Editorials by Forrest Fenn - Women can be so unreasonable that way

Women Can Be So Unreasonable That Way
by Forrest Fenn

We had this sweet, young salesgirl (you can call a female a girl until she’s twenty or after she’s sixty-five but not in-between) working at the gallery who was almost perfect for the job. Even the wives loved Phyllis, and some said that when she moved from Lubbock to Santa Fe she raised the IQ of both cities, but I don’t know if that’s really true.

Anyway, one morning she came up to me with a coffee cup in her hand and confidence written all over her walk. “Boss, I can hardly wait to tell you what I heard about you at a party last night.”

Now how the hell was I supposed to respond to something like that? It was bad enough that I’d not been invited to the party but worse, I knew from her grin and testy tendency that she was about to rain all over my new Hawaiian shirt. Besides, all the rumors about me in that little town had their own press agents.

There are a lot of things in this life that are great, but I like revenge the best. I moved up on the first step so my eyes could be even with hers, “That seems very strange to me, Phyllis, because I never hear your name mentioned anywhere,” I kindly replied.

Well, her braids straightened out a little bit, and suddenly she looked like she had just crawled out form under a pick-up truck. But somehow we suffered through that ordeal okay, and after I pouted for a couple of hours, we were friends again. The down side was that she would never tell me what she’d heard. Life can be so unfair.

Now, Phyllis was very bright, and we knew that she could close most deals by just smiling at a client. Our director said that she could probably sell retirement plans on death row, so we knew that she was worth every penny of the twenty bucks an hour we were paying her and so we went out of our way to keep her happy. Things ran smoothly for a while.

Then one Saturday afternoon this really tanned guy wearing tight jeans and a top-tank strolled into the gallery and started looking around. He could have been a centerfold for Mechanics Illustrated for all I know. As Phyllis eased over to him, I just hung in the hall and listened. It was so beautiful to see her in action, and during the twenty minutes, while I was dreaming about black-topping the parking lot out front, she sold him a $60,000 Frank Tenney Johnson night scene with two horses tied to a fence post and music coming from the cantina.

She had proud written all over her face when he walked out with that beautiful package under his arm and her phone number in his pocket. The first thing I thought about was buying Phyllis a big box of chocolate candy tied with some kind of special bow.

The problem was that Phyllis was a thinker and inquisitive by nature. So when she walked in on Monday morning, after finding out from our over-rated accounts payable clerk that we had paid only $30,000 for the dumb painting, her appetite had been redirected.

“Now let me see if I have this straight,” she said, in a voice that didn’t have flattery anywhere in sight. She was in a major swivet and it was plain to see that she knew how to do it.

“In the twenty minutes while I was making six-bucks sixty-six selling that steroid-jerk a painting, you were jumping up and down in the hall making thirty-thousand. Is that correct?” Boy oh boy, it was one of those times when I wished I could have said “No habla Englash.” Her laser glare told me that it was too late to try my slither technique, so I decided to give it to her straight.

“Look Phyllis, I know you think I’m a bandit, so I’ll make you a deal. You go to the bank and get two million bucks, and I’ll sell you half interest in the alarm going off at three in the morning, the leaking roof, the endless personnel problems, the angry artist’s wives, the bad checks, and the seven day work weeks.” What do you think?

She was taken aback for a second then quietly said in a voice that made my socks mildew. “There is nothing wrong with you that reincarnation can’t cure so you can take my severance pay and stick it right in the old gazoo.”

Well, I later looked that word up and it said a gazoo was “The Wyoming end of a mule that’s looking at Idaho.” Oh me! But the worse part was when I phoned her mother on Valentine’s Day to inquire about how her lovely daughter was getting along. “She’s in Harvard Law School and will soon be backing up to get a running start at you.” Women can be so unreasonable that way.