Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “Well, you know it’s going to be a great seder. I mean, we’re talking about the Blooms of Bloom’s. So the food’s going to be fantastic, right?” That the food would be fantastic was a tribute to Lyndon’s talent. Blooms did not excel in the culinary arts, and Grandma Ida, like Sondra, rarely served food from the family store.

  “All right,” Casey had conceded. “I’ll meet you there at five. What am I supposed to wear to this thing?”

  “Clean clothes,” she’d told him. You’ll need a yarmulke, too, but I’ll bring that.” She had a few lying around, black velvet with “Travis Feldman Bar Mitzvah, June 12, 2000” inscribed on the white satin lining. Travis, a cousin on her mother’s side, was a twerp whose soul seemed trapped inside a whine that affected everything he did and said. His bar mitzvah had been held at the Plaza Hotel, and the entertainment had included a chamber ensemble and a low-rent metal band that played excruciating covers of Metallica. Before the cake cutting, his parents announced that in honor of Travis’s bar mitzvah they’d donated twenty-five thousand dollars to Brandeis University. Travis had seemed more interested in the cake.

  Susie had asked to keep Adam’s souvenir yarmulke, as well as her father’s. They both owned personal skullcaps, and Susie decided she ought to have a few on hand, just in case. She hadn’t known that “just in case” would wind up being a guy like Casey Gordon accompanying her to her grandmother’s seder.

  He’d arrived late. She hadn’t been sure whether he’d belatedly decided it was too weird to experience his first seder at the home of the family for whom he worked, or whether he just wasn’t interested in Susie enough to sit through an hour of prayers and chants and songs in order to eat a meal, or whether he didn’t have any clean clothes. When he finally arrived, a little past five-fifteen, she’d been so relieved she hadn’t asked for an explanation. He’d provided one, anyway: “The F train stalled under the East River. We just sat there in the dark for a half hour. Definitely the pits.”

  The F train under the East River meant he lived in Queens. Definitely the pits was right. Queens wasn’t just another borough; it was another country, another planet. Queens was where people’s parents lived. It was where residents bragged that they lived on Long Island, not in New York. It was where the Mets played, for God’s sake. She didn’t know if she wanted to get involved with someone from Queens.

  Then again, she didn’t really want to get involved with Casey. She just wanted to have some fun, some friendship, some high-quality sex—and she suspected he might be able to provide at least a few of those essentials.

  They’d arrived at Grandma Ida’s just as everyone was gathering around the dining room table. The air was thick with the salty fragrance of chicken soup, punctuated by the zing of freshly grated horseradish. As soon as Julia saw Casey, her eyes widened. Susie’s mother’s eyes narrowed. Of all her female relatives, only Grandma Ida looked unfazed.

  “All right, well, you’d better have him sit next to you,” Grandma Ida said as soon as Susie had presented him to her family. “We’re about to start, and he probably has no idea what’s going on. Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked Casey.

  “None at all,” he said good-naturedly.

  “Then, sit next to Susie. You can be bored together. She usually gets bored when we do this. Jay, you sit at the head. Wendy, you sit here. Martha you sit over there.” Grandma Ida wisely placed the length of the table between Jay’s two wives.

  The seder began. Uncle Jay did not read Hebrew fluently, and when he asked Rick or Neil for assistance they stared back at him blankly. Rick, seated on Susie’s other side, had once confided to her that the day after his bar mitzvah, he’d forgotten every word of Hebrew he’d ever learned. She doubted Neil had much opportunity to polish his language skills while cruising around the Florida Keys in his rent-a-sloop.

  Not squirming took enormous willpower. If she were younger, she could have kicked her legs back and forth and driven Grandma Ida crazy, but Grandma Ida had been nice enough about including Casey in the family gathering, so Susie forced herself to keep her legs still. She flipped pages in her Haggadah and studied the trite illustrations: An infant Moses floating down the river in a basket and resembling a bundle of laundry with a baby’s head poking out one end. An adult Moses looking oddly like a young Bob Dylan, facing off with a pharaoh who had apparently eaten something that didn’t agree with him, if his facial expression was anything to go by. A crowd of Egyptian women in some sort of marketplace, their faces frozen in agony as torrents of frogs descended from the wide African sky. The Red Sea parting as if someone had unzipped it, and Bob Dylan leading a parade of Jews through the gap. She counted the number of pages Uncle Jay would have to fumble through before she could sip some wine. She counted the number of pages before everyone could set the books aside and dig into dinner, the tantalizing aromas of which made her stomach rumble.

