How to Sell

by Clancy Martin

  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.”

  Because 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.”

  “It’s ice-cold out there,” I said.

  “We’ll have sex in the hot tub. We’ll wear robes. It will be fun.”

  In the bathroom I sat on the edge of the tub and she sat on the floor with her back against my legs.

  “I honestly can’t sniff cocaine anymore, Bobby,” Lisa added, as she started her cooking. “I quit sniffing it years ago. Sniffing it is too fake.”

  Jim was on the phone. I kept the pocket door between our offices open so that I could watch him when he grabbed the phone. This was not easy because we were very busy and the phones rang constantly. I always answered the phone now. With customers at my desk, too. I would smile and apologize and roll my eyes at the sales floor to express my frustration with my lazy salespeople and then get it on the second ring. “Clark’s Precious Jewels.” If it wasn’t her I stuck them on hold. Even the Polack told me, “You are the boss. Let those salespeople answer your phone.” But she didn’t answer it any faster herself. It was never Lisa when I answered. But I knew that sometimes when Jim picked up it was her. I could see it on his face. He would stand, sometimes, too, and slide the door closed. He might do that just because the customer in his office wanted privacy. But he would do it when he was on the phone, too. I knew he could call out if he wanted. But when you called her she never answered, you always had to leave a message, and then she would call back. So I watched for that behavior especially closely. Call, leave a short message, watch the phones. When I could see him doing that I grabbed every call. I thought about cutting the line to his phone. If it was practical I would have done it. It would give me a few easy days. A few days before we got it fixed. He shouldn’t be answering the phone anyway. The Polack was right about that. We were too busy to be answering the phone.

  My boyfriend doesn’t like you anymore,” Lisa said.

  “I don’t blame him,” I said.

  It was late Saturday night and we were driving across I-10 to spend the night in a cabin on Caddo Lake in East Texas, in the Piney Woods. It was too far a drive for just one night and the next day. There was an oversized limestone fireplace in the cabin and I would make a real fire. In the morning there was a place on the lake we could have pancakes. This was our first trip there but I had read about it in a guidebook. I hoped the pancake place would be open with the cold snap. Maybe there will be ice on the edges of the lake, I thought. That will look nice against the dark water. In the guidebook it said it was the only natural lake in the state of Texas. And Texas was covered with lakes. All of those other lakes were made by human hands. That was upsetting to think about. Or bulldozers, more likely.

  “He always liked you before. He always said you were a good one.”

  She tapped out two little polka dots of crank onto the plastic makeup mirror she carried with her. Then she sniffed them quickly up. She blinked.

  “Do you want some of this?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood. “If I were him I wouldn’t like me, either.”

  “He’s not like you. He’s not jealous. He knows I love him.”

  “He still doesn’t have to like me.”

  “I swear sometimes you act like I should be grateful to him. It’s like you think most guys wouldn’t want me for a girlfriend.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say. Hey, do you want some of this?”

  I had brought a bottle of champagne for us to drink on the drive. It was a Louis Roederer I had not tried before. But when Lisa climbed in the car and saw it she was immediately irritated. “We’re not celebrating anything, Bobby,” she had said.

  I tried to hand her the bottle. She ignored me. I thought she could use a drink.

  “It’s okay. I like it. I like how you think about me. You think something is wrong with me.”

  She is trying to let me in by faking a little bit of vulnerability, I thought. Or even not faking it.

  “You don’t know how I feel,” I said. “Or if you do, you don’t let me know.”

 
I hadn’t meant to be vulnerable back at her. But when I saw her face in the lights of the dashboard like that, with the cold champagne bottle between my legs, and the lights of my car on the highway, the truth just snuck up inside me and jumped out of my mouth.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to give you the news, but you’re not all that mysterious, Bobby.”

  I thought that through. I seemed plenty mysterious to myself.

  I hated moments like this, but I noticed they were getting more common, in more than one of my relationships. It was like we were having two entirely different conversations, and each of us was talking only with ourselves. Yet along the way we managed to say enough to screw things up between each other.

