The Constant Heart (13 page)

You could see, said Sara, from the pictures that he showed her, one after another, a sort of serial of pictures, that the girl, whose name was Nadia, was losing weight. Jack sold novelties (like “belly button lint”) and had a little case on wheels that he rolled from store to store, although, he said, the Internet was killing him. He even gave Sara a guaranteed cockroach killer. It was two blocks. “Place cockroach on block A. Strike sharply with block B.” That kind of thing.

After they had looked over the cars and Sara had shared
half a tuna sandwich with Jack, which he ate in small bites to make it last longer, he said, “Do you know what nephritis is?” And when Sara said she didn't, he explained that it was a kidney disease and that Nadia needed a transplant, but a lot of people also did, and she was on a waiting list, which, he guessed, was as long as the Manhattan telephone directory. And, Jack said, she's got this little suitcase all packed and ready to go in case we get the call, but I think, Mike said, we'd have better luck if we could just buy a kidney. Sara said she thought that was illegal. He asked her if she would do anything illegal to save someone she loved. She said she hoped it would work out. He sat there, with a quarter of the tuna sandwich, and said, “Yeah. Let's hope.”

So he came in once a week, sometimes more, and on some occasions he just sat in her office and she shoved over half her lunch and he left her a bag of belly button lint and a plastic ice cube with a fly in it. Just what I needed, she said.

Still, she was selling cars even when times were hard, when people were out of work: She had a way of suggesting that the car would bring good luck. She had a gimmick, too, which was that she had a case of champagne and when she sold a car she gave a bottle of champagne to the buyer and said the thing to do was to put it in the refrigerator, since she said that a bottle of champagne in the icebox attracted things to celebrate. And she had some spray cans of good luck she got from the Latino grocery down the street, and sometimes she sprayed the car with the can, which she said was a closer.

She came home late, glad she had sold a car, but the next day she sold two or three cars, each day getting tougher than before, as though while she wanted to forget this growing
obsession (“That's what it was, Jake”), underneath it all she was trying to make sense of things: Each new car sold suggested order, didn't it?

She said to me in the bar, “See, there's this moment. Everything is hanging in the balance. You have to know what the buyer wants and how to give it to them. They've got to feel that you will do anything for them. It is an intimate moment. They want something. You give it to them. For instance, if they want bucket seats, by god, you've got to move heaven and earth. You can't ever let them feel that they are just a convenience of some kind. You've got to give them a fucking hard-on.”

She came home at the end of the week and flipped open the book she kept to keep track of the cars she had sold, and as she did, she had a glass of wine, then straight vodka, which she took out of the freezer, poured a slug into a glass and then slammed the door so hard the refrigerator rocked back and forth on its little legs. With a kind of fury, she wrote, “I sold three cars, and a truck. Tinted glass, radio, CD player, leather seats. Two jackasses invited me out and one made an indecent proposition. Bank approved them all.”

Her boss called her and asked if she would meet him in a bar after work, on a Saturday. Usually he wanted to talk to her about new models and what lines he should order from the manufacturer, what she thought the inventory should be, what extras, CD players, air, tinted glass, leather seats were going to fly and what about the TVs that could be in the backseat of the wagons. Would parents go for that? He used to bitch about how he couldn't keep a body man or a good mechanic, since they were always taking off for someplace like Alaska or Hawaii, and these days even China.

His name was Barry Hammelman. He had wanted to be a doctor, but he hadn't gotten into medical school, even after he had tried a lot of times, and he had taught biology in a high school, although he got tired of the rules and regulations there and kids carrying guns, but most of all he got tired of being broke. So he had opened a dealership. He wore his hair short and he had big glasses so he looked like a kid, just as he wore bowties to suggest a kind of innocence. The most dangerous thing anyone could do would be to believe that what he looked like and what he was were the same thing.

