Sell Me This Pen
Anybody can sell a car, Delaney. Sell me this.
C&R. CANDIDATE EVAL. TUES. 10 OCT. ’67
Acct. Exec. (Clairtone, + Volvo if we get them back)
Interviewer: T. Delaney
Sched. per N. Bellamy:
9:30 H. Deep
2:00 O. Starr
4:15 V. Null
5:30 ________
Score: Front / Patter / Close / Would I Buy. Five each. Twenty’s a miracle. I’ve given one.
8:50. Blinds half down on the harbour side. Bars of sun across the blotter, Dartmouth flat and blue behind them, a tanker riding at anchor off George’s Island. Best office on the eleventh floor of the Centennial Building, paint barely dry.
V.O. poured. Yes, before nine. Long weekend, turkey at Mother’s in Dartmouth, she asked twice if I was eating. Player’s lit. Fresh yellow pad. The pen. His Mine.
Saturday’s Herald still under the ashtray. COULD BE SOMETHING CONCRETE IN SHAG HARBOUR UFO – RCAF. CJCH on the transistor by the elevators this morning says the navy’s called off the divers. Nothing. No trace. Barker in copy says it’s the Yanks testing something. Barker also says Stanfield’ll be Prime Minister by Christmas. [Patter 4, everything else 1.]
Nancy through the frosted glass. The Selectric going, hum and clack, no bell, no carriage, only the little ball spinning. Steady as rain on a shed roof. Green shift today, hem at the knee, the pale frosted mouth. She brings the coffee and smiles and the eyes stay where they were, grey and flat as the harbour in February. [Pretty girl. Fastest hands on Hollis Street. I’d be lost without her and she knows it, that’s the only trouble with her.]
The rule, same as every time: Sell me this pen. I slide it over. One interviewer, one question, my call.
Learned it from Bill, my first week, 1958, the old office on Barrington. Bill slid this pen across a blotter at me and said “Anybody can sell a car, Delaney. Sell me this.” Montblanc, the big one, black barrel, gold nib, W.J.C. on the band. Eleven men hired with it. Two fired.
No. 1. HAROLD DEEP. 9:30
9:31. Nancy shows him in. Radiator ticking, and under it, low tide. Kelp. The flats at Eastern Passage at the bottom of the ebb.
“Harold Deep. Call me Harry.” He’s sitting before the door’s shut.
Overcoat, heavy wool, a February coat on an October morning with the sun out. Skin grey-green and waxy. Thick blunt fingers, nails short and white. Sits bolt upright, back off the chair.
The smile goes past where a smile stops and keeps going.
Pen across. He doesn’t touch it. Asks what I do at three in the morning.
“Sleep.”
“No you don’t.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
[Out loud. Write it down. Do it anyway. My file.]
What’s under the work, Thomas. He asks what I make. Clairtone consoles, the Moirs Christmas boxes. What is it printed on. Paper. What about the paper. Desk, building, Hollis Street, the rock. Tell me about the rock.
[Every question’s got its answer packed in already. Quiz from the fella who wrote the textbook.]
Everything a man builds is marks on something dying, he says. Says the navy boys went down three days at Shag Harbour and came up with nothing because they didn’t know how to ask.
Then he gives me the pitch. “A pen of magic, a pen of promise, a collector of details… this pen holds the ideas of everything.” Something to pin a man to his desk at three in the morning so he doesn’t drift. Ballast.
[The smile never moves. I write that down.]
He picks the pen up. Sets it down. Same spot, nib toward me.
The bars of sun on the floor are bent now. Curved up at the ends, ribs of a hull on blocks in a Lunenburg yard. Ink coming off the nib wrong, feathering, little webs in the ruling, this line, look at it. The ice melted. The V.O. is warm and brackish. The Dartmouth ferry in a mouthful.
Front 1. Patter 3 (weird, but he’s got a rhythm). Close 0, never asked for the sale. Would I Buy: wouldn’t buy a lobster off him on the wharf.
