Adventures in the Diamond Trade**
**This was ghostwritten by a person with first-hand knowledge of the events in question.
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It turns out I was being ripped off for hundreds of dollars every month and didn’t know it. Why? Because I suck at money—I dunno, maybe at some level I think I don’t deserve to have any. In any case, sometime during the pandemic, underoccupied and restless, my girlfriend decided to overhaul my finances, beginning by scrutinizing my credit card bills, which is something I’d never bothered to do. Certain unwelcome discoveries were made. Her glee at these discoveries was roughly equal to my embarrassment about them. The upshot was that there were many recurring monthly charges I had no idea I was paying.
There were the two different subscriptions to the New York Times under two different email addresses, both billed to me. (I only read one.) There was the fact that AT&T had, some fifteen months earlier, added a second line to my wireless bill that I’d never asked for, never used, and (adding insult to injury) charged me a sixty-dollar fee to install. There was the subscription to the Telegraph I’d never been able to log onto (along with a foreign currency fee), which involved numerous phone calls to London to cancel—there was no way to unsubscribe online since I couldn’t log into the account, and even the Telegraph people initially claimed they couldn’t find it. (I’m not good with online forms—it’s possible I screwed up the email address.) I was being charged for some kind of music service by Amazon that I swear I never signed up for. And so on.
Flushed with success, my girlfriend was becoming a savings vigilante, either because she’s frugally minded, hates corporate theft, or because I said I’d give her a finder’s fee for all moneys recouped. She spent roughly a dozen hours on the phone with AT&T who, dicks that they are, shunted her from one idiot to another (no one knew how the line had been added), then would only refund three months of charges. Undaunted, she found a fabulous company online called Fair Shake that negotiates with criminal utilities on your behalf for a small percent of what they get—AT&T coughed up around six months more. Flushed with even more success, she then submitted a pile of long ago shrink bills to the insurance company and made us both a windfall.
“What’s this,” she asked one day, during one of her periodic straightening raids on my stuff. (Okay, I do have a bad habit of stuffing unpaid bills and receipts in the drawer under the microwave.) She was referring to a chocolate brown box, roughly four inches square. I didn’t love where this was going. Open it if you want, I said. Nestled inside was, as I knew, a platinum and diamond ring—roughly seven of the sparkly little fuckers, a quarter carat each—I’d purchased at Bailey Banks & Biddle (yeah, I know) for my ex-wife. The marriage was falling apart, and I was doing what I could on the repair front. Well, maybe not everything I could since I never gave it to her, and being the financial idiot I am, it never occurred to me to return the damn thing.
And here it was, complete with a cash register slip indicating it had been worth fifteen hundred dollars in 2008, back when fifteen hundred dollars actually meant something. “Why don’t you sell it,” suggested my girlfriend, as though I were a person who’d have a clue how to go about doing something like that. How about you sell it, I said, and we’ll split whatever you get?
Maybe she had some diffidence about this exciting financial opportunity since it took her a couple of years to get around to it, during which time she moved from Chelsea to the Upper West Side. The neighborhood was still new enough that every street was a discovery, and one day she passed a storefront on Amsterdam with the promising signage: WE BUY GOLD AND DIAMONDS. She vowed to return with the ring while figuring that no one was going to offer more than fifty dollars. They had to make a profit on it for themselves, obviously.
Entering WE BUY GOLD AND DIAMONDS on her appointed mission, she was directed to a glass partition in the back where a nice-looking guy of maybe forty presided. “No yarmulke, seemed smart,” she reported cryptically, having made this assessment before he even opened his mouth. (An ongoing argument between us is that she believes you can assess people’s intelligence by their photographs and insists on selecting doctors and other professionals by this method, no matter how many times I tell her that phrenology was long ago discredited.)
She slid the ring through a tiny mousehole shaped opening in the (presumably bullet-proof) glass. “It’s pretty,” said the man, whose name turned out to be Daniel. “Thank you,” said my girlfriend, oddly pleased. She didn’t want to be in there trying to pass off dreck, even if it wasn’t her dreck, and this wasn’t the classiest of places. She’d thought of taking the ring down to the diamond district, with no idea if she’d do better or worse than in the neighborhood. Wherever she went, she figured she’d get rooked.
Daniel was spending a surprising amount of time assessing the ring. He held it up, he looked at it though what seemed to be a succession of different loupes (was that what they were called?), prodded it with an instrument, then counted the diamonds and measured each one (they were admittedly rather tiny). Then he seemed to go through the procedure again. She’d figured he’d glance at the ring and say “fifty dollars,” so she was slightly confused.
“Do you know how many carats these are,” he asked. She looked at the receipt. “A quarter carat,” she said, “but aren’t you supposed to be the expert here?”
“I am,” he said, “that’s what I thought. How much were you looking to get for it?”
Her recently deceased father—it happened to be the one-year anniversary of his death this very week—had imparted strict rules about the art of negotiation, at which he considered himself an expert. Never name the price first, he’d instructed many times throughout her life. She was not going to tell Daniel what she was looking to get.
“Well, I know what it sold for,” she answered cagily. Daniel took this in stride. “I’m probably not going to be able to give you what you were hoping,” he said, but in a friendly way.
My girlfriend laughed. “You told me it was pretty and now you’re lowballing me!” she said teasingly. “I’m not lowballing you,” Daniel retorted, “I haven’t even said a number yet.”
He examined the ring some more. “It doesn’t have a jeweler’s stamp on it,” he pointed out. (Or that’s what she later thought he’d said, she didn’t entirely recall—was he suggesting the ring was somehow inauthentic?) She held up the Bailey Banks & Biddle box. “I do have the receipt,” she said. “I can tell you what it sold for.” He didn’t ask to see the receipt, but consented to hear the amount. She glanced down and told him the retail price, not mentioning that I’d actually gotten a twenty percent discount—that’s how they reel the guilty husbands in, with twenty percent off.
“Am I the first place you tried?” asked Daniel. She didn’t see a reason to conceal the information (having briefly consulted her deceased father), so admitted that he was.
“I can give you a hundred and seventy-five for it,” said Daniel. My girlfriend said she’d think about it. “If someone offers you two-fifty, I’d take it,” he advised.
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