  Every now and then she glanced up from her book. Her mother was glowering at her. Adam was fidgeting with the gold ring he’d gotten when he graduated from high school. The Bimbette kept sending her charming dinner-party-guest smile in Casey’s direction. Julia slid her finger along the page, trying to follow Uncle Jay’s halting recitation. Aunt Martha appeared to be dozing, but Susie knew she was only meditating on the meaning of Passover. She always closed her eyes during the seder; she claimed this enabled the story to reach her on a deeper level.

  But Casey seemed to be into the whole thing. He would read the English translation on the right-hand side of the page, then study Uncle Jay, then eye the flickering candles, the tower of matzos, the Passover platter laden with all the symbolic foods…and, every once in a while, watch Susie. When she caught him gazing at her, he smiled. Not a bored smile, not an “I’ll survive this ordeal and we’ll go off and live our own lives and never think about this evening again” smile, but a “hey, this is kind of cool” smile.

  If she were foolish enough to consider the possibility of falling in love, she’d make sure to fall in love with a man who gave her a “hey, this is kind of cool” smile.

  At last, they could eat. He’d floundered three-quarters of the way through the Haggadah. The last part of the book had to wait until after dinner, but by then everyone would have consumed enough wine that they wouldn’t all be focusing on how awkwardly he read it, compared with Ben.

  Ben was dead. Jay was the senior male of the family now. And damn it, if he was going to read the Haggadah, he should be running Bloom’s.

  He stared around the table, exhausted and irritated that no one had thanked him for having plowed through all that Hebrew. Did they think it was easy? A little appreciation would be nice.

  But at least they’d get to eat—and drink. He wanted another Manhattan, but bottles of a kosher rosé stood around the table, and he figured it would be too complicated to request anything else. The wine was bland, but its alcohol content, not its flavor, was what counted.

  Lyndon and his buddy waltzed in and out, carrying plates of gefilte fish and bowls of steaming soup with matzo balls protruding from the broth like pale, round boulders. Everyone was talking at once. Neil was telling Julia, the famous no-show executive, about some rich European and his bosom-enhanced mistress who had chartered him to sail them from Miami to Key West. “They paid me in cash. Is that illegal? It kind of creeped me out, you know?” he asked, tapping into her legal expertise.

  Now, there was an idea: send Julia down to Florida to defend his son if he got arrested for accepting cash payments. For all she was contributing to Bloom’s, nobody would miss her.

  That conversation was to his right. To his left, Ida was criticizing Wendy’s hair—“It looks too blond,” she complained.

  It did, but so what? If Ida was going to criticize someone’s hair, she might as well attack Rick, whose hair looked as if it had been styled with an eggbeater.

  Farther down the table, Sondra and Susie were sniping at each other across steaming bowls of soup, while Adam repeatedly asked for someone
to pass the horseradish. At the far end, Martha pontificated to Susie’s latest boyfriend about how Judaism was a sexist religion because women weren’t allowed to lead the seder. Jay took her criticism personally. She probably thought she could do a better job reading the Haggadah than he had, but he knew she couldn’t. Just because she had taken a seminar on women and theology at the New School didn’t make her an expert.

  He ate his own soup. It was flavored perfectly, the matzo ball was dense, the way he liked it, and little yellow circles of chicken fat skimmed the surface of the broth like a delectable oil slick. The gefilte fish had been firm and just slightly sweet. After the soup there would be a roast. One thing about Lyndon—he sure knew how to cook. Jay wondered whether he’d be willing to give Wendy a few lessons. Maybe on Sunday, while Jay was out golfing, she could come over here, learn how to boil water and beat eggs, and work on improving her relationship with Ida. For all Jay knew, the reason he’d been cheated out of the presidency of Bloom’s was that his mother hated Wendy.