VERDICT: Undertaker’s cousin. Coat off a dead uncle. Smiles like halibut. Ain’t our guy. NEXT.
He leaves a dime on the blotter. Centennial. The mackerel jumping. His hand never went near it.
Nancy’s typing heavier through the glass. Boots on wet stone. Noon gun off the Citadel and I jump. Hadn’t done that since I was a junior.
Lunch, Chart Room at the Nova Scotian. Two martinis, Barker. They’ve got the whole west side of Barrington down for Scotia Square, a hole and a crane.
No. 2. ORVILLE STARR. 2:00
2:04. Smoke hanging in the window light in flat sheets. Doesn’t drift. Fresh page.
“Orville Starr.” A nod. The hand stays at his side.
Grey suit, buttoned all the way. Cuffs fastened tight at the wrist. Sits. Hands flat on the desk, fingers together, thumbs lined up. Marks coming up on the jacket. A blot on the lapel, then gone. One on the sleeve the shape of the chart for the Sable Island banks, then a moth, then cloth. [It’s there, then not. Like ink in water.]
Ozone. The smell when a transformer goes on a pole in a storm. Cold coming off him.
His eyes go to my cigarette. The coal. My face doesn’t interest him.
“Write your name, Mr. Delaney.”
I pick up the pen and the sun goes out.
I count it. One Halifax, two Halifax, three. No hand. No desk, no pad, nothing for the nib to action. Cold in the teeth.
Then the glare, flat. Every shadow on the desk a cut-out, scissor work. The ashtray’s own shadow you could peel off the blotter with a fingernail.
He takes the pen out of my hand. Holds it the way you’d wield a filleting knife, thumb on the spine.
“Don’t call it a pen. It’s an implement.”
In all the dark, he says, one point of fixed light. The anchor that holds fast. You need one. You needed one just now, Mr. Delaney. And then, same voice, a man reading a tide table: “Put it through a man and he opens like a letter.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Starr?”
“It’s a feature.”
Sets it down. Exactly parallel to the blotter edge. I could check it with a rule.
Fillings humming. The V.O. glass frosts over, white fur on it, and a crack runs up the side with a tick. A clock tick. The pen’s light in my hand. Hollow. Ink coming out grey.
Front Patter Clo
put it through a man and he opens like a letter
put it through a man and he opens like a letter
[underlined. twice. hand won’t]
Don’t know when he leaves. The door’s shut. Nancy’s typing has a hum under it now.
No. 3. VIVIAN NULL. 4:10 4:20
light gone violet thru the blinds. the harbour is a bruise rising. hum in the back teeth. Player’s #3, #4, ashtray full, butts on the blotter
typing under the hum. hum under the typing.
woman. black. severe, all corners. collar up on one side and not the other and it hurts, I look at the desk. Rings, dark, they eat the lamp. Dust. attic in August. old paper, the morgue at the Herald
her shadow on the wall goes the wrong way from the lamp. reaching for the corners. on its own
“Vivian Null.”
she tells me what I sell. status. gold nib says a man’s arrived. boy off the Dartmouth ferry with an office on Hollis, 11th fl, harbour side. she’s right. [she’s not right]
gold for treaties. plastic for grocery lists. all of it a story we tell ourselves about our signatures. then she takes it apart
permanence. your name cut into whatever comes after.
“this is the variety of pen that can sign many contracts and many deals of import. Deals of horrible consequence. Some deals end wars, other deals end lives. Every deal passes judgment.”
Jesus. Barker’d cut this by half. I’d buy it lock, stock and barrel.
I want it. want it. it’s mine it’s al
[she knows about the]
Bill’s painting over the credenza, the abstract nobody understood, rustling. dead moths in a jar. paper going thin under the nib, newsprint, Saturday’s Herald, tears, ash on the blotter on my cuff on
can’t wri
outside nothing. no horns on Hollis. even gulls shut up.
