She wanted her mother to be the president. Sondra deserved it. She’d earned it. The size of her nose was irrelevant; for the sake of the store itself, for the solvency of its future, for the legacy of yet-to-be-born generations of Blooms, Sondra ought to be the one at the helm.
“You need a plan,” Susie commented. She swirled a vivid green slice of bell pepper through the dip and popped it into her mouth.
“What are you talking about?” Julia asked.
“A plan so Mom can get to be president.”
“You have any ideas?”
Susie gave her a grin broad enough that Julia would have blamed its excessiveness on the scotch if Susie had consumed more. “Here’s what I think,” she said. “Julia, you tell Grandma Ida you’ll be the president. Then you act as kind of a dummy president. Mom does the actual job and you keep your job at Griffin, McDougal.”
“That’s a stupid idea,” Julia said, although for some reason it didn’t seem quite stupid enough.
“How long would we have to play this game?” Sondra asked. “How long would we have to pretend Julia’s the president?”
“How long do you think Grandma Ida’s going to live?” Susie asked. With a remorseful cringe, she added, “I’m not saying we should start hoping for her to die or anything. I’m just saying, how much attention is she really going to give to all this? She hardly ever goes to the third floor. She doesn’t visit the offices much. How often, Mom? Maybe once or twice a month? On those days, Julia will have just stepped out of the office. Or she’s got an appointment with the vinegar dealer. Or she’s at a sour cream tasting.”
“I’m not going to a sour cream tasting,” Julia protested.
Susie gave her an impatient look. “Of course you’re not. You’re over at Griffin, McDougal, running up billable hours. Grandma Ida doesn’t have to know that.”
“Uncle Jay’ll figure it out. He’ll tell her.”
“Uncle Jay doesn’t pay enough attention to figure anything out. And if he does…well, maybe sometimes you’ll have to stop in at the store and act like you’re in charge. You could bring your files with you and work in Dad’s old office, couldn’t you?”
“What if Uncle Jay asks me a question about something and I don’t know the answer?”
“Tell him you haven’t mastered the job yet. Tell him to check with Mom in the meantime. Eventually, Grandma Ida is going to…well, do whatever she’s going to do eventually. And then, as president, you can name Mom your successor.”
“What a brilliant idea,” Sondra said.
Julia took a quick, biting sip of scotch and tried not to wince. The idea was miles from brilliant, but it still didn’t sound stupid enough. She needed it to sound stupid. She needed it to sound so stupid she could laugh about it, and then tell Sondra and Susie that it was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard.
She eyed the bottle of Dewar’s sitting innocently next to the bags of raw vegetables. It was two-thirds full. There wasn’t enough scotch in it to make this idea sound as stupid as Julia needed it to sound.
She didn’t want to be the president of Bloom’s. Not even the dummy president. Not even a fake, fool-Grandma-Ida, grease-the-skids-for-Mom president.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” Sondra gushed, gliding across the room and gathering Susie into a smothering hug. She relaxed her hold on Susie only enough to reach out and snag Julia, who was drawn tight against the two women she was closest to in the whole world. Three bosoms smashed together at the center of the circle of Sondra Bloom’s arms. “It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. Let’s do it. Mazel tov to Julia, the new president of Bloom’s.”
Shit, Julia thought, as her mother hugged her tighter. Like Sondra’s hug, the idea wrapped around her and squeezed. And she couldn’t see a way to escape.
4
Ron Joffe leaned back in his chair. The spring in the hinge had gone a bit flabby, so he had to do this carefully or he’d wind up flopping over backward and banging his head on the industrial-strength carpet that blanketed the floors of Gotham Magazine’s headquarters, a block from Union Square. The right corner of his desk was occupied by his computer, which filled his office with a white-noise purr. The monitor displayed the text of next week’s column. He ought to skim it one final time, but he didn’t want to. He’d gone over it often enough to recognize the configurations of the letters and the patterns of the paragraph breaks.
The column was fine. It was great. It was done, finished, history.