  “You should want me to break up with him. You should be afraid if I don’t.”

  “Come on, Lisa. You know I would like it if you broke up with him. But I’m not going to ask you to.”

  “You should, though. You would if you knew.”

  I pulled the foil off the champagne bottle. Then I held the steering wheel with my knees and opened it. It was very good champagne and it did not bubble over. I took the steering wheel back and tried again to hand the bottle to Lisa. She waved it away.

  “Maybe he’s angry with me,” I said. I took a swallow of the champagne. It was already much warmer than it should have been. I couldn’t really tell what it tasted like anymore. “It’s not like he hasn’t always known what was going on with us. Anyway, I think he would be angrier if he knew I asked you to break up with him.”

  She was quiet.

  Then it occurred to me that she was worried about herself.

  I noticed what a small person she was, physically I mean, curled up in the car seat. Not much more than a kid, really.

  “Afraid of what, Lisa?”

  I looked at her but she wouldn’t look over at me. She was staring down the road.

  I took the last swallow of the champagne.

  The highway was dark and seemed to be getting smaller and smaller in the night, as the tall black trees gathered closer to its sides.

  At the lake the fireplace in the cabin started easily. That was a good sign. The flue was not stuck and I could see which way was open and which way was closed. The smoke went straight up the chimney.

  We drove into the little town and looked for a bar. “I need a beer,” she said. There were three of them, but two were already closing, because they were attached to restaurants. The third was a pool hall.

  “Do we want to go in there?” I said. The men coming out of it looked like the men you see in small towns in Texas. Big men. I thought I noticed one looking at my car and laughing. He was drunk and was probably laughing about something else. But my car didn’t look much like a truck. It was the contrary of a truck, in fact.

  “Come on, let’s play a game of pool. We need something fun right about now.”

  I thought my success with building the fire in the fireplace had already done that work for both of us.

  When we parked she said, “Wait one second,” and tapped out some more crank on that mirror of hers. I reached for it and did a couple of bumps myself. I figured it was about that time.

  Inside, people were noisy and excited—it was Saturday night—and there were more men than women. I noticed the men looking at Lisa, first, and then the women, too.

  I should have changed before we came over. I was still in my suit and tie from the store. I always made the salesmen wear a jacket and tie. Jim was the only man in the store who would wear a shirt and tie, or a jacket with an unbuttoned shirt collar.

  “You want to play pool, little lady?”

  A man about my own age in black jeans with a red bandanna tied around his hair was talking to Lisa. He had large dangerous lips. I was a few steps away, at the bar buying our beer.

  “No, thank you. I am here with my boyfriend,” she said.

  It was nice to hear her describe me as her boyfriend. Even if it was a lie. But maybe she truly thought of herself as having two boyfriends. I could be her second boyfriend, I thought. That’s one step away from being her first boyfriend.

  “Hell, I bet he wouldn’t mind if you play a game of pool. Hey, buddy, you mind if this pretty gal of yours plays a game of pool with me?”

  I turned around. I tried to smile naturally. Naturally but confidently. Or naturally but faintly aggressively. Cockily, maybe.

  “That’s up to her.”

  “I already said no, thank you.”

  He took her by the arm. He had a pool cue in his other hand. She pulled her arm away. She looked at me for a second. There was something hopeful in the expression.

  “One game.” He pulled at her arm. I was unsure what to do. I was still waiting for the beers. But I had to do something. Then the bartender put down our beers next to me. I picked them up, one in each hand, and started for Lisa. I thought I might even say, Here, have a beer, buddy. We’re not in the mood for pool right now, and give him one of them. That would settle him down, I bet. But as I elbowed my way out from the bar I saw Lisa struggle with the man—he was really tugging her arm—and when he turned to her with that same sloppy face she kneed him, as hard as she could, in the balls. If it had been any woman other than the woman I was with I would have admired it. She looked like she had done it many times before, like she was the blade of a jackknife folding up. He bent over and she pushed him to one side so that he collapsed, on his side and then on his back, onto the pool table. Then she took the pool cue he had dropped and poked it into his nose. She shoved the felt tip of the pool cue into his nostril and pushed. He was shouting. The ease with which she did it was almost comical. It looked like a kung fu move. She said, “You aren’t much of a listener, are you?” Then she gave the pool cue another push, but not as hard as she might have, and turned to me. The guy was still scrambling on his back on the pool table. I thought, Where do I find these violent, capable women? First the Polack and now this one. She stepped quickly over to me and took me by the arm—just like he had held her, I thought—and said, “Let’s go. We’re getting out of here.”

