Clancy Martin - How to Sell

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By the time I left the apartment complex with my copy of the application form in my hand my car had been towed. I sat on the curb for a few minutes. I took off my shoes and socks and rubbed my feet in the sand and pebbles in the gutter. The cold gravel felt good on my feet. But the rain was picking up and I was getting wet. I called Jim.

“Where have you been?” he said. “I’ve been calling you for an hour. Morgan was here. He waited and then gave up. I finally showed him the opal myself.”

“Did he like it?”

“No,” he said.

“That opal was perfect for him,” I said.

“Is it a doublet? It looks like a doublet.”

“No, it’s not a doublet. It’s eight grand a carat, Jim.”

“I told him I thought it was a doublet. It looked too good. There was no price on the paper.”

“I don’t believe you told him it was a doublet. He’ll think I was lying to him.”

“Just tell him you screwed up. Where are you?”

It had taken me a month to find that opal. It was the perfect opal for Morgan. I was competing with a new dealer on Preston for the sale. I did not know how Morgan had found this independent dealer. He had been my best customer for three years. Now Jim had told him it was a doublet.

“My car was towed. I need you to come get me.”

“We’re stacked up over here. I can’t come get you. Where the hell are you? Are you drunk? Are you at a titty bar?”

“I’m over on Eastchase. I parked illegally. I’m sitting in the rain. Send a salesman, then. Send Sosa.”

“I’ll send the Polack. Where are you? On Eastchase? What the hell are you doing on Eastchase?”

“No, don’t send the Polack. Don’t say anything to the Polack. If the Polack asks, I went to lunch. I’ll explain when I get there.”

I am going to catch a cold, I thought. That would be okay. I could use a few days off.

It started to rain more heavily. I pulled my blazer off and held it over my head. I held my phone with my chin.

“Bobby! Are you there? I can barely hear you. I thought you were going to lunch. What the fuck are you up to? You had better get your act together. You are fucking up. We needed that Morgan deal. You had better get your shit together.”

W e made the swap outside, at the curb.

“Thanks for coming to the store,” I said.

It had been my day with Claire. I had taken her to the new meerkat show at the Fort Worth Zoo.

We could have met at the house but I avoided our house now, because she tried so hard to get me to come by the house. For a few months I carried a beeper she bought for me and it went off constantly. I kept my cell phone turned off. One night at three in the morning she beeped and then the cell phone rang because I had forgotten to turn it off. When I answered she told me she could hear a burglar outside. “He’s out there right now,” she said. This was my wife. I had married this woman. That comes with certain obligations.

My girlfriend was there in bed with me.

“I’ll be right there,” I said. “She lies to you,” the Polack said. “You do not leave me in bed to go to her house in the middle of the night.” “She doesn’t lie,” I said. “Say what you like about Wendy but she doesn’t lie.” “Maybe she does not know it. That she is lying. But, you trust me, she lies,” she said. “And one more thing. Do not say her name like that when you are lying in bed with me. I do not want to hear that name,” she said. “I told her I would go,” I said. “I have to go. What if there is a burglar there? It’s not just her. It’s Claire, too. It’s my daughter, too. My daughter, Polack.”

Then I thought, Bobby, this woman is in bed with you, with her arms around you, and now you are going to drive across town on the cold road in the middle of the night to your wife. She may be the Polack, but she’s a woman, too. Can you not have a little patience and sympathy? I reached to touch her cheek in the dark with my fingertips. But she turned her head away. “You do not bother coming back, then,” she said. “You do not return here.” “It’s my apartment, Polack,” I said. “Tonight, I am saying. Spend the night there. In your old bed with your old wife. You do not drive back here to hope to fuck me.” “I’m not going to spend the night there,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” “No, you will not,” she said. Another night on the way back from Dallas the beeper went off and the Polack took it from the coin well and threw it out of the car. That’s what you get for driving a convertible, I thought.

Wendy and I stood outside the store and I handed her our daughter. Claire did not want to go to her mother. She grabbed at my neck and my arms. She wrapped her little legs against my diaphragm and rib bones.

“No, you put her in her car seat,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. I did not know what else to say. There was nothing else to do except to put Claire in the car seat. I wondered if the Polack was watching us from inside the store. I wondered if it might be practical to kidnap Claire, drive to Lisa’s, and then the three of us could drive to Mexico. My new, improved family. We would have to wait until night so I could rifle the store’s safes before we left.

“I want you to do it,” Wendy said. “I want her to see who’s doing it.”

B ecause Jim wasn’t taking his calls, Dad kept phoning me for money. I had relented and started up with the cocaine again. It was the buildup to the season and Jim and I were working fifteen-and sixteen-hour days. Black Friday was only a week away. I used one of those little brown bottles that Jim used to carry. I always offered it to Lisa. Out of politeness. Not because I thought she should have some. She said no for months and then she said, “Fine.”

We were back at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. But not in the big suite I had moved us to for our last couple of visits. “I want to stay in our old room,” Lisa said when we checked in. “Our regular room.” It was one of the smaller rooms, on the third floor.

“Don’t do it if you don’t want it,” I said. “But it is very good cocaine. I get it from the biggest importer in San Antonio. She is a little Mexican woman who weighs about three hundred pounds. Maria Garza is her name. She is the cocaine queen of Texas.”

“I bet she has nice jewelry,” Lisa said. She was being sarcastic but she knew it was true. It was sarcasm directed at me, not at the cocaine dealer.

I did not want to talk about that. You hated to think about putting your own diamonds and Rolexes up your nose.

“I don’t know, Bobby,” she said. “I like to feel clean when I take a bath.”

“I’m used to doing it without you,” I said. “But it is an awfully nice thing to do together.”

Then, unexpectedly, and gracefully, not violently like I would have expected, she sniffed several small lines.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ve done it now. We may as well go ahead and do it. Let’s smoke some,” she said after we had sex. There was something different about her. I did not like it, whatever it was, but it was spiritually stimulating. Suddenly she reminded me of Jim. Her face looked so independent. Like she had made a decision, and she was not going to tell me what it was. For my protection, maybe, or just because she didn’t need to tell me, and I didn’t need to know.

I wondered about that. Where precisely that change in her originated, I mean.

“Do you know how to do that?” Then I thought that was the wrong thing to say. “Can we even do that in here?”

“It’s really easy. We’ll smoke it in the bathroom. You know how it is, you don’t let the smoke out of your lungs anyway. It tastes too good. We’ll smoke a few grams and then go to the pool. It’s dark, I bet we’ll have it all to ourselves.”