The Silent Hondler

Our 2007 car lease was about to expire on January 4th, so my husband and I decided to start looking at cars this past weekend. We thought about buying the car we had been leasing. It had low mileage and a slight crack in the right front bumper. It was hardly noticeable to me.

The leasing company inspector wrote it up as “excessive damage,” valued at $650, and informed me that we were responsible for the repair or the payment of $650 in full. After reading the report that evening, my husband let out a few descriptive expletives and vowed to fight this.

“Excessive damage my (expletive)! What about our $1,500 maximum allowable damage?! I’m going to fight this!” I like to see my husband get riled up once in a while. He’s normally so cool and composed and I’m the one ranting and raving about things. It’s nice to sit back and let someone else take on those annoying little battles in life.

“If they want me to lease another car, they will have to waive the damage fee," he ranted on. "I’m not paying it. If they don’t waive the fee, we’ll weigh our options. We’ll look around at other cars; we have time. I’m not going to be pressured by some car salesman.”

In the dealership we listened to the salesman read aloud the fine print on the back of our three-year-old lease contract. “It’s written very clearly here…you owe the money for damages.”

I waited patiently for my husband to begin his rebuttal. Instead, he scratched his chin and bobbed his head in agreement. They were like two old school chums, lounging in matching wing chairs, discussing the finer points of a legal document. I stretched my foot across the floor and poked his shoe, trying to stoke the embers and get the fire started, but he just looked at me very calmly and said, “It’s right there in black and white, I guess.”

The salesman had my husband on his team now and was revved up to make a sale. He pulled out a lined notepad and wrote down a number: $499, and underlined it with a hard bold stroke. “That’s your monthly payment to lease this new car,” he said.

We both stared back at him. Then he crossed out $499 and wrote underneath it: $479, glanced up at us, crossed that price out and wrote $459. “Do you have a good credit rating?” he asked. “If you have a good credit rating," he said, crossing out the previous price, "I might be able to talk my manager into going down to: $439, but I can’t go lower than that!”

We just sat there and said nothing.

“OK, look,” he said, taking a deep breath, crossing out the $439, "I can probably get it down to $429.” I looked over at my husband, and waited for him to say something. He locked eyes with the salesman and didn’t blink once. Another cross-out brought the price down to “$419 -it's the lowest I can do... and you can have the car tomorrow!” The poor man was squirming in his seat, clicking his pen top waiting for some words to come out of my husband’s mouth.

“You folks just wait here a moment; I’ll go talk to my manager.”

“What’s going on?” I asked my husband.

“I’ll be damned if I know. Maybe if we sit here long enough he’ll give us the car for nothing.”

The manager came back and took our orders for refreshments and sent the salesman scurrying off to get them. He sat down across from us, leaned in over the desk and sotto voce asked, “How can we get you in this car?”

My husband finally opened his mouth. “I want to put zero down and have a monthly payment of $330, like we had with the old car.”

“No way! That’s impossible! I would be giving the car away.”

“Well, we’re not ready to lease a car today, anyway,” I said. “We want to go down the street and take a look at the Volvos,” I said, glancing at my watch.

When the salesman came back with our refreshments, the manager asked for my husband’s driver’s license and a major credit card. “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and he took off with the salesman. They both returned, beaming. “You both have an excellent credit score,” the manager said. “How about if we go down to $399? Would that be more reasonable?”

We remained silent, sipping our refreshments.

“$379; that’s my final offer. Can’t go lower than that. We’re taking a huge loss on this car.”

“Let’s take a bathroom break,” I suggested, “and then we’ll test drive a smaller model. We might have to downsize if we can’t afford the model we want.”

After the test drive, I wanted to leave. I wasn’t happy with the smaller car; the engine had no pep, it was already dark out and I was getting hungry. We still had three weeks left on the lease and these salesmen were starting to get on my nerves. What is it about car salesmen? No matter how nice they are, you just don’t trust them. They were both starting to look like sinister characters in a Punch & Judy puppet show.

As if he was reading my mind, the salesman said, “Look, I know you don’t like the smaller model and I want you to be happy. Can you just go up a little bit? – say to $370?”

I just wanted to go home and sit in my recliner, so I blurted out: “$350; that’s the highest we’ll go.” My husband shot me a glance with flames coming out of his eyes and I tried to recant the offer, but it was too late. Our salesman was rushing off to the manager’s office again. “Let me see if I can work with that!” he called over his shoulder.

He returned with the manager who asked us if we needed more refreshments. At this point, I needed a hot meal and a shower, and if he had offered us that option, I would have signed on the dotted line just to go home and be done with it. We had already invested 3 hours in that place. As annoying as they were, I was beginning to feel an intimacy growing. They were trying so hard, I was starting to feel sorry for them. My husband and I opted out of more refreshments and took another bathroom break instead. We met at the water fountain to talk conspiratorially.

“How high can we go with this offer?” my husband whispered. “I just want to get the hell out of here.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “We’ll offer $360 and not a penny more. Jeez, it’s only $30 a month more than we were already paying. And I love the car.”

“Can we cut out $30 a month somewhere?” my ever frugal husband asked.

“We could cut out the movies… going out to dinner…”

“We don’t do those things, anyway,” he said. “What else could we cut.”

“We could stop getting the New York Times weekend edition.”

“But we just started the subscription; I don’t want to cut that. What else?”

We must have been gone too long because our salesman came looking for us. “If I could get you the car for $360, you can pick it up tomorrow. What do you say?” Did they have hidden microphones in the walls? Did he just overhear our conversation?

“Do you have a black car in stock?” I asked.

“No black. We have a nice grey.” I wrinkled my nose. “Let’s go take a look. I have one in the lot,” he said.

“How am I supposed to see colors in the dark?” I called out to him, as we huddled against the cold wind to hunt for a grey car.

“Let’s just humor him,” my husband whispered. “We’ll tell him we don’t like it and then we can leave. I'm starving.”

When we finally found one I repeated, “I don’t like grey, and I’m not walking outside again in this cold weather. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I want to go home.”

“I have a white car. Do you like white?” he called out as he ran through the dark car lot. “I’ll just run out and get it and pull it up to the showroom while you folks wait, nice and warm, inside.”

“We have to buy this car, please,” I whined. “We’re never going to get out of this place alive if we don’t buy a car tonight. I don’t even care about the $30 extra a month. I’ll take on a new client if I have to. Say something, will you?!”

I turned to look at my husband who had a big smile across his face. “I know where we can cut $30 a month out of our budget,” he said. “We’ll cut out meat and chicken and eat more tofu!”

“Well, what do you think?” the salesman said, walking us around the white car.

“We’ll eat tofu!” I said.

“Huh?”

“We’ll take it.”