Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Real nice, Bobby. The Polack. I don’t understand you at all. I mean, I suppose maybe I do but I almost wish I didn’t. She doesn’t know about me, does she?”

“No one knows.”

“Oh, I bet she does. That’s what’s really sad. She knows.”

“No, she doesn’t. You don’t know her about this kind of thing. I’m telling you, she’s dangerous. She’s jealous, too. She would kill us both.”

“You don’t know anything, Bobby. You are just like a damn little kid. Why do you want all these mommies, Bobby? Wouldn’t you be better off with just one mommy?”

Now she was being cruel, and I couldn’t see why.

“Could we talk about something else?”

“We’ve got all night.”

“Could we talk about something happy?”

“I’m happy. You should be happy, too. But you don’t know anything. You can’t even get a real girl. You had to call Sylvia.”

That was something I had been thinking about. Since she brought it up. Since she was the one wanting to talk about these things. Just say it, Bobby, I thought. But as I spoke I couldn’t quite ask her what I wanted to ask her.

“Sylvia,” I said. “You know Jim gave me Sylvia’s number.” That was pretty close, I thought. Close enough.

“Jim, as in your brother, Jim?” She looked away from me. “No, I didn’t know that. Why? I don’t want to see Jim.” She kissed me again, on my neck, and then rolled off of me. “Here, you want a fresh drink? I’ll get us both one,” she said.

While she was getting the bottle from the minibar she said, “You didn’t give him my number, did you? Did you tell him about us?”

“No. Of course not. That’s not what I was saying. He gave me Sylvia’s number. That’s all I was saying. He and Sylvia know each other. He doesn’t know about you at all.” That sounded odd. “I mean, I didn’t know if you wanted me to tell him. I want to tell him about you. About us, I mean. About you and me. And that you are happy and everything. You know, I think he’d be glad to know. Like old friends and everything. Plus he cares about you. And me, too. He would be happy for us.” Shut up, Bobby.

She had been watching me from where she was kneeling at the minibar but now she looked away from me. I couldn’t tell why. Maybe it was that she believed I was lying and did not want to humiliate me by letting me see it in her face. I wasn’t lying, though. That was the frustrating part.

“But maybe I shouldn’t tell him. I don’t know what you would think. You might not like him now.”

“Maybe you think he wouldn’t like me anymore,” she said. She was turned away from me and the way her hair hung on her naked back, between those shoulder blades that belonged on an antelope, made me want to reach out and grab it with both hands. She was putting ice in the glasses. “It sounds like that is what you are saying. But do you really know him in that way? He might look at all this differently than you do. Do you really know what you’re talking about, Bobby?”

“No, what I’m saying is you wouldn’t like him now.” I had to dig myself out and I would do it at Jim’s expense, if necessary. I thought I was hurting her feelings. “He would definitely still like you.”

She lit a cigarette. She came back to the bed.

“Here’s your drink, baby,” she said.

I took the cold glass of ice and vodka. I wanted to go to the bathroom to pee, but I didn’t want to leave her alone to think. Also I was still a bit shy to urinate around her, and I couldn’t close the bathroom door in the middle of this conversation.

“I hope you are not trying to trick me into something,” she said.

“I said I don’t want you to meet him, Lisa.”

“That’s what you said. I believe you. But this is how it starts with you two. I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen you two in action. It always starts with something. Something like this.”

“What starts?”

“What do you think, Bobby? Nothing good, I’ll tell you that much. Nothing that will make any of the three of us happier.”

The three of us? But this time it is only about the two of us, I wanted to say.

I drank my vodka. Leave it alone, Bobby, I told myself. I tried to think of a joke to tell her. Something to get us on a new track.

“Let’s not talk about Jim,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought him up. That was one of your rules, right? No talking about Jim.”

I couldn’t help myself.

“Okay, that’s it,” she said. She started tickling me. “It sounds to me like you want to wrestle. You wanna wrestle?” she said. “I bet I can whip you. Let’s wrestle.” She took an ice cube out of her drink and put it in her teeth. She rubbed it on my chest. “You better watch out now,” she said, with the ice cube in her fingers. “I can do some real damage with this thing.”

When I woke up, in the morning, she was still there, where I didn’t know if she would be. Outside my window I could see the shadows from the sun, not quite risen yet. There were birds out there, too, waking up, bouncing the branches just past the window. I didn’t have a hangover. My first appointment wasn’t until one. What a good day, I thought.

T hat same morning, a few hours later, the Polack came into my office and said, “A girl will speak with you.”

The Polack was wearing one of my favorite thin silk shirts. The red one. She bought them for herself in one of those giant Chinese warehouses over on Harry Hines, where we sometimes bought cheap gold chain if we needed it in a hurry and didn’t want to pay for Italian. They were only ten or twenty bucks apiece but they looked like they came right off a mannequin at Barneys. She knew I always wanted to fuck her when she wore one of those shirts. You could see all of the details of her body beneath it. I had told her so many times, and we had even had sex in the bathroom at the store while she was wearing it. I asked her to keep it on.

I understood who the girl was by the way the Polack said the words. I looked up from my work on my desk in fear. I knew I would see Lisa on the showroom floor. There were three or four customers out there, wandering the showcases. My salesmen were sitting on their asses as usual. But no Lisa. Dear God, that’s one I owe you for, I thought. I knocked on the wood of my desk.

“She’s waiting,” the Polack said. “This girl. She is on the phone.”

“A girl? A woman or a girl?”

“Yes, as I explain. A girl. She is on that line.” She jabbed at the blinking light of the phone at my desk as though she were poking its eye out. I was afraid she was going to ask me to put her on speakerphone.

“Okay, Polack,” I said. “Thank you.” I shuffled the pink message notes on my desk until she left.

After I hung up, the Polack was back in my office. “She is who?” she said.

“She’s a customer, Polack,” I said.

“Okay. Customer. Fine. That’s what you say. Who? Who from? How does she know to ask your name? I do not know this customer. She sounds like someone I know.”

“She’s a referral,” I said.

“I said that. Whose?” the Polack said.

“Not now,” I said. “Polack. Please. It’s Jim’s business. Okay?”

“Good. I talk to him about it,” she said.

“No,” I said. I almost called her Emily, to try to get through to her. But that would be a giveaway. “It’s his personal business. Drop it.”

At lunch I told the Polack that the customer who had called was an old girlfriend of Jim’s, a girlfriend from the Lily days, who was now a hooker. I didn’t tell her it was Lisa. You know, the useful cliché, keep the lie as close to the truth as you can.

“He does that? He pays these women to have sex with him?” she said. “So she asks for you. This is the story?”