Clancy Martin - How to Sell

I tried to remember if Wendy and I had been happy before the baby was born. But as far as I could remember the last time we had had sex was when she got pregnant. That was nearly two years ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday. Now I was almost twenty-six years old, and the baby was about to turn one.

Wendy hated the store and over the years she had come to dislike Jim. She would even come out and say it. “I hate that fucking store,” she would say, and I would say, “Wendy, that store is our life.” But I was trying to make us rich. This was what it took. Then we’d have time together. And great vacations. It wouldn’t be like this much longer. I told her that, too. The night before, when we started to fight about it again, I tried to explain this to her. I had said, “I promise, it’s temporary. I love you. Give me five years. I love Claire. I want to be home more.” That last was a lie, but all the other parts were true.

“You never see Claire,” she had said, and handed her to me. “You never even see your own daughter. When was the last time you changed a diaper, Bobby? When was the last time you bathed her?”

Claire started to cry. I did my best to hold her the right way. It is a tricky thing to hold a baby properly. Even your own baby. I handed her back to Wendy.

“Hush,” she said to the baby. “That’s enough, Claire,” she said more firmly.

“She’s just upset,” I said.

This is not working, I thought. We had only been married for three years. It was too soon to get a divorce. My mother will love that, I thought.

Claire continued to cry. Her eyes and her fists were closed. Something about her mouth in its lonely curl reminded me of myself.

“Stop that, Claire! If you don’t quiet down I’ll give you back to your father.”

“What did you just say?”

“Well, if it works,” she had said, and walked out of the room.

“Come on, cheer up,” Jim said. I looked up and saw him watching me carefully. His phone was ringing. It was after hours, so we had the ringers off, but I could see the red light blinking like the light on a police car. The private line. One of the women. Wendy, or Jim’s new wife, or possibly his ex-wife. He sensibly never gave the private line to his girlfriends. His new marriage was going well, however: she was thoughtful and she did not call often. Or it could also be the Polack. The Polack had the private line, naturally.

“I’m cheerful,” I said. “I’m just sick of sorting melee. Do you mind if we get out of here?”

“Let’s put the rest of this package in the papers and go have some fun.”

After the last of the diamonds we went to a dark topless bar in Euless Jim liked. The girls were not as pretty as in the Dallas titty bars but they worked harder. Lap dances were two for twenty dollars, and for fifty you could get a hand job in the back room. You don’t get that kind of treatment in the upscale places. We each blew five hundred bucks or so of our sweeps money. It was a pleasant evening.

M y first and my best crow at Clark’s was Joe Morgan. I picked him up at a giant tent auction we held that summer under a circus tent we erected in the parking lot. The whole parking lot was beneath this enormous white and red tent that the rental guys inflated like an air balloon with enormous fans. We parked the twelve vintage Rolls-Royces we were auctioning at the far end on either side of the auctioneer’s stage. It was the full-page color ad featuring those Rolls-Royces that brought in Morgan, he later told me.

Many crows are women, and the luxury jewelry business lives on them. Wealthy women who shop for jewelry in the way normal women gather shoes. But a rich male crow is even better than a woman, because women are buying for themselves, but men can at least pretend to be buying for their wives. It is easy for a husband to tell a wife that she does not need another diamond bracelet. But it is difficult, and very unusual, for a wife to tell her husband that she has enough jewelry. Even if she has more than she wants, she does not want to discourage his affection.

I was selling Morgan an eighteen-karat white gold diamond-and-emerald bracelet that had been assembled a few days before by our antique dealers over in Dallas. They had put it together for a “Grand Jewelry” event Neiman’s was putting on — these two fellows were among Neiman’s largest consigners — but they brought it to us first, because Jim and I had acquired a reputation for turning enormous pieces quickly if they were flashy enough. As soon as I saw it I called Morgan.

I did not own this bracelet, it was on memo, and I told Morgan that I was preparing to purchase it from a wealthy client and old friend of mine who needed some cash in a hurry.

“She needs some money that her husband doesn’t know about,” I said.

He gave me a sly look. “She’s got something on the side, you think?”

He had a Jack and Coke in his hand. He was a tanned old Texas rancher who had made a fortune, young, in the Gulf, by building and leasing enormous steel barges. He liked to stir around the ice cubes in his drink with his large brown index finger. Usually he would have three or four while he was in the store, and I told the Polack to keep them coming and pour them strong.

“I don’t think so, she must be in her late seventies.” He was in his early sixties. I tell my salespeople: make the old ones feel young, and the young ones feel grown up. “I think it’s for her daughter. She’s in some kind of trouble.” I knew that his daughter had left her husband and moved back home several years ago.

“Hell, that happens,” he said, and took a drink. “That’s kids.”

I knew Morgan would buy this piece but the courtship period was crucial. It would take three or four visits before I would see the check, and in the meantime there would be other buyers he would hear about on the phone: someone would fly in from New York or Toronto, a dealer would ask if he could take it to a show, an expert on Colombian stones would appraise the emeralds. All this was theater, of course, I had only one customer who could buy this piece. And I only had the bracelet for a week.

He had the bracelet in his hand. He held it up like it was a fish he had caught by the tail.

“My wife, she does love platinum, don’t she? That is some kind of pretty platinum bracelet. I don’t think she has many emeralds, does she, Bobby? That’s something she could use. I like those dark emeralds. Those ones with a bit of blue in them are the good ones, ain’t that right?”

“That’s right, Joe. You want that dark intense green with a blue undertone. Those are the very best.”

In describing the emeralds, the diamonds, and the provenance of the bracelet — I was improvising a riff on a story I remembered by Jorge Luis Borges — I had forgotten to tell him that it was not platinum but eighteen-karat white gold. If I had dealt with that at the outset it was manageable. I could have explained that old South American pieces were always done in white gold in imitation of the grand European platinum pieces because they had not yet discovered platinum in South America at the turn of the century. That could have led us into a helpful conversation about the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , which was a surefire winner for a male customer, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford raiding gold mines in Brazil, robbing banks, riding horses, and jumping over waterfalls. But it was too late now. He had been telling himself for an hour that his wife would want it because it was platinum.

“Joe, let me give her a quick steam for you. All my sales-women pawing the bracelet has put some oil on the stones. Of course, they are all dying just to try it on. Let me steam her off. I want you to see her in all her glory.”