He enjoyed being Gotham’s financial columnist. It beat having to wear a necktie to work. Journalism had been his first love, anyway—the business degree had come later. Having a weekly gig at New York City’s top-circulation magazine suited him the way a career in finance never would. Journalism and business—the perfect marriage.
Shifting his attention from the computer screen, he stared at the framed print of a lion hanging on the wall across from his desk and felt a keen identity with the animal, its muscles taut and bristling with energy beneath its tawny skin. The lion was one of eight large photographs of animals that decorated his office. Some days he was partial to the photo of two pandas. They looked so sweet and cuddly and childlike. Other days he was partial to the photo of the lion, which looked the exact opposite of sweet and cuddly and childlike.
Today was a lion day. Energy burned under his skin, making him want to prowl.
He groaned. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel so restless? Why were his thoughts skewing toward romance, images of first loves and perfect marriages? He knew that old saw about how in the spring a man’s fancy turned to thoughts of love, but in the spring his fancy usually turned to thoughts of the Yankees—if he even had a fancy, which he sincerely hoped he didn’t.
He was not suffering from spring fever. Lions never suffered from spring fever, did they?
Actually, he wasn’t sure about that. It was possible they mated in the spring. Or maybe spring was when they gave birth to their cubs. He knew squat about wild animals, with the possible exception of urban cockroaches, a species he’d had some experience with over the years.
Cockroaches. Ha. A man with a fancy didn’t think about cockroaches. This must prove he didn’t have a fancy.
The thought failed to soothe him.
He hit the combination of buttons on his keyboard that would send his column to his boss, and shoved out of his chair. He tried prowling for a minute but it didn’t satisfy him. Maybe if he had four legs, if he could prowl on clawed and padded paws instead of scuffed and battered sneakers, if he could prowl through an African savannah or an Asian jungle, or wherever it was that real lions prowled, the exercise might have a more therapeutic effect. At least he had a great head of hair, he thought, sending the lion poster a defiant glare. Mr. Pussycat there might have more of an eighties Bon Jovi coif, but Ron’s hair wasn’t chopped liver.
Why was he thinking about chopped liver?
Maybe he was hungry.
He left his office, resolved to go downstairs and buy himself something edible. Preferably something that included meat, given his leonine mood. He’d go find a hot dog vendor and pounce with a roar.
He slowed his gait as he neared Kim Pinsky’s office at the far end of the hall. Not that he felt he had to sneak past her, but if she saw him leave, she’d want to know where he was going and why. She was like a mother, only worse—too young, too smart and too hard to bullshit.
His slowing was a bad move, though. It allowed his shadow to slide through her doorway. “Joffe?” Her voice wafted out to him, a deceptively gentle soprano.
Sighing, he followed his shadow into her office. She sat at her desk, blond and mercilessly gorgeous, the antithesis of a hard-boiled editor in appearance if not attitude. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Out for lunch.”
“It’s ten-fifteen.”
“A very early lunch.”
Her smile didn’t reassure him. “Where’s your column?”
He was relieved to be able to say “P
robably sitting in your e-mail In-box right this very minute.”
“And?”
“And I’m hungry,” he said.
She flicked a long, golden lock of hair behind her ear with her hand. Her hair was better than his. So were her claws, perfectly filed and painted a metallic copper.
“You’re hungry for a challenge,” she told him.
“Actually, I was thinking along the lines of a couple of hot dogs.”
Her teeth were also better than his, too even and white to be natural. He was pretty sure she regularly subjected them to professional bleaching. He was also pretty sure she’d had cheek implants at some point. She was a Californian by birth, after all.
“I have an idea for a bigger article,” she said. “Maybe a cover story, if you think you can handle it.”
He straightened, even though he knew she was manipulating him. She was blond and he was a man. Of course she could manipulate him. “I can handle it.”
“It’s about food,” she said. “A very New York piece. A new challenge, Ron. Something to get your juices flowing.”
