Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “And shouting, ‘Let me out of here!’” Julia added, trying to imagine her grandfather, in his rusty, accented voice, shouting such a thing. “Actually, he’d say, ‘Oy, vey iz mir. It’s hot in here! I’m shvitzing!’”

  Joffe laughed, that same dark, dangerous laugh she hated. She laughed, too. Somehow, when they both laughed together, she didn’t hate his laugh so much. Which was a bad thing.

  “You’d better find the key and cool the poor guy off,” Joffe urged her, then turned from the desk and started toward the door. “I’ll go talk to Deirdre now…get some facts and figures about the place. Will you be around later if I have more questions for you?”

  “Sure.” She’d be here all day. The folks at Griffin, McDougal assumed she was spending the day on her knees, hunched over her toilet; they certainly wouldn’t want her to show up there.

  “Great.” Joffe smiled.

  Julia didn’t think it was great. She’d done an adequate job of answering his questions—although he apparently thought her family were a bunch of aristocrats simply because Neil ran a sailboat charter business in southern Florida. And he’d implied Bloom’s was failing. If it was, no one had bothered to tell her—but someone seemed to have shared this information with him.

  She didn’t want him to start grilling her on Bloom’s health. Nor did she want him to smile at her the way he was smiling at her right now, because it made her lungs strain and her heart stammer and her fingertips grow so icy she was afraid to shake his hand and let him find out how nervous he made her. There was no reason he should make her feel nervous, none at all.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, so mildly it shouldn’t have sounded like a threat. He paused at the coffee table to pocket his tape recorder and pick up his cup. Then he headed to the door. With a final glint of a smile, he was gone.

  Julia felt herself deflate. She stumbled back to the leather chair behind her father’s desk and collapsed into it. What was wrong with her? Why did she feel as if he’d tied her knee tendons into knots so she couldn’t stand without feeling wobbly? He was just a magazine writer, a hack trying to stir up trouble. And she was Julia Bloom, the president of Bloom’s.

  Yeah, sure. He knew who she was. He could see right through her. He knew that as the president of Bloom’s she was as empty as her grandfather’s old desk. He’d sensed that she was a phony, and he was going to pump Deirdre for information with which to arm himself and then come back into this office and flatten her.

  This was not going to be a puff piece. It was going to be a stomp-Julia-and-Bloom’s-into-the-ground piece.

  And she had no one but herself to blame, for accepting this position and failing to fill it. Well, she could blame Susie for coming up with the idea, and her mother for thinking it was so clever. And whoever had fed her father that salmonella-infected sturgeon. And Uncle Jay for being such a putz that Grandma Ida had refused to consider him for the presidency.

  And Grandma Ida, too. She deserved a hell of a lot of the blame.

  Yes, they were all to blame.

  But Julia, most of all.

  9

  Jay was heading out to meet a friend for a late-morning game of squash when he spotted Sondra hovering in the hall just outside Deirdre’s office. What the hell was she doing? Eavesdropping on Deirdre?

  Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. She might learn a thing or two. Everybody knew Deirdre was the brains of this outfit—right behind Jay, of course.

  Spying on Sondra from his office doorway, he noticed that she’d become profoundly pear-shaped over the past few years. Her shoulders were narrow, her chest nothing to speak of, but those hips! She’d obviously spent too much of her life sitting, and gravity had caused the fat to slide down to her tush. If Wendy ever let herself go like that…Well, she wouldn’t.

  He’d often wondered why his brother had fallen for Sondra. She’d had a nice educational pedigree and she’d come from an affluent family, but so what? Ben hadn’t married her because he’d needed her family’s money or her scintillating conversation. The store had always been his primary passion.

  Maybe she’d been good in bed. Jay couldn’t imagine it, though. Not given her figure—or her personality.

  But who was he to wonder why his brother had wound up with Sondra? He himself had married Martha, of all people.

