Winter Kept Us Warm by Anne Raeff

Author:Anne Raeff [Raeff, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

They did not make it to California. The plan was to spend a week or so with Isaac in New York, just for old times’ sake, Leo kept saying, and then head out to Los Angeles on the Greyhound bus, but Leo met another guy in a bar, another insurance salesman, and he also said to give him a call, which Leo did, and the next day he met the boss, who said that Leo was going to be a natural, he could tell. Leo told Ulli that he would just get some experience in the business, learn the tricks of the trade, and then they would go to California.

They stayed with Isaac for three weeks, during which time Isaac kept reminding them that they were welcome to stay as long as they liked. Isaac was hardly ever home anyway. He was in the thick of graduate school at Columbia and would often spend the entire night at the library, coming home at dawn only to shower and change. But they couldn’t stay with Isaac forever. Leo and Ulli had to make their own way, especially since Isaac disapproved of insurance, which was obvious from the way he nodded without commenting every time Leo brought it up. What bothered Leo, however, was not that Isaac disapproved, but that he thought what Leo was doing was so insignificant that he didn’t even want to argue with him about it. So they left Isaac to his books and got their own place in Yorkville, near the German restaurants and delis that Ulli never entered, not even once, for she was done with Germany, done with wurst and black bread, but the apartment was cheap, and through the bedroom window they could see a sliver of the East River.

Leo, it turned out, was more than a natural at selling life insurance—he was a genius. In fact, he sold more insurance than anyone else on his team, and the company soon made him the regional manager. For the first time in his life he saw the advantages of having grown up in the shadow of the flood. Johnstown gave him insight that the other salesmen, most of whom were from Queens or the Bronx or Brooklyn, lacked. They had been raised in what they all assured him was the greatest city in the world, had not known that kind of lurking danger.

“The first rule,” he told the new hires, “is never, ever talk about danger. That’s what the big bosses will tell you to do. They’ll tell you to start listing all the possible things that could happen—car accidents, train accidents, a brick could fall from a building onto someone’s head, cancer, heart attack, murder, drowning. You might think that’s the way to go, but if you get them thinking about the dangers all around them, they’re just going to start feeling out of control, and when people feel out of control, they give up. They just let things happen. They don’t prepare. The trick is to sell them the benefits without ever mentioning death.

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