If she were single and he had a fancy, his juices might start flowing just from the velvet texture of her voice. But she was married—to a high-priced lawyer, in fact—and bitchy. And Californian. And his boss. All in all, not his type.
So he focused on the big article she was pitching him. “What’s it about?”
“You’re familiar with Bloom’s?”
What New Yorker wasn’t? He shopped at Bloom’s regularly. It was a terrific store. It sold more bagels than Broadway sold tickets to shows—and Bloom’s bagels probably got better reviews, too. He’d bought his own significant share of those bagels over the years.
But still…Bloom’s? What the hell would he write about a deli? “Just because I’m hungry doesn’t mean I’m a food expert,” he argued.
“Obviously. If you were a food expert, you’d stay away from hot dogs. Do you have any idea what goes into them?”
“Not knowing is part of the fun,” he said.
“Bloom’s isn’t just a deli. It’s a huge business. One year ago, Ben Bloom, the president of the company died. I want you to get past the food and write about the business. One year after Ben Bloom’s death, how is Bloom’s doing? Are their finances shaky now that Ben Bloom is gone? There’s your story, Joffe. A business story about food. You’re just the one to write it.”
He disagreed, but disagreeing with Kim was something a Gotham staffer—even an esteemed weekly columnist—didn’t do out loud. “Okay,” he said, realizing he wasn’t that hungry after all. Or else perhaps this assignment had taken his appetite away.
With a forced smile, he backed out of Kim’s office. One of his colleagues had once dubbed her the Gotham Goddess, and someone else had said it was bad luck to turn one’s back on a goddess, so they all remained facing her when they left her office. Ron wasn’t particularly superstitious, but he knew better than to tempt fate.
Oddly enough, though, as he retraced his steps to his office, contemplating his new assignment, he couldn’t shake the eerie notion that Kim had just given his fate a karmic realignment. Bloom’s. A fabulous deli, the death of the head honcho, family intrigue. Food, money, heirs, power. Tradition. Schmaltz.
His nonexistent fancy was definitely turning.
Susie sat cross-legged on a chair near the front window of Nico’s, the whiteboard on the table in front of her and a marker clenched in her hand. The last poem she’d written had been up for nearly two months. It was time for her to compose a new one.
She stared at the streaky white surface for a moment, doodled a couple of round red tomatoes in the bottom-right corner of the board and tried not to think about the poetry-writing techniques she’d learned at Bennington. College professors knew how to coach students to write the sort of poetry that got good grades. Nico wanted the sort of poetry that would entice people into the restaurant to buy pizza and pasta and pitchers of beer.
The window poetry had been her idea. She didn’t mind waiting on tables—she wasn’t crazy about it, but it paid her third of the rent for the crowded little walk-up on East First Street that she shared with Anna and Caitlin. However, she had artistic inclinations. After working at Nico’s for a few weeks, she’d asked Nico to let her redesign the pizzeria’s window. He’d put her off for a while, but finally he’d given her permission. She’d arranged some of her old stuffed animals around a toy table in the window and put a big fake pizza on the table. She’d tied a bib around the neck of Mr. Beanie, her stuffed elephant, taped a plastic fork to the paw of Aussie the koala and a wedged piece of a bread stick into the bill of Inga the stuffed duck, and she’d set before them glasses filled with water darkened with red food coloring to look like Chianti.
Then she’d written a poem that would have earned her at best a C-minus in Sadie Rathbun’s advanced poetry writing seminar at Bennington:
Pizza isn’t matzo.
What it is is lotsa
Crust and sauce and toppings and cheese.
So come on in, PLEASE!
Not only had many people come in and ordered pizza, but they’d all commented on the charming window display and the poem. Nico had decided that Susie must be some sort of genius, and he’d asked her to change the window display every few months.
Her new display entailed a poster that showed a pizza broken up like a pie chart, with different-size wedges. A two-thirds-of-the-pie wedge was labeled “Percentage of New Yorkers who can’t resist Nico’s pizza.” A ninety-degree wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who prefer sex to Nico’s pizza.” A very narrow wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who, if stranded on a desert island, would rather have a good book than a slice of Nico’s pizza.”