In Danville, beyond the black hole of downtown where the Dunkin' Donuts was, next to a burned-out dress store (where someone was just hoping to collect the insurance after Wal-Mart came, like an economic dinosaur), a strip had still grown up, and while it was mostly car dealerships, like Sara's, and AutoZones, and some stinky junk stores, a Chinese restaurant had opened, too. Barry and Sara met there.

Car dealerships on either side of it and one across the street. Barry had on one of his bowties and a white shirt. When Sara came in he had been looking out through the glass doors of the restaurant at the promotion in the Ford dealership across the street: balloons and a guy with a hot-roasted-peanut cart in the parking lot giving away bags of peanuts.

“I'm not kidding this time, Sara,” he said. “Now, you know how I feel about selling cars. No one likes to move iron more than I do. But what you're doing is going to cause trouble. I don't mind a call or two from the Better Business Bureau. How can you make any money and avoid that? But this is different. You are going at people in a way that is going to get us in trouble. You're getting too . . . ” He looked at her.
“Personal. I know it is hard for you to believe, but even in the car business there are matters of propriety. At least if you get caught. So what's wrong? What are you trying to prove?”

“That's between me and me,” she said. “You want me to move to some other dealership? Will you give me a good recommendation?”

“No, I don't want that. I'm just saying back off a little. You don't have to go after these people like an alligator after a dog.”

She rolled a shoulder.

“This is what I've got,” she said.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Sure.” He took a drink. Then another. Finished the glass and held it up for another.

He said that he was going by her office one afternoon that week, and she was getting ready to close with a guy, a big guy, about forty-five with a big gut, and Hammelman stood by the door, just back from it so he could see her face and hear what she was saying. The guy, the buyer, had the pen in his hand and he was thinking it over. Not signing, but thinking about it. Wavering. Thinking one thing and then another, and she was looking at him. You know you are an attractive woman, the buyer said to her. You send a kind of atmosphere, sexy but yet kind of considerate.

So the buyer was looking at the brochures and then at you, Hammelman said to her. What she wanted, of course, was for the buyer to sign the damn form. She leaned forward, smiled, looking right at him. She tried to figure out what he wanted, better air, more speakers, what the hell could it be? The closer. The thing that would wrap this up. The guy looked over his shoulder, at the bathroom, and it was obvious, of
course, that the buyer thought it would it be nice to get Sara in there for a couple of minutes with the door locked, since he seemed to be able to tell that she would do just about anything to sell the damn car. Actually, a van. Good fabric on the seats. Automatic. All-wheel drive. Sara looked right back, and Hammelman saw it, not that he would object if they could get away with things like that, but he knew they couldn't, not for long. Sara looked right back at the buyer, not angry so much as insistent, and she stood up and reached for the key to the bathroom, and the buyer said, “Well, I guess I will just sign this,” kind of scared. “But,” Hammelman said. “You would have done it, wouldn't you?”

She shrugged.

“I wanted to sell the car,” she said.

Hammelman told her to back off, because soon the Better Business people and god knows who else are going to be on them like stink on a dog, and Hammelman had his own family to worry about and his wife—what would she say? And he had a license to protect, a line of credit to look after, and while he knew it was hard to believe, he was a member of a church, and that was a great source for people who bought cars. So if Hammelman thought she could do it and get away with it, fine. But he didn't think that was it. So knock it off, he said. Sell the cars. Flirt. But stop right there.

He drew a line with water at the tip of his finger across the plastic tabletop where they were talking. Like drawing a line in the sand.

“So,” I said then, in the bar where Sara and I went after almost getting shot. “Is that the trouble? You got somehow sideways selling cars with, err, incentives?”

“Oh, Jake,” she said. “I don't think I would have really done it. But no, that's so far away from it, from trouble.”