  Last Sunday he’d been out at Emerald View, playing a round with Stuart Pinsky, his attorney. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth hole, he’d mentioned that he was worried about his mother. “She’s not as sharp as she used to be,” he’d said.

  “None of us is as sharp as we used to be,” Stuart had pointed out.

  “Yes, but we’re not eighty-eight. She is. And she’s making some decisions about the store that frankly worry me.”

  “Really?” Stuart handled Jay’s private affairs—his divorce, his will, the trusts he’d set up for the boys—but he didn’t work for the store. Still, he knew a lot about it. “You think it’s time for you to exercise power-of-attorney over her affairs?”

  “She’d disown me if I did anything that drastic. But I’m worried about the store.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  It was true—every time he and Stuart got together, Jay wound up ranting about the store. “It’s because she put my niece in charge of it, and my niece doesn’t know bupkes when it comes to retail. Or deli. The girl probably wouldn’t know what pastrami was if it bit her on the ass. But she’s Ben’s daughter. That’s the only reason she’s got the corner office.”

  “You sure it’s got nothing to do with you?”

  “Me? I’m holding the place together. But it’s hard, I’ll tell you. If the store’s value drops, some big macher could come in and buy us. Then Bloom’s would be just a brand name, not a place, a family’s lifeblood. You see what I’m saying?”

  “The store isn’t publicly owned, Jay. How can you be worried about a hostile takeover?”

  Jay wasn’t exactly clear on how hostile takeovers worked. “Well, if we start losing money—and you know, we’ve been just sort of drifting for the past year since Ben died, because my mother refused to make any decisions for that whole year—and if instead of just drifting we start drifting south, who’s to say? Bloom’s is Bloom’s. It goes under, a huge piece of New York culture goes under with it.”

  Stuart actually stopped lining up his shot and stared at Jay. “You think it’s that shaky, Jay?” He sounded genuinely concerned.

  “I don’t know how shaky it is. I’m just saying, the store could be slipping, my mother could be slipping, and they’ve locked me out of the executive suite.”

  “Sounds like you’d better start looking for the key,” Stuart advised. “You’d better find a way to get into that room and stabilize things. It would be an act of mercy, I would think. If your niece can’t handle the store, you can’t just stand aside and let it go under.”

  This was mere golf advice, nothing legal, nothing that cost six hundred an hour. But since Stuart’s words had been exactly what Jay wanted to hear, he’d savored them.

  He was going to find that key. It had to be somewhere. Maybe everyone else wasn’t as sharp as they used to be, but damn it, Jay wasn’t getting any duller.

  8

  This time the frantic phone call had come to her apartment the night before, rather than during the workday, when she would be up to her elbows in Griffin, McDougal business. Thank God, too. Her superiors at the law firm were growing suspicious about the increasingly frequent cell-phone calls that led to her disappearing for a few hours here and there.

  “Family problems?” John Griffin himself had asked the last time. “What exactly is the problem? Is it something we can help you with?”

  His solicitude had swamped her with guilt—as if she hadn’t already felt guilty enough. “The only way you can help is to be flexible about my having to run across town,” she’d told him, smiling sweetly so she wouldn’t seem demanding.

  He’d given her a long, pointed stare, which implied that he wasn’t so much interested in helping her with her problem as he was in making her problem go away so she could once again give 150 percent of herself to Griffin, McDougal.

  “Go, take care of your family problems,” he’d said. “My only concern is that you’re getting your work done.”

  Which, of course, she wasn’t. She was trying to keep up. She was staying late at the office, working through the dinner hour, turning down all Heath’s invitations because she didn’t have time to go anywhere with him and argue about whether they should have sex. She was dragging files home and writing reports until two in the morning. But she had her limit—and she’d passed that limit well before the beginning of Passover.