Nico loved the pie chart, but he wanted a poem, too. “The customers expect it,” he explained to her—even though this grand tradition was little more than a year old. “They want the poem. Gotta give ’em what they want.”
She studied the blank surface of the board, wishing words would magically materialize on it. Magic failed, and the board remained blank.
“Okay,” she whispered, then forced herself to write:
I gave my love a pizza;
In return he gave his heart.
He carries the taste of pizza
In his soul when we’re apart.
And when he’s far away from me,
Nico’s brings him back.
The pizzas I give him are the ultimate
Aphrodisiac.
Not her best. At the moment, pizzas didn’t seem like aphrodisiacs to her. Bagels, on the other hand…
No, she wasn’t going to think about the guy selling bagels at Bloom’s. Not for the next ten minutes. She’d already been thinking about him too much, and for no good reason. Who was he, anyway? Some clerk who’d given her an egg bagel—and reminded her to pay for it, as if she were a potential shoplifter. And he’d called her “nubile,” which, when she considered it, had a kind of iffy feel to it.
She reread her poem, decided it would do and set the whiteboard on its easel in the window. Through the glass, she saw a familiar-looking man pausing to read it. She waved at him, and he smiled and nodded, then steered his attention back to the poem.
She closed her marker and carried it across the small dining room to the counter. The tables were empty. Her shift ran from three to eleven today, and the place wouldn’t start filling up until closer to five, when hungry customers began drifting in after work. She could visit a little with her cousin Rick if he came in.
He did, moving in his shambling way across the checkerboard floor tiles to the counter. “Hey, Cous’,” he greeted her, tossing his unkempt black hair back from his face with a jerk of his head.
“Hey, Rick.”
“New poem?”
She nodded. “What do you think of it?”
“I think any poem that has the word aphrodisiac in it is okay.” He leaned on the counter and gave her an ingratiating smile. “Would your boss kil
l you if I had a cola on the house?”
“No, he wouldn’t kill me. He’d just ask me to pay the buck-fifty,” she said, her smile growing a little stiff. Rick was always trying to mooch food off her.
She didn’t know why he never had any money. Well, yes, she did: because he never worked. He usually had a supposed deal in the offing, some project about to happen, but until the deal or project reached fruition—which was about as likely to occur as the earth colliding with the moon—he subsisted on handouts. Uncle Jay usually came through for him. So did Aunt Martha. One advantage of having divorced parents was that you could hit them both up for money and neither had to know you’d already hit the other one up.
Still, Susie liked Rick. They were the same age, second-born kids, arty types, downtowners. He lived in a flat in TriBeCa that he couldn’t possibly afford without assistance from Uncle Jay, and he sporadically took classes at NYU’s film school. He saw himself as the next darling of the independent film world. At least he would be, if he ever managed to make a movie.
“If I staggered in here dying of thirst, so parched my skin was turning to dust like Oklahoma in the thirties, you’d still make me pay for a cola,” he said. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
She had to laugh. That was the thing with Rick: he made her laugh, and that made her give in. “I’ll treat you, but first you’ve got to tell me what you really thought of my poem.”
“If you’re treating me, I really thought your poem was a work of brilliance. It resonated, Suze. It rocked.”
She was laughing harder. Her cousin was going to get his cola. And Nico probably wouldn’t make her pay for it, anyway. He was back in the kitchen, prepping for the dinner surge. He’d never even have to know about the cola. She’d tell him she’d taken it for herself.
And he wasn’t paying her extra for the front windows. The least he owed her was a cold drink.
She decided her resonant, rocking poem was worthy of two drinks. After filling two plastic tumblers with cola from the machine and poking straws into them, she emerged from behind the counter and led Rick to a table. He unzipped his hooded sweatshirt and slouched into a chair. His pants were fashionably baggy, and he wore ratty-looking Teva sandals with no socks.
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