Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “Condoms? What a good boy.” Susie snorted. “Imagine if he hadn’t been careful. We might have had another baby brother.”

  “One brother is enough.” Julia closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “What’ll we tell Adam?”

  “Nothing. Why tell anyone anything, Julia? What’s the point?”

  “The point is, our father was a shithead.”

  “Like, this is news?” Susie slid off the counter and enfolded Julia in a hug. “I gotta go.” She yawned. “Juggling two jobs isn’t good for me.”

  “Quit Nico’s. I’ll hire you full time.”

  “I make a lot here with tips.”

  “I’ll give you tips. Come work at Bloom’s, Susie. I need you.” For a lot more than what she could contribute to the store, but Julia didn’t say that.

  “Yeah, right.” Susie released her and unlocked the door. “Go take that cute little reporter boy home and have your way with him.”

  “I might do that,” Julia said, following her sister out of the rest room and acknowledging that while the thought of sex right now excited her about as much as the thought of eating the cooling, congealing slice of pizza she’d left on the table, she couldn’t come up with a better idea.

  “I could put your cousin in touch with some people,” Joffe said.

  Julia sat naked in his bed, the sheet pulled up to her waist, a box of graham crackers by her side and the rough-draft pages of his article spread across her lap. She’d had her way with her reporter boy, found the act had distracted her quite nicely, and when they were done she’d realized that she was famished. He’d offered to race over to Bloom’s to pick up a stuffed cabbage for her, but the store closed at ten. “Maybe we should stay open later,” she’d remarked, when he brought her the graham crackers. “We could attract a younger, hipper clientele. Maybe we could have singles’ nights at Bloom’s. From nine to eleven, only singles would be allowed. It would be an improvement over most singles’ bars. Better lighting, better nutrition. What do you think?”

  “Great idea,” Joffe had said, sprawling across the foot of the bed. He’d donned a pair of navy-blue sweatpants, which paradoxically made him look sexier than he’d looked naked. She kept glimpsing the waistband where it clung to his abdomen just below his navel, and thinking about what was underneath that dark-blue fleece. “If you really want to institute something like that, let me know. I can put it in the article and see what kind of interest it generates.”

  The article. For some odd reason, she hadn’t given it a thought while Joffe had been lying under her, his hands clamped around her hips as he guided her up and down in a devastatingly effective rhythm. Nor had it entered her mind after she collapsed sweaty and panting on him and assured herself that she was nothing like her father, even though she’d discovered, to her amazement, that she liked sex. But once she’d regained a degree of lucidity that enabled her to nibble on graham crackers and shape coherent sentences, his comment had reminded her that the tear sheet was still in her bag, awaiting her attention.

  It was wonderful. Not a puff piece but close, with lots of juicy descriptions of the different departments, the cluttered counters and packed shelves, the blended aromas of cheese and coffee, warm bread