Nancy in. “Thank you, Miss Null.” shows her out
I didn’t ring.
No. 4. ________
After. Dark. Lamp.
The typing stops. All of it. The clock on the credenza. The radiator. Hollis Street. The harbour. Nancy shows him in and doesn’t look up, and her hands sit on the keys and stay there.
Small. Wiry. Collar loose a size, sweat at the hairline. Plain brown suit. The chair takes him the way a hook takes a coat. The face, I look straight at it and I’ve got nothing for the face.
Schedule says ________. I forget to ask. Again.
[I almost don’t ask it. He wouldn’t be able to do it. I ask it anyway.] Rule’s the rule. Bill’s rule. Mine.
“Sell me this pen.”
He picks it up. The shoulders come back. Colour in him he didn’t have at the door.
“Hey, Thomas. Can I call you Tom?”
“Sure.”
Turns it over. Reads the band. “W.J.C. Who’s that, Tom?”
“Bill Corkum. It came with the chair.”
That’s what I tell people.
“Now you sell it to me, Tom.”
It’s my question, handed back, and you don’t get to say no to your own question. I’ve never let a man off it. Nine years in the trade and nobody’s asked me.
So I sell it plain, the way you’d sell a Volvo to a dentist in Bedford.
“We lie awake in the dark. Everybody does. What we hold on to at three in the morning. Keeps us at the desk.”
He nods and I continue.
“Close your eyes. Go on. That’s what it’s like without one.”
He leans in. He’s buying. I’m on a roll.
“Nothing to hold. Nothing holding you.”
Every line I give him he gets bigger.
“And when you sign with it, buddy, it stays signed.”
His shirt fits now. The collar’s snug at his neck.
“Wars. Lives. Judgment.”
There’s more of him in the chair, and the chair’s smaller, the desk is, or I am.
“Your name on whatever comes after.”
I’m reaching up for the blotter [a boy at Mother’s kitchen table].
I pause, and then I close.
“Sign here.”
He claps and the window cracks. After considering me for a beat, he stands and leans close. Old Spice.
“Tommy.”
Nobody calls me that. Mother. The ferry wharf in Dartmouth, I’m six, hold my hand, Tommy.
“You always wanted them to like you. The nuns. Bill. Every buyer you ever sat across from. Didn’t come with the chair, Tommy. What was it like? Bill’s on the carpet in the old office. And the little tin is out of his vest pocket. The man who taught you the question.”
A Saturday in March, ’64, the two of us in on the Moirs boards. He goes down by the credenza, his face going the colour of the blotter, and the tin rolls to my shoe. I pick it up. I keep my thumb on the lid. Eleven minutes by his own desk clock. Bars of sun across him through the blinds, like this morning. After, I take the pen out of his breast pocket, and then I phone.
Coroner said his heart. Bill always did have a bad heart.
I tell him. “Strong. Powerful.”
He takes the pen with him. On the blotter, the dime.
Dark but the lamp. Pad near full. Writing with what Nancy brought, a Bic, the clear barrel, cap chewed. The ink comes out thick and black, tar out of a seam on a hot day.
Outside the plate glass, no Dartmouth. No harbour, no George’s Island, no lights on the Macdonald Bridge. [Flat. Grey. A smudged strip on a blank page.]
Nancy in. Green shift. The smile. A document, C&R letterhead, typed on the Selectric. She takes the Bic out of my fingers and sets it on the line.
“Your offer, Tommy.”
She booked them. Every one. 9:30, 2:00, 4:15, the blank. Her hand on the schedule since August.
Read it twice.
POSITION: CLOSER.
ACCOUNT: HUMANITY. SEASONAL. CONTRACT EXPIRED.
DUTIES: CLOSE THE END. SELL IT TO THEM SO THEY SIGN.
Under that, the scores. Front 5. Patter 5. Close 5. Would We Buy 5.
Behind her, in the dark, the typing starts again.
Noted.
My hand’s steady on the Bic.