  Martha had been different back then, though. He’d been different, too—but she’d been really different. She used to smile a lot, tell bawdy jokes and play old folk music on the stereo all the time: Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, corny stuff but fun. She’d wanted to raise their sons to be free, creative, adventurous and fearless, and the boys had grown up to be all those things—maybe a bit too much of some of them. At an art class Rick had taken as a kid—he’d spent most of the classes throwing clay at other kids, as Jay recalled—Martha had become friendly with some of the other mothers. Artsy types, intense, they’d all subscribed to Ms. and taken themselves very seriously. Martha had started reading Ms. and taking herself seriously, too, and eventually she’d become the new Martha, grave and grim, so sympathetic with the world’s oppressed that she became a bit oppressive herself. She’d started going to meetings and attending classes. Strange newsletters regarding human rights violations in Sri Lanka and battered women in Boise had filled their mailbox. Martha had set the clock radio to National Public Radio.

  She’d even flirted with vegetarianism. If Jay had had to pinpoint the exact moment their marriage disintegrated, it would probably have been the evening he’d craved a thick pastrami sandwich and all she’d had in the house were tofu and hummus.

  He’d stormed out of the house that evening, gone downstairs and had one of the guys at the deli counter fix him a three-inch-thick pastrami on rye, with a spear of dill pickle. He’d brought it to his third-floor office and devoured it there, too pissed off to return to the apartment. Then he’d gone out to a movie, something with Catherine Deneuve at one of the art houses—he didn’t remember the movie, but he sure as hell remembered Catherine Deneuve—and he’d gone to a neighborhood bar and downed a few beers and a hamburger, not because he was hungry but because he’d wanted meat. He’d finally gotten home around two-thirty, and he’d slept in the guest room. No way was he going to sleep with a vegetarian.

  She’d started buying meat again—so much for her commitment to the idea of food as a political statement—but their marriage never improved after that.

  He supposed he should be grateful that she hadn’t wanted to participate in the family business. She had always viewed Bloom’s with a degree of distrust. She’d never had any difficulty spending the money it brought in, but she’d often comment on the obscene indulgence of so much food when people were starving in…Where were they starving? Rwanda? Kazakhstan? As if thousands of Rwandans and Kazakhstanians were crying out for bagels and lox.

  Sondra moved, drawing his attention back to the hallway. She must have sensed his eyes on her, because she spun around.

  He grinned and approached her. “What?” she snapped, her voice near a whisper.

  “What do you mean, what? What are you doing, hovering outside Deirdre’s office?”

  “She’s being interviewed by a reporter from Gotham.”

  “Gotham?” He’d placed ads in Gotham Magazine. He knew the ad director there. Why hadn’t he been told about this?

  “The fellow wanted to talk to Deirdre. And Julia.”

  “About what?”

  “He’s doing a story on Bloom’s.” Sondra moved away from Deirdre’s closed door, snagging Jay’s elbow on the way and drawing him down the hall. “I was trying to hear what he and Deirdre were talking about. Julia told me he asked her mostly about the family. But Deirdre isn’t family. He must be asking her about something else.”

  He might be asking her for an outsider’s view of the family—and God knew what an outsider’s view would be. Just because the Blooms shared a last name didn’t mean they shared philosophies or personalities. Sondra was pushy, Julia out of her
depth. Jay was the only one who understood how the place ought to be run.

  “I’m hoping he’s going to write a nice PR piece,” Sondra said, her voice still barely above a hiss, “but you never know. These reporters—they all want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. They’re always looking for a scandal. Thank God we haven’t got any scandals. Unless you count marrying a woman young enough to be your daughter,” she added as an afterthought.

  “Wendy isn’t young enough to be my daughter,” he retorted. No one in his family liked Wendy, but fortunately, she wasn’t terribly aware of that. Thanks to her sunny disposition, her sublime naiveté and the fact that Jay treated her as if she were the jewel of the Bloom family, she just bounced along, being pleasant to everyone even though they were all jealous of her youth and beauty.

  “I should talk to this reporter,” he said. “I know lots of people at Gotham.” That was a slight exaggeration; he knew one person. But that was probably one more than Sondra knew. “If he’s doing an article on the store, he ought to include stuff on our Web site. It’s a growing area.”

