Clancy Martin - How to Sell

The Polack ate her mozzarella-and-tomato salad. She was also having a bucket of mussels. Unlike me, she preferred the large ones.

“I kind of knew her, too,” I said. “I mean, she left Jim just as I was coming in the business. That’s why she asked for me. She wanted to know what Jim’s romantic situation was. Like she had some kind of interest in him, I guess. Other than his money. I don’t really know. But I cleared it up. I told her, you know, that she should just ask Jim. I told her that we didn’t really get involved in one another’s personal lives.” I always had difficulty lying to the Polack. She was so suspicious that she made you feel like you were saying, Okay now I am going to lie to you, and then trying to tell the lie. It doesn’t work. It’s self-contradictory.

“I do not blame him. With this latest wife of his. Who would want to have sex with that? No. But, the hooker? For money? Do you ask, how many other cocks are in the hole? Now your cock is Mr. Lucky? We all fuck her at once! Shove in the cocks! More! Like a hotel. But we all sleep in the same bed!”

Lately the Polack wore her hair pulled back but today she had let it down and it made her look more human. She had angular cheekbones, long legs, and, when she wore short dresses or skirts, the kind of bony knees that made her look like a French or an Italian woman in a photo on a runway. But with the unjust and vulgar way she explained the motivations of other people, and more generally her outlook on life, she could seem almost ugly. For an unpleasant moment I wished a magical truck would leap the curb — we were eating outside, on the patio — and run her over right before my eyes. Stop dead with a huge rubber wheel crushing her belly and the crumpled chair beneath her. With that bit of white mozzarella squeezed from her lips. Then I thought, Bobby. You’re cheating on the Polack, too. She’s only trying to have a real relationship with you. She deserves your affection as much as anyone does. Or nearly as much. If you will just give her the benefit of the doubt.

“It’s not such a big deal, Polack,” I said.

“This is bad for a married man. You should be telling him yourself. You are the brother. A married man should not go fuck some hooker. He breaks a promise.”

“I’m married, Polack.” Why do you say things like that, Bobby? Are you so determined to make your own life worse?

“I understand. And I am not the hooker. Or you forget?”

“What I’m saying is leave it alone. Plus if you say something then he would know I told you. He’s my brother, Polack. He has to trust me. I should never have told you in the first place. But I knew, I mean, I thought you would show some discretion. This is important. I need to know I can tell you things, Polack. Without you running straight to repeat them to Jim. Anyway it’s none of our business.”

“Okay. No problem. I will tell it like a joke. We joke like that together. Jim and I, we have our friendship. I know him long before you.”

“But I told you.”

Her salad and her mussels were gone. She reached with her fork and started on my gnocchi. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t hungry. But it made me sick to watch her forking it up like that over the table.

“Go ahead and eat it,” I said, though she hadn’t asked.

I thought, Now I have to tell Jim the whole thing. He will want to call her, too. I did not think he would want to pay her for sex, like I was. But he would want to be friendly with her. He might even start dating her again. I didn’t know what his status was with his current girlfriend. Plus his latest wife, of course. I could ask him not to call her, I thought. But who knew what he would think about that. He might just laugh about it. “Like you said. She’s a hooker now,” he would say. But he would call her anyway. Then he would tell her the story about the Polack and the lie I told her about Jim. She might think it was a sweet story. But they might laugh about it together.

Unless he has already called her, I thought. Then I didn’t have to tell him anything. Or I could just say, Lisa called for you, earlier, and the Polack asked about it. I wondered if there was a way I could get the truth out of Sylvia. But she had been a hooker and a madam for years. She could keep a secret better than anyone.

There had to be a way to turn this to my advantage. It had that feel to it, like if I thought about it with my whole brain I could figure it out. Like a chess move that you know is there, and then you discover it.

What couldn’t happen was that the Polack would find out about me and Lisa.

I could watch Jim’s eyes when I told him. If he blinked too much I’d know they were already talking.

But then, if they weren’t talking yet, and I told him, they’d start talking.

How could I keep them from talking? That’s what I needed to figure out.

L isa and I were about to go away for a weekend — she knew about a house you could rent on the Oregon coast — when Dad called to tell me he was coming to town.

“We’re pretty busy, Dad,” I said on the phone. “Christmas is practically right around the corner. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get away.”

“It’s August, son,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Christmas isn’t for six months. I want to meet my granddaughter. Are you trying to tell me I can’t meet my own granddaughter?” He laughed. It was a deep, happy laugh, one of those good laughs I’d known for years, and it fooled me.

My dad met his granddaughter in an IHOP off I-30. He told us he was on his way to Sedona. “To meet John Denver,” he said. “I gave him the title for his new album.” Uh-huh, I thought.

Wendy met me there half an hour before he arrived. Claire walked in with her, holding her hand. With the other arm she clutched a stuffed black poodle.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said. I picked up Claire and held her in my lap.

“Daddy,” Claire said. “Hi, Daddy.” Suddenly she was shy. She placed her face against my neck. I took off one of my cufflinks for her to play with. I showed her how the back flipped on its platinum spring.

“I wanted to see your dad,” Wendy said.

“You won’t recognize him. What are you going to eat?” I asked her. “What should Claire have? What are you hungry for, honey? How about some pancakes? They have chocolate chip pancakes.”

“She doesn’t like chocolate chip pancakes. It’s dinnertime. Why don’t you have a hot dog, Claire? She should eat some protein,” Wendy said. “Have you seen your dad yet? How is he?”

“I want pancakes, Daddy,” Claire said. “I want chocolate pancakes. I do too like them. Yes, I do. I do not want a hot dog.” She spoke precisely, emphasizing every sound, as if she had invented the word at the moment she used it.

“Yes, I saw him,” I said to Wendy. Dad had come by the store earlier. I didn’t want to talk about it. But Wendy always missed those cues or, more likely, ignored them. She used to tell me, “Don’t make that face,” and I would say, “You can’t edit my facial expressions.” But really she was in the right.

Jim and I had cleaned out his car that afternoon. It was full of clothing, books and tapes, old food, and cockroaches. There were other, smaller bugs. There was even a mouse. It jumped out of the car and ran away across the parking lot. Good for you, I thought. Better luck. Our dad had been sleeping in his car for weeks.

“Your poor dad.”

“You are the only one who ever feels sorry for him,” I said.

“You, too. You do, too. You feel sorry for him.”

“Well, I’m still talking to him. Jim won’t even talk to him now. But he helped me clean out his car.”

My dad walked in the door. He had lost weight and there was more gray but he still had that aura around him, like his body was charged with a magnetic field that stimulated the nearby air molecules, atoms that were listless around the rest of us. His hazel eyes shone at me behind his heavy tortoiseshell glasses just as they always had. If things had been better in my own life I could have believed, maybe, looking at him and the easy way he walked, the same old Guccis and his gold rep tie, that he was not in this terrible state of degeneration. When he hugged me I smelled the cinnamon pipe smoke and the Yves Saint Laurent cologne in his beard.