Clancy Martin - How to Sell

I took the tweezers I had been playing with and put them back on his desk pad where I had found them. I folded the three carats back into their papers.

“The package looks fine to me,” I said. “I like your bracelet idea. I bet Fadeen will go for it. But you better get terms,” I said. “I have a few deals closing this week. But not enough to pay cash for these. You have anything working?”

I could not say anything directly about our numbers. But he had been behind me for months.

“Where are you going? I was kidding,” Jim said. “Are you going to get your feelings hurt over a hooker?”

“Call her,” I said. “It makes no difference to me.”

I almost wanted him to. Or rather, I almost wanted him to believe that I wanted him to. If he already had.

“I was joking. Ha ha, a joke. I’m not going to call her. Hell, let’s make her a gift wrapper if you want,” he said. “I don’t care. I remember she’s good with her hands. That’s a joke, too. Joking.”

“Here. Here’s her number.” I wrote it in big, awkward numbers on his desk pad. The number he already had.

Bobby, I said to myself. Stop this now. Control yourself. If you let them know that you know it’s real, then they can let you know it’s real. And then it will be real.

I felt sick to my stomach. Like I’d been climbing the rubber-matted walls of one of those centrifuges we used to ride at the Calgary Stampede when we were kids. Jim was the only one who could ever get all the way up on his knees, or who dared to go to the top of the wall. The rest of us stayed on our backs about three-quarters of the way up.

“I’m not going to call her. I should, though. Remember those hookers in Vegas?”

In Vegas one time, at the Jewelers Circular Keystone Vegas show, we had been robbed by three black hookers of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of loose uncertified diamonds and thirty grand in cash. These women knew what they were doing. They demanded more money when we were in the middle of sex — I had two of them in bed with me, and Jim and the third one were already asleep, wrapped together in the next bed — and when I punched in the code to get a few extra hundreds, they must have watched me from behind. The next morning Jim woke me and said, “Did you move the diamonds? Because the safe is empty. Bobby, where are the diamonds?” I understood immediately what had happened, though it took a few hours before I could admit it to Jim. I remember rising from that bed, walking to the huge wall of glass that was one end of our enormous suite, and resting my forehead against it. There was Vegas, many floors beneath us, stretching out flat for brown and yellow miles, and farther out the line of the mountains.

T hen I caught them. It was after midnight, and I had left my coke up at the store so that I wouldn’t go through it all, but once I was home I changed my mind and drove back to the store. There they were, the Polack shouting in Russian or Polish on top of a jeweler’s bench with her hands on the back of Jim’s head. I watched them for a few minutes. She looked better with him than I imagined she did with me. I had never seen her naked from a distance like this. Naked, across the room like that, she didn’t look like she thought about money as much as I knew she did. She looked so trustworthy. I thought, If you sold naked, no one could outsell you. In my desk I saw they’d found my cocaine and it was all gone. Naturally Jim’s was gone, too. So I rifled the cash box to let him know I’d been there, and before he got the same idea.

I skipped work the next day and when Jim called at a quarter after ten I didn’t answer the phone.

I wanted to kill her then. When I came in, after the weekend, I sat behind my desk with my diamond tweezers pinched around my pinkie finger or on the lobe of one ear and imagined her with that tiny red laser-targeting dot following the back of her slender skull.

First it was Jim and Lisa. Now it was Jim and the Polack. Or maybe it went in the opposite order.

When she finally came into my office I had a customer at my desk. Janie Krantz, one of my favorites, who was a publicist and on the side wrote books about child therapy. She was looking for a medium-sized cabochon-cut pink tourmaline. I loved these stones myself, so we were having a good time together shuffling gently with our rubber-tipped tweezers through the large cotton-wrapped parcels. She looked up and frowned impatiently at the Polack.

“We speak,” the Polack said. “I explain something to you now.”

“I am with Janie, Polack,” I said.

“I’m on the run today anyway, Bobby,” Janie said. “I should let you get home to your family.” She gave the Polack a stare. Okay, Janie, I thought. “Put these three aside for me.”

“Thank you, Janie,” I said. We gave each other our private smile — I tell my salespeople, cultivate as many of those private smiles as you can — and she left.

“You said you wanted to talk to me,” I said. “I really don’t have anything to say to you at the moment.”

“It is over. I leave the business, too! Time for me to go. Not the business. But this store. You and Jim. I have enough of this, now. I stay for the season. Then, I go!”

“Wait a second. What are you saying? I catch you screwing around with Jim and you dump me?”

“You are making me nauseated, Clark! I look at you and I want to vomit! I cannot watch this ugliness anymore. Fresh air. You need it. This place smells bad. And it is you! You are the cause! Why do I fuck your brother? He, at least, is a man!”

I rubbed my fingers against my thumbs, like you might if you were rolling a bit of earwax between them. My eyebrows were itchy.

“You’re fired, Polack,” I said. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Fired?” she said. “You are joking me? I quit.”

She walked out the front door of my office, and then out the front door of the store.

W e were in the car, fighting. I was drunk and I shouldn’t have been driving. At one point I thought I had somehow drifted over the line of the road and into oncoming traffic. I swerved back to the right, and then I realized that the lights I thought were headlights bearing down on us were just construction beacons.

“Let’s tell the truth, Lisa,” I plunged ahead. “You don’t want me to leave my wife. And you won’t be honest with me about why. I think it’s because you are ready to leave your boyfriend. That’s all I can guess it could be. And you don’t want me to think that now it’s going to be the two of us when you do. And Jim is in this somehow. I am just going to say it. I don’t know how, but I know Jim is in this, Lisa.”

I looked over at her. She looked back at me like I had thrown an object at her.

“You say you don’t want to fight but you give me that. Nice.”

She was shivering. I could have turned up the heat in the car but I knew I needed to keep both hands on the wheel.

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Lisa?”

You are not selling her anything, Bobby, I told myself. Therefore you do not have to try to read her mind and repeat her thoughts. She is your girlfriend. Or your hooker. Your girlfriend-hooker. Calm down, I told myself. For that matter, come to think of it, I am the customer here, I told myself. Or at least I should be. That is how the natural order of this is and ought to be structured.

We better get home, I thought. We need to get in bed.

“Bobby. Bobby. Don’t you get it? Did you even listen to a word I said to you? I’m pregnant, Bobby,” she said. “That’s what I have been telling you. If you would fucking listen. I’m pregnant.”

The air took a kind of slide to the left, as though someone had divided the world’s atmosphere into two halves, and then bumped the bottom to one side with her hip. I tried to steady the car. Someone blared their horn, and then again.