  “Gotham is a New York magazine. Its reader base is New Yorkers. Why would they be going on the Web site to buy Bloom’s products when we’re right here in their backyard?”

  “Because Internet buying is the wave of the future,” he informed her, not bothering to tamp his resentment. No one in this family recognized how important his work was, how cutting edge, how vital. If they wanted Bloom’s to come across as twenty-first century, they ought to highlight the Web site in this magazine article.

  “Since when has Bloom’s marketed itself as a futuristic company? We’re selling nostalgia here, not the Jetsons.”

  “The Jetsons are nostalgia,” Jay argued, then let out a long breath. He wasn’t going to stand in the hallway bickering with his sister-in-law. What did she know? Who was she, anyway? If she was so important, if she understood the store so damn much, Ida wouldn’t have bypassed her for her own daughter for president.

  He returned to his office, settled in his chair and rang Deirdre’s extension. “Jay here,” he said. “I want to talk to the reporter when you’re done with him.”

  “Are you sure?” Deirdre asked.

  “What, am I speaking Swahili? Sure I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” she said, and hung up.

  He hung up, too, then stared at his phone console for a minute, annoyed that Deirdre hadn’t sounded more enthusiastic about his talking to the journalist. His annoyance grew as he realized he was going to have to cancel his squash date. He’d really been looking forward to that.

  Damn. Well, he supposed the store was more important than squash—and getting his name prominently mentioned in the article was more important yet. Let his mother read the article and realize how essential he was to the business. She’d rethink her decision to put Julia in the top slot. One good Gotham article might be all it would take.

  What an ass, Ron thought as he left Jay Bloom’s office an hour later. What a mess. He couldn’t decide which was more dysfunctional: Bloom’s the store or Blooms the family.

  The store was coasting and its momentum was flagging. No new products or promotions had been introduced in over a year. The store’s design hadn’t changed in a decade. Now that he’d met them, he could safely assume that the Blooms were the main reason the store was stagnating.

  Jay Bloom was all bluster, orating about Web sales as if he’d invented the concept. And Sondra Bloom was a delicatessen version of a stage mother, alternately gloating about her daughter and presenting herself as the power behind her daughter’s success. According to Deirdre Morrissey, Ben Bloom had been the only person who understood how to run the store. He’d had the brilliance, the energy, the devotion. “He lived and breathed Bloom’s,” the woman had said, choking up with emotion. “I ought to know—I sat at his right hand. He was the genius here. He made the place what it is, even more than Ida and Isaac did. No one else will ever be able to do for Bloom’s what Ben did.” She seemed to miss the late, great leader more than his own relatives did.

  And then there was Julia. As slim and fragile-looking as a ballerina, yet when she smiled, when she laughed, when her dark eyes flashed in his direction, he sensed that inside her delicate body lurked one tough broad. She was a lawyer, after all. A Wellesley grad. Didn’t Wellesley make their students take advanced seminars in tough-broad-ology before they received their degrees?

  He wanted to find out just how tough she was, just how smart, how determined. He wanted to find out whether she was really as detached as she seemed from the workings of Bloom’s, or whether she knew everything and was hiding the truth from him. He wanted to learn the truth—about her, about her store, about what was locked inside that decrepit old desk in her office. Her grandfather’s spirit? Or secret documents, wads of cash, ancient records, photos of colleagues in compromising positions? Ron wondered what the courts would throw at him if he got caught sneaking into her office and picking the lock on the desk. Breaking an old drawer lock couldn’t be that difficult, and he could always plead freedom of the press.

  What amazed him was that he cared enough about this Upper West Side food shop to contemplate a criminal route to the truth. Christ. It was just a desk, and this was just a story about a famous delicatessen in a time of transition after the death of its longtime president. Why on earth should Ron fantasize about prying open the top drawer of a desk?

  It wasn’t the desk he wanted to pry open. It was Julia Bloom.

  He stood at the elevator bank at the far end of the entry, mulling over whether to leave or to go back to her office. He wanted to have another look at her, but he’d run out of questions to ask her. He’d be better off returning to his own desk at Gotham’s headquarters and digging up some more stuff so he’d have a legitimate reason to come back and interview her again.

  The hell with legitimate reasons. He strode down the hall, knocked on her door and heard her call from within “Deirdre?”

  That was good enough for him. He swung open the door and smiled. “Not Deirdre. Can I come in?”

  She gazed at him, her eyes as dark and deep as shadows at midnight. Ron knew a lot of women. He’d had his share of experiences, flings, affairs, relationships—and he definitely wanted one of each with Julia. She wasn’t the world’s greatest beauty; she didn’t exude sexual charisma; she wasn’t sending him come-hither looks or flashing a thong at him. But damn it, she turned him on.

  She rose from her chair and smiled hesitantly. “Did you have anything more you wanted to ask me?”

  “Not right now,” he admitted, closing the door behind him. She glanced at it, then back at him, but didn’t object as he approached her. He might have thought breaking into the old desk was risky, but what he was about to do was ten times riskier and he didn’t give a damn.

  He drew to a halt in front of her, slid one hand around her nape under a tumble of silky black hair, and kissed her. Right on the lips—a firm, dry kiss, nothing X-rated but all he’d dare when such minor issues as his professional reputation and possible charges of sexual assault were on the line.

  She accepted his kiss, neither returning it nor shoving him away. When he pulled back, her eyes were round and startled, her cheeks rosy. She lifted her hand to her lips and touched them, as if to make sure he hadn’t chewed them off her face.

  “Sorry, but I had to do that,” he said.

  “I…uh…” She pressed her fingertips to her mouth again.

  “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “Um…no.”

  She wasn’t smiling, though. She wasn’t reaching for him, flicking the tip of her tongue, nestling up to him and letting him feel the warmth of her slim, graceful body against his. He was usually pretty good at reading signals, but if she was sending him any, they were in a language he didn’t understand.

  Not that it mattered. Something was going on, something he couldn’t define in a few neat paragraphs for his City Business column, something that defied words and
grammar. Something that made him horny just looking at this woman, whom he’d met only that morning and talked to for an absurdly short time.

  “I do have more questions,” he said, “but they can wait.”

  “I think I have some questions, too.” Her voice sounded breathy. “They can wait,” she added.

  “I’ll be in touch.” He smiled, hoping she’d smile back but willing to call it a victory if she refrained from slapping him.

  No smile, no slap.

  He turned and left the office, once again closing the door behind him. Had he shocked her? Bowled her over? Triggered a tough-broad reflex inside her that would make any future meeting between them fraught with indignation? Had he destroyed his career?

  He didn’t think so. In fact, he thought that kiss had gone pretty well. The next kiss would be slower, deeper, a whole lot wetter. The next kiss wouldn’t stop at a kiss.

  Susie knew Julia hated coming downtown, but there she was. She’d phoned Susie and asked if she could stop by, and Susie had said, “Sure, when?” and Julia had told her she was calling from the vestibule of Susie’s building, so now would be a pretty good time.

  Caitlin was out; she worked as a secretary for a securities firm on Wall Street, so she actually had to wake up early enough to be at her desk by nine a.m., poor thing. Anna was home, though. She was a harpist waiting for the city schools to increase their arts budgets so she could get a job as a music teacher, and in the meantime she was registered at four temp agencies and took clerical work when the spirit and her dwindling cash supply moved her. Apparently, she wasn’t broke at the moment, because she was sprawled out on the battered sofa in the living room, watching a TV talk show, the theme of which was foot fetishes.

  It was eleven a.m., which meant Susie had only just finished showering and pulling on her black jeans, an olive-green T-shirt and a black sweater with a deep V down the front. At the moment her cell phone chirped, she’d been standing in front of the open refrigerator, contemplating which of the mandarin oranges on the middle shelf looked the most edible. Once she’d told Julia to come up, she selected an orange for herself and then added another scoop of coffee and another cup of water to the coffeemaker for Julia. Less than a minute passed before Julia knocked on Susie’s door, which meant she’d climbed the two flights of stairs at a brisk clip. Either she’d been working out or she was really eager to see Susie.