Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [154]
The next day, as I was sitting at my desk, my assistant buzzed me on the intercom to say that there was a man on the telephone who had to speak to me about a watch.
Expecting that it was Cartier on the telephone, asking for my address, I took the call. A rich, deep, vibrant voice, gravelly, hoarse, with a distinct Brooklyn accent, told me it wasn’t anybody from Cartier. “You Mike Korda?” he asked. “Irving and Jackie’s friend?”
I acknowledged both facts and asked who he was.
“This is Sol,” he said. “I’m down on Forty-seventh Street. It’s about your watch.”
“My watch? I don’t get it. Isn’t it coming from Cartier when it’s ready?” In those days Cartier still delivered jewelry by hand on request, with a solemn messenger wearing a gray chauffeur’s uniform, with breeches and leggings, and bearing the pale blue Cartier box. I had expected my watch, eventually, to arrive like that.
Sol snorted with impatience. “Hey,” he said, “it has to be hand lettered. I got to put on the whatchamacallit? The fucking ankh.”
“You do this for Cartier?”
“Cartier, Shmartier. You’re getting a real Cartier watch, with the dial hand lettered—are you ready for this?—at wholesale! How do you like them apples, bubbi?”
There was a silence while I worked this out in my head. However I juggled them apples, what I was looking at was that I was apparently buying the watch, not the Mansfields. How much was this going to cost me? I asked.
I could tell from Sol’s rasping voice that he was offended. “Cost? What are you talking about, cost? They asked me to give you the best deal I could. You tell me where you can beat wholesale on a Cartier watch?”
“Yes, but what are we talking about in numbers? Ballpark figure?”
A long, resentful sigh. “One large,” he said. “With the lettering and the whatchamacallit maybe a little more. Say twelve hundred.”
I tried to think of a way that I could explain to my wife why I had spent $1,200 on a gold Cartier watch I didn’t need, with my name painted on the dial and an ankh. I couldn’t do it. “Keep the watch,” I said.
There was a long silence at the other end. “Make it nine hundred, I’ll throw in the dial,” Sol said. “You pay cash, and we forget about the sales tax.”
“No.” Even $900 was out of the question, I explained. It was a point of honor. The watch was supposed to be a gift.
“What am I going to do with the watch?” Sol asked, panic in his voice now. Sell it to someone else, I suggested. “Someone else? My boy already lettered your first name on the goddamn dial! Who I am going to sell a Cartier watch to whose first name is Michael?”
“Somebody whose family name has five letters,” I said and hung up.
I was not out of the woods yet, however. The next day, Irving called me from Los Angeles. Jackie was in the bathroom crying her heart out, he told me accusingly, all because I had rejected her gift. I pointed out that it wasn’t a gift. I was going to have to pay for it, after all.
“She thought you were different from the others,” he said. “She thought we were friends.”
“We are friends,” I said. “I just don’t want the watch. Tell her company policy prevents me from accepting it.”
Irving thought about this. He was not an unreasonable man when he was treated like an equal partner. “I’ll explain it to Jackie,” he said, in his best, confidential, man-to-man voice. An hour later, he called back and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Heh, heh, you’re in the clear.”
And I guess I was. Jackie and I stayed on a friendly basis, even though she left S&S rancorously