to put the cocaine in the chamber. I couldn’t walk in the street and sniff cocaine.

He looked at the bottle when I handed it back to him.

“You didn’t even do it,” he said. “You didn’t get any. Here, I’ll load it for you. Just be careful. Don’t spill it when I hand it back to you.”

We were walking toward a little park Jim liked downtown that was a few blocks from the store. In the summer it had fountains, but in winter they turned the fountains off, usually, and it was just a square of black granite surrounded by trees on all sides. It felt protected when you sat there. Like a grove.

He put one hand on my shoulder. Not his whole arm, we weren’t that kind of a family, but his hand, like he would steer me with it.

“Listen, don’t worry about this Lisa thing,” he said.

“Jim, I don’t, I mean, she is. I wanted to tell you.”

I realized that if Jim told me that I could not see Lisa anymore, I wouldn’t. He was more important than any person. He was my brother. You can break up with your girlfriend, you could divorce your wife if you had one, but your brother is always your brother.

“Don’t even worry about it, Bobby. This isn’t something you and I are going to be concerned about. Here, do another bump. Hit the other nostril. Careful. It’s loaded.”

I did another bump. It was fun, walking through the quiet cold streets, in the open like this, sniffing cocaine. It was like we were the ones making the laws. Or the laws could apply to the other people and we stood above them.

“I’m married, Bobby. Lily and I have enough problems as it is. You are a free man. I am happy for you. Not much has been going on with me and Lisa lately, if you want to know the truth. It’s all ancient history. Pretty much.” Then he did another bump. He handed the bottle back over to me. “She told me immediately, anyway,” he said.

“She told you?”

My hands started shaking. I was afraid my eyes might be getting wet. That could just be the cold. I didn’t know where to look. I tried to focus on the trunk of a tree on the other side of the park. I could not imagine what he might say next. It was going to be awful, I knew that much.

“When? I mean, when did she tell you?”

“Don’t be mad at her. That’s how she is. She told me when you two started and she wanted to tell you, too. But I asked her not to. There wasn’t any reason. You needed some time. You came down here without any confidence at all. It was that girlfriend of yours. She had you like a whipped puppy. But look at you now. You’re becoming a man. So, deal with it that way. Like a man handles things.”

He was not accusing me of anything.

“I wouldn’t take this thing with Lisa too seriously, Bobby, if I were you. Sometimes it’s better to stay on the surface with somebody. You know what I mean?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I understood him, but we both enjoyed it when he gave me advice, like this. He didn’t do it often enough.

We sat down on a stone bench. We passed the one-hitter back and forth. Above us was the noise of the traffic of downtown, and beyond it the deep-lunged breathing of the two enormous highways, I-30 and I-35, that intersected at the southeast corner of downtown Fort Worth. For about five minutes we sat there together. My fingers hurt with the cold. Suddenly I worried that the time was awkward rather than natural. I couldn’t decide. I blamed it on the cocaine.

Jim patted me twice on the back. He stood up, and put the one-hitter away in the breast pocket of his jacket. Even if I was upset I could have used one more, I thought.

“Okay, Bobby,” he said. “We’re squared away. Let’s get back to work.”

E veryone liked to watch for the Neiman’s deliveries in the afternoons. They came in once or twice a week. More often at Christmastime, when the money was really flowing. Sheila went shopping in the morning at the Fort Worth Neiman’s and had everything sent to the store. They had three children, two sons and a daughter, but as far as I could tell they were never at home. I didn’t even know their kids’ names, and there were no photographs of them, not even on Sheila’s desk. They kept their dry cleaning in a big armoire in Mr. Popper’s office. Sheila changed in the office if they were going out in the evening.

I was taking a break from the phones, working the buy counter — the Polack was there, too, in a dress that fit her like a ballerina’s leotard, working the buys beside me — and a young mother came in with a kid under one arm and another in a stroller. I noticed her all the way from the entrance because the regular Neiman’s delivery guy came in just ahead of her and, with his hands full of bags, held the door open for her with his foot. I guess she wasn’t even twenty years old. A teenager, same as me. I hoped she would pick someone else but she saw me looking at her and came straight for me. She wanted to sell her wedding ring. She took it from her ring finger and handed it to me with a hopeful expression. But not too hopeful.