  Passover was done now. Someday, Julia would actually honor all eight days of the holiday. She’d skip doughnuts and eat matzo for breakfast every morning of Passover week. Maybe Lyndon would teach her how to make matzo brei. She’d have plenty of time to learn how to cook once Griffin, McDougal fired her.

  But they weren’t going to fire her today, because instead of bolting from the office during business hours, in front of witnesses, she would not be going to the office at all. She would be calling in sick. Lying seemed much more palatable than bolting.

  Francine took her call. “I’ve been vomiting all night,” Julia told her, figuring that would discourage questions. She hadn’t realized she was such a smooth liar. She felt proud—and a little ashamed—that she could deceive Francine so easily.

  She dressed in a below-the-knees straight skirt and matching jacket, swallowed a few handfuls of Cheerios, brushed her teeth and slicked her lips with gloss. She’d pick up some coffee at Bloom’s, and she’d drink it out of a mug emblazoned with Bloom’s lettering. That ought to impress the reporter.

  A reporter. She couldn’t believe she was going to have to meet with a reporter from Gotham Magazine to discuss the direction she intended to steer Bloom’s now that she was behind the wheel. Her mother had explained that an article in Gotham would be excellent exposure for the store, a way to generate excitement for the store’s new management in the new century.

  “What if someone from Griffin, McDougal sees the article?” Julia asked.

  “You’ll tell them you’re a figurehead. You’ll say it’s family PR. Don’t worry—you’ll think of something.”

  The sun was bright, and spring gave the air an apple-fresh scent, unusual in a neighborhood that usually smelled of bus fumes. She walked the few blocks to Broadway, concentrating on her posture and mentally rehearsing what she’d tell this reporter from Gotham. Would he go easy on her if she said she adored his magazine?

  Journalists could be dangerous. This one might be snide and supercilious. The thrust of his piece might be that Bloom’s products were guaranteed to clog one’s arteries, and they weren’t even kosher. Only kosher-style. She might have to explain the importance of kosher-style in the lives of Bloom’s customers. “Kosher can be viewed as a style,” she’d say. “Kind of like a lifestyle. People who want to eat a salami and Jarlsburg sandwich ought to be able to buy a kosher salami and a kosher Jarlsburg, even if piling them together between two slices of bread isn’t kosher.”

  Too verbose. As a lawyer, she knew the value of saying the absolute minimum, answering the question but volunteering not a single extr
a syllable. If the reporter criticized Bloom’s for being kosher-style, she’d simply smile and say, “That’s the way our customers like it.”

  She nodded, pleased with that approach: “That’s the way our customers like it.” He couldn’t possibly describe such a philosophy snidely.

  Deirdre had set up the interview and promised to spend time with the reporter. She would be able to supply him with any business information he might want. Julia’s sole function, according to her mother, was to put a human face on the president’s office.

  Closing her eyes, she imagined taping a yellow smiley face to her door—and locking herself inside.

  She reached her desk at nine-fifteen. He was scheduled to arrive at nine-thirty. She couldn’t remember his name.

  She took a sip of the coffee she’d brought upstairs with her, in her nice new Bloom’s mug. She’d made her purchases anonymously, paying full price. She was already thinking like a Bloom’s executive, refusing to depress profits by helping herself to merchandise without paying for it. If her mother could serve food from the cheap supermarket down the street, Julia could pay her own money for a cup of Bloom’s Colombian supreme.

  Her door swung open and her mother bounded in, beaming like a cheerleader after a touchdown. “I’ve brought you some things so you’ll look busy,” she whispered, dumping a stack of folders on the desk. “These are the profit-loss statements for March from each of the departments, if he asks.”

  “Are the profits bigger than the losses?” Julia asked, opening the top folder and slamming it shut when she saw the intimidating array of numbers on the top sheet.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t looked. Just tell the reporter our profits are growing. The store’s doing great. Our customer base increases every day. The coffee department in particular is doing magnificently,” Sondra added, her gaze snagging on Julia’s mug and her smile fading. She was probably wondering whether Julia had paid retail for it. “On-line sales are stagnant, of course—but you don’t have to tell him that. Just tell him everything’s doing fantastic. He wants details, you send him to me.”