Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Maybe I should leave,” I said. Let’s see what she says about that, I thought.

“Where are you going to go? When? Are you going to live with your brother? That’s a good idea.”

This was not the response I had expected. I did not even know how she might have guessed about that.

“I thought you loved me,” I said. That did not come out right, either. “I mean, don’t you love me?”

“I would only want you to go to Texas because I love you. Because you need a change. I wouldn’t want you to go for any other reason.”

“You want me to go? Because I will go if you really want me to go. But I don’t think that’s what you honestly want. I think if you ask yourself honestly you will know that’s not what you want.”

“What I’m saying is I know it’s for your own good. Even though I don’t want you to go. You could go and then you could come back. That’s what I’m saying.”

“If you say you don’t want me to go then I won’t go.”

I did not understand how it had happened that now I was going. Before this conversation had begun I knew I could never move down to Texas. What was I going to do, sell jewelry for a living?

“I think it’s important that you go. That is what I am trying to say. I will miss you but sometimes it is good to miss a person. Then when you come back things will be different. Better.”

There was silence on my end. I wondered if she was in her bedroom, alone, or if she was in the kitchen with her mother listening.

“Is your mother there? Is your mother making you say that?”

Wendy’s mother had liked me for the first several months. It was not difficult to arrange. I flattered her, dressed cleanly, and smiled often. “You have such nice teeth, Bobby,” she told me. “I just can’t believe you never had braces.” But then, a month or two before this conversation, she had found some pornographic letters I had written Wendy — it wasn’t my idea, she insisted on them, it was a job I had to do in order to have regular sex with her — and, like I say, her mother had found the letters, which in itself might not have been disastrous, but one of the letters was about a mother-daughter-boyfriend thing, and since then she could not tolerate me.

“No. I am in my bedroom. You need to go. It will be good for us,” she said. She made that yawning noise she always made when she was lying.

“You are yawning,” I said.

“I am yawning because I am tired,” she said.

“No, you are yawning because you really don’t want me to go,” I said. “Because you are lying when you say you want me to go.”

She yawned again.

“You are right. I don’t want you to go. But I think it is really important that you go.”

“I’m going,” I said. “To go, I mean.” Now I had her where I wanted her.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad it’s decided. I’m proud of you. But now I have to go. I have to go to the grocery store with my mother.”

“What? You are doing what?”

“I slipped when I said that,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that last part. I am staying home.”

“Stay on the phone, then,” I said.

“I have to go, Bobby. I have to do my homework. I am turning off my phone so I can do my homework. Otherwise you’ll never hang up the phone. You’ll just keep calling back and you won’t let me work. I love you but I have to get off the phone now.”

“I love you, too,” I said. “I’m sorry,” I said. But I knew she had hung up as soon as she told me she loved me. She always hung up before I could. That was how I preferred it.

M y mother was out of the house, walking our dog with my stepfather. That was part of their regular routine. I waited until they had been gone ten minutes or so, to be sure they would not duck back in for something they had forgotten. An old plastic bag for the dog poop, for example. Then I called my dad.

“The hell with that, son!” he said. “Don’t be silly! You aren’t supposed to be a jewelry salesman. Let your big brother hold down that end of the fort. That’s not the right situation for you. If you’re ready to leave the nest and move to the States, come live with your old man.”

My father had never asked me to live with him before. He had often insisted that I could if I wanted to, but he had never requested it.

“Come on, Robby!” I loved it when my father would use that name for me. “The real South! Sunshine and oranges! You don’t want to waste your time in Texas with all those cowboys and rednecks. I’ve got grapefruits growing on the tree in the backyard! I eat them for breakfast.”

“Florida?” I grinned and blinked back the tears.

The next day, during another of my mother’s dog walks, I called Wendy. When I told her that I had changed my mind about Texas and now I was going to move to the States to live with my father she agreed to see me again. Because it was my father, I think, and not my brother. That made the plan sound real.

“Take me out on a date,” she said. I was making a plate of microwave nachos while we talked. “I want to see you before you leave. You weren’t going to leave without saying goodbye.”

At the end of the date she said she didn’t want to go home yet. “Let’s drive out to the field,” she said. I knew what that meant.

We suffered the sex on an oily blanket in the back of my borrowed tow truck.

“This is your goodbye present,” she said. “Your so-long fuck.”

Why does she have to use the expression so-long? I thought.

“This is too much work,” I told her after several minutes. “You are never going to come. Maybe if we move to the grass.”

I had my legs wrapped around the armature of the towing apparatus for leverage.

“No, I am close, don’t stop now,” she said.

“My jaw hurts,” I said.

“I’ll make it worth your while. Don’t stop. You’re next,” she said. “There. But softer. Right there.”

The tow truck came from an old job of mine, the Shell station on Sixth Street, which was down the street from the Safeway where Jim had first taught me to steal Du Maurier cigarettes. My friend still worked at the Shell station, and because I got him the job he would often allow me to borrow the tow truck for a few hours in the evening after Erik Jensen, the white-headed Danish owner, left.

After Wendy came and the two or three minutes of my sex were over, we wiped up and rested on each other. That was frequently the only part of our sex that was thoroughly happy for me.

“Can I have your jacket? It’s getting cold out here.”

A few years ago her parents had moved to a new development on the north end of the city and we were parked out at the end of it in a long pasture where new houses would eventually be. Beyond there were pine trees. We could see the sun going down behind the mountains. All the mosquitoes were dead from the cold and it was nice to be in the field with the last bits of sun on the sparkly white tips of the mountains. I gave her my jacket. I was grateful that she had asked for it. I was in a short-sleeved T-shirt and the hairs on my arms rose with the wind.

“It smells like it’s going to snow,” I said.

“I’m excited for you about your dad. I wasn’t surprised but I was excited.”

“I was surprised,” I said. “You can come down too. We can lie on the beach together.”

“Do they have a beach in Palm Springs? I thought that was in the desert.”

“No, he’s back in Florida. He’s got a new church there.” At this time my father was a kind of minister or guru.

“He moves all the time,” she said. “That must be great. I wish I lived in California and Arizona and Florida.”

“I know. Me, too. I mean, I guess I will be.”