Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Okay,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t hurt to get hit with a stick?”

“I’m not explaining it right. Really it was a good thing. But anyway, that made me see things differently. Wendy, I mean. It made me see the value of Wendy. More clearly than I did, I mean.” Was that what he wanted? “I mean, she loved me. She believed in me. I understood that I wasn’t one of those guys I always wanted to be. With women, I mean.”

Telling the story was making it less clear in my own mind.

“I need another margarita,” I said. “Do you need another margarita?”

She was quiet. Her straw made a sucking sound at the bottom of her drink.

“Hey, not to change the subject, but when is Jim’s baby coming?” she asked me. “Isn’t their baby due any day?”

One of our salesmen had gotten a girl pregnant and Jim and his latest wife were adopting the little baby boy, who would be born in a week or two. They were going to call him Tanner.

“Plus, you know, honestly, nobody will ever love me the way Wendy does,” I said. “I mean, except for Jim, I guess. But he’s my brother. That’s reason enough to get married right there.”

She reached out and took my sunglasses off. It was bright as a lightbulb out there by the surface of the pool.

“Let’s have another drink,” she said.

She sounded odd. But it may have been me. With the sun and not having eaten breakfast I was feeling a bit drunk.

“There was something I wanted to ask you, too,” I said. Since you already said his name. Since you introduced him into the conversation. Better to get it out now, Bobby. In the open.

The thing was, a few days before, Jim had answered the phone and started having a conversation with someone who could only have been Lisa.

She didn’t respond.

“Okay, I’m hot. I’m getting in the water,” she said. She stood up. The sun was on her back and shoulders. She put her sunglasses on the table. Her movements were abrupt but had that fluidity beneath them like a tree branch shaking in the wind.

She was so slender that her belly curved in behind her hip bones.

“Can we talk for a minute, Lisa?” I said. But she dove in.

Later in the bungalow I questioned her about it directly.

“Did you call the store the other day? Did you talk to Jim on the phone?”

She said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Ridiculous was not a word she would use unless she was lying.

•

Monday morning when I was back at the store, I asked Jim. It was not really a question we were allowed to ask each other, but I didn’t care.

“Yeah, she’s called a couple of times. I picked up the phone when she was calling for you, I guess, and recognized her voice. She said you guys are dating a little.”

I admitted to myself that I was not as surprised as I should have been. He was lying, too. The conversation I heard only a second of before he hung up had nothing to do with Lisa and me. He had been telling her about his last trip to Vegas. The return of Lisa to our lives should have been electrifying news. They didn’t even have their stories straight. As developments go, it was oddly reassuring. By the way he said it I didn’t think they were having sex or anything. Maybe they were just worried about me. They knew how bad things were with Wendy and they were hoping to protect me, trying not to add new worries and complications into my life. It could be that innocent, I thought. It was better if I left it alone. Also, that way, if I was wrong, if they were up to something together, I could keep an eye on them. By playing dumb, I mean.

S o I understood immediately that it was Lisa he was hiding behind his idea of the trip.

“Get on a plane. You can use the store’s AmEx. That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “Relax with Kizakov in Tel Aviv. The way he splashed the green around on that place of his you wouldn’t even think he’s Jewish. Of course, they are different in Israel than they are over here.”

“Okay,” I said. I had always wanted to see Jerusalem. “That sounds good. Why not? I could use a little break. You’re right. Good idea,” I said.

“Buy us some diamonds. We can run a promotion when you get back.”

I didn’t think they were having sex. He wasn’t trying to get me out of town so they could have a weekend together. They wouldn’t do that to me. Jim wouldn’t look at the sex as a betrayal. He would view that part recreationally. But Lisa would.

That was an advantage I had over them. Each understood what would count as a betrayal of me differently. I had double indemnity.

Then I thought: But what would Jim count as a betrayal?

“Keep it light. Don’t go crazy. Spend a few hundred grand. I need a D Flawless six-carat marquise. A fine make. Ideal make if you can find one. It doesn’t need to be certified. See what you can conjure up. Let Elie hold your hand.”

So I left them both behind and flew to Israel. I stayed with Kizakov at his mansion in Netanya. I regretted this because I could not drink as much as I wanted or call a hooker. But the hookers seemed scarce in Israel. Hong Kong had been the same unfortunate way.

I tried calling Lisa several times while I was gone. I knew better than that. But I was up at all hours anyway. I crept down Kizakov’s cool, breezy hallway in the dark and used a phone I had found on a hall table. There was no phone in my guest room, and my phone didn’t work in Israel. One time her phone went straight to voice mail so, quickly, I called Jim’s cell phone. His went straight to voice mail, too.

After we settled on the diamond buy we went to the coast and had dinner. Israel is an ugly, sandy country under construction, with more bulldozers than trees, but the food was excellent. We had roasted duck and many small plates of delicious pastes and hot flatbread. Kizakov did not drink, so I had a bottle of white Israeli wine to myself. It tasted like copper.

“Now you want to buy a piece of turquoise,” Kizakov said.

“For my daughter Claire,” I said. “She was born in December. Two years ago. It’s her birthstone. You know how it is with your children. When you are traveling.”

“Please, what’s to apologize?” Kizakov said. “I admire turquoise. The true turquoise.”

Not the next day but the following day, the day before I had to leave, he flew me in his little leather-seated jet to Cairo and we met with the turquoise sellers.

“This is turquoise de la vieille roche ,” the wrinkled Egyptian explained. It was like in a book you read when you were a boy. We sat on a red rug together in our bare feet and he poured the blue stones from leather pouches. The high-ceilinged room was quiet and decorated with many brass and silver ornaments. There was a large Koran on an ornate stand. He explained the quality of different turquoises to me and I learned. His turban was black. There was something in this Bedouin’s ancient face that made me certain I could believe what he told me. But perhaps he merely came from an older, cleverer culture of sales. With Kizakov there, learning, too, serious and deliberate, I felt like a child among these men.

The Egyptian had finished pieces also, set in orange twenty-two-karat gold, but I selected a stone about the size of the top half of my thumb. It was a color of blue that you have not seen. After the long, patient discussion of price, while they drank tea and he graciously served me a beer, we settled at seventeen thousand. I still have the stone today. That is, my ex-wife has it, in one of that Muslim’s simple leather pouches, in a safety deposit box at her bank, waiting for Claire to turn twenty-one.

•

B ack in Fort Worth Jim was supposed to pick me up at the airport. I hung around the baggage check for half an hour or so, until the crowd cleared and I was there alone, watching the metal plates roll past, and then I called the store. At first there was no answer. I counted the rings. When I got to fifteen and the voice mail answered, I hung up in disgust and called again. Around ring eleven he answered. Of course, I thought. After eleven rings the owner answers the goddamn phone. I wished we could fire every salesperson we had and start fresh.