  People stepped out of our way and no one tried to stop us. When we got to the car I realized I still had the bottles of beer in my hands. I didn’t know where to put them to get my keys. You couldn’t balance them on the roof of the car because it was a convertible with a cloth top and they would just fall over. I was trying to hurry because I imagined the guy and his friends rushing upon us outside the bar. I was not drunk enough to want that to happen. I put one of the beers between my knees and got the keys from my suit pocket. We climbed into the car and drove back to the cabin. Lisa drank her beer. That was good. But the whole drive back we did not say one word to each other.

  Inside, the fire had already gone out and the cabin was cold. I knelt to start it again but Lisa said, “I’m going to bed,” and I thought, Why bother? I knew she couldn’t sleep, not after the fight in the bar and the crank, but I couldn’t bear the idea of sitting up there with her on the bed in the silence and the dark. If we still didn’t have anything to say to each other, I mean. I sat in the living room, under the Navajo blanket that was across the back of the leather sofa, and drank a glass of water. There was no minibar in the cabin. Then I went to the car, opened the trunk, and found the Burgundy that I had brought for us to have with lunch tomorrow. I had planned for us to take the boat out and have a picnic on the lake.

  In the morning we drove to the pancake place, but we weren’t hungry.

  For weeks we had been building things. We drew designs and swapped them back and forth, we got out the stencils, the French curve set, and the Staedtler compass, we critiqued each other, we sent Sosa to the SMU art supply store for fresh 9000 pencils, we arranged tiny stones in black and purple sticky wax to evaluate sizes and patterns. We filled the holes in our inventory with pieces created by Jim and Bobby. The cocaine was helpful in this process—Jim was doing it with me now, too, or maybe he had never stopped and had just been hiding it from me—and we usually worked at Jim’
s desk, and late into the night. We drew sketches and checked diamonds for size against the open-pronged holes in yellow gold blanks. Christmas was rearing its fierce, beautiful head, and there was no time to dawdle or sleep.

  “So she’s a hooker now. Wonderful. Good for her. She’s really moving up in the world. And you are paying her? I know you’re not paying her. Why do you need a hooker for a girlfriend? In a way it’s not fair to her. It’s like you are making her into a liar. She’s a hooker, so let her be a hooker. That’s probably what she was meant to be all along.”

  “I pay her by the month now. She’s not doing it for the money. I mean, she needs the money, of course. But that’s not why we do it that way.”

  “Well, Lisa was always smart. Now she’s a smart hooker. I’ll give her that. What got her hooking anyway?” He paused for a minute. His eyes softened at the corners. “I guess it was the crystal. That’s what does it to all of them. I told her not to smoke it. I told her and told her.”

  “She’s not really doing drugs anymore. She doesn’t do drugs at all, in fact.”

  She had done drugs once or twice with me, now, but I didn’t know if she was doing them on her own. I didn’t think she was. Not that I wouldn’t have lied about it.

  Except he might know better than I did what drugs she was doing. If they were doing them together.

  “And I wouldn’t say she’s exactly a prostitute, Jim,” I continued. If they were seeing each other he wouldn’t say that. Unless he was paying her, too. “That’s not fair. Or even accurate. It’s more like a networking thing. That’s what I’m saying. I was thinking we should hire her as a gift wrapper.”

  If I brought Lisa into the store I could understand whatever was going on between Jim and her. Then it would all be transparent, and my relationship would have the moral authority because I wasn’t hiding anything from either of them. Plus, that would force me to end it with the Polack, which I needed to do regardless. I doubted I had the strength to remove the Polack from my life without outside help.