I lay there, next to the stream and in that sound, that humble hiss, splash that has such a secret, and in the stars overhead a meteor streaked across the sky, a sort of scratch of light, the color of a sparkler, and that led me to think about the Horsehead Nebula before I began to face up to the beginning of the real problem. That's when Sara decided that she wanted more money, to sell more cars, to have more proof that she could make up for every mistake, every error in perception. She thought of me, she said, but by this time she was too much on her own, too alone to be able to make me understand. Or to take the time to find me. And what was I doing anyway, I thought, since I spent my time thinking about some star, Zeta-12. Lambda Crb. Centaurus.

T
HEDAWN WAS an ominous gray, as though something were stirring behind the trees, the leaves of which looked like the feelers or ears of monsters, and as the stars faded, which left me with a sense of being more alone (like a diamond cutter without his tools), I thought, Well, now is the time to face up to Sara's real trouble, right? My father got up and took a long, slow leak, the steam of it urine-scented. Then I took my fly rod and waded into the now pink water where the fish were taking emergers. Hungry, desperate, large.

Even then I thought about some of the photographs I had seen from the Hubble, particularly those of filmy clouds of gas, glowing green or red. The difficulty was often one of precision. For instance, I confronted the endless failure of expectation, or my thinking things would be one way, but reality, if that's what you can call it, seems to delight in being slippery, in trying to get you to believe one thing is true, when, in fact, this item is just another false lead. Error is at the heart of the history of science or medicine, that is, a lot of what was
believed turned out not to be true, and I can't forget this essential vulnerability. We will look back on the present, from a hundred years from now, and laugh. Or, at least, that's a possibility. So I was left with that essential uncertainty, that essential possibility of being wrong, not only in the heavens, but in confronting Sara's trouble, too. In my work, what I expect to get as a result of observation is often just a little skewed, but you do your best, make the best assumptions (how do you know what's “best”?), do the calculations. The next thing you know you are off by a billion years. When you saw something unexpected was it just an error, or was it something new, and if it was new, did it change everything? Understanding could be going along just fine: All the data was safely inside the realm of statistical error and yet the next thing I knew, it didn't add up. Nothing you could put your finger on, aside from the certainty that your explanations didn't really make sense anymore.

And yet, beneath those stars that glittered like the sequins on a woman's dress at an elegant dance, where a mirrored ball turned above the couples, I still was convinced of a cold romance (in its demands), just like hitting an elbow on a frozen pipe, the chilly vibration the evidence of how those stars overhead were connected to Sara. Or, maybe, with a little luck, I could be wrong about that coldness, too. Was that hope on my part or delusion? Hadn't I thought things were one way and had them turn out another? Well, I had a little more to go on than usual. Sara was in trouble, and even reality, at its most slippery, wasn't going to change that.

Barry Hammelman said, after a couple of weeks of uneasiness with her obvious restraint, that is, he was afraid she could
resist making more money, but not for long. “Say, Sara, I want you to meet an old friend of mine. Maybe you should get to know him. A good guy.”

I am a slow learner, in many ways, but I have learned the hard way that when someone is introduced as a “good guy,” it probably refers to someone who behaves in such a way that the rest of us, that is men, end up paying for it, just by association. Hammelman's friend was Frank McGee, or that's what he called himself. And he even had ID that said he was Frank McGee, but Sara found out that his real name was Miguel Jose Cardoza, whose mother had been a blond beautician in San Diego who had taken up with a man, Cardoza, who had been in the navy, although he spent a lot of his time in the brig. So Sara called him McDoza, at least when she thought of him, which these days was a lot. Or, she said, when she hated him the most, she called him, to herself, MD.

McDoza had a proposition for her, although he sort of worked around to it slowly. They went to that same Chinese restaurant where Barry Hammelman had taken Sara. McDoza had blond hair, dark eyes, a scar in his eyebrow, and he wore dark, very cool clothes, Armani, said Sara, which, for reasons she couldn't really explain, made her feel that he was someone she could do business with. “If the guy is wearing a sport coat that cost twenty-eight hundred dollars, doesn't that mean he's someone you should think about doing a deal with?”