Leaving the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered (Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the highway. He hadn’t come this way before and the trip was disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new. Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had become a video arcade and the Woolworth’s had evolved into a Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was turned.
Declined, his father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics, his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn’t improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him. The evidence was his life.
Maybe so, Barbara would have said, but we can go down fighting. She had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his memory.
She was your conscience, Tom thought.
But morality—the morality of weapons research or the morality of selling cars—had a way of twisting out of his grasp. He was twenty minutes late when he arrived at the lot, but there were no buyers waiting and nobody seemed to notice the time; the salesmen were clustered around the Coke machine telling jokes. Tom had clocked in and was standing helplessly on the lot watching cars roar past—thinking about Barbara, thinking about the house—when Billy Klein, the manager, eased up behind him and draped an arm over his shoulder. Klein was wide all over his body, big shouldered and big hipped and broad in the face; his smile radiated predatory vigor and automatic, fake heartiness—an entirely carnivorous smile. Tom turned and took a blast of Tic-Tac-scented breath. “Come with me,” Klein said. “I’ll show you what selling really means.”
It was the first time since his interview that he had been allowed into Klein’s sanctuary, a glass-walled room that looked into three sales offices where contracts were written up. Tom sat nervously in what Klein called the customer chair, which was cut an inch or two lower than an ordinary office chair; troublesome deals were often T.O.’d to Klein, who felt he benefited from the psychological edge of gazing down from a height. “Strange, but it works. The salespeople call me ‘sir’ and practically shit themselves bowing out of the room. The customer looks up and he sees me frowning at him—” He frowned. “How do I look?”
Like a constipated pit bull, Tom thought. “Very imposing.”
“You bet. And that’s the point I want to make. If you’re going to work out in sales, Tom, you need an edge. You understand what I’m saying? Any kind of edge. Maybe a different edge with different customers. They come in and they’re nervous, or they come in and they’re practically swaggering— they’re going to make a killer deal and fuck over this salesman —but either way, deep down, some part of them is just a little bit scared. That’s where your edge is. You find that part and you work on it. If you can convince them you’re their friend, that’s one way of doing it, because then they’re thinking, Great, I’ve got a guy on my side in this terrifying place. Or if they’re scared of you, you work on that. You say stuff like ‘I don’t think we can do business with that offer, we’d be losing money,’ and they swallow hard and jack up their bid. Simple! But you need the edge. Otherwise you’re leaving money on the table every time. Listen.”
Klein punched a button on his desktop intercom. Tinny voices radiated from it. Tom was bemused until he realized they were eavesdropping on the salesroom behind him, where Chuck Alberni was writing up a deal for a middle-aged man and his wife.
The customer was protesting that he hadn’t been offered enough on his trade-in, an ’87 Colt. Alberni said, “We’re being as generous as we can afford to be—I know you appreciate that. We’re a little overstocked right now and lot space is at a premium. But let’s look at the bright side. You can’t beat the options package, and our service contract is practically a model for the industry.”
And so on. Focusing the customer’s attention on the car he obviously wants, Klein said. “Of course, we’ll make money on the financing no matter what happens here. We could practically give him the fucking car. His trade-in is very, very nice. But the point is that you don’t leave money on the table.”
The customer tendered another offer—“The best we can do right now,” he said. “That’s pretty much my final bid.”
Alberni inspected the figure and said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take this to the sales manager and see what he says. It might take some luck, but I think we’re getting close.”
Alberni stood up and left the room.
“You see?” Klein said. “He’s talking them up, but the impression he gives is that he’s doing them a favor. Always look for the edge.”
Alberni came into Klein’s office and sat down. He gave Tom a long, appraising look. “Toilet training this one?”
“Tom has a lot of potential,” Klein said. “I can tell.”
“He’s the owner’s brother. That’s a whole lot of potential right there.”
“Hey, Chuck,” Klein said disapprovingly. But Alberni was very hot in sales right now and he could get away with things like that.
Tom said nothing.
The intercom was still live. In the next room, the customer took the hand of his nervous wife. “If we put off the cedar deck till next year,” he said, “maybe we can ante up another thousand.”
“Bingo,” Alberni said.
“See?” Klein said. “Nothing is left on the table. Absolutely nothing at all.”
Tom said, “You eavesdrop on them? When they think they’re alone?”
“Sometimes,” Klein said, “it’s the only way to know.”
“Isn’t that unethical?”
Alberni laughed out loud. Klein said, “Unethical? What the hell? Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?”
He clocked out at quitting time and took the highway to the Harbor Mall. At the hardware store he picked up a crowbar, a tape measure, a chisel, and a hammer. He paid for them with his credit card and drove the rest of the way home with the tools rattling in his trunk.
The northeastern end of the house, Tom thought. In the basement. That’s where they live.
He microwaved a frozen dinner and ate it without paying attention: flash-fried chicken, glutinous mashed potatoes, a lump of “dessert.”
He rinsed the container and threw it away.
Nothing for them tonight.
He changed into a faded pair of Levi’s and a torn cotton shirt and took his new tools into the basement.
He identified a dividing wall that ran across the basement and certified by measuring its distance from the stairs that it was directly beneath a similar wall that divided the living room from the bedroom. Upstairs, he measured the width of the bedroom to its northeastern extremity: fifteen feet, give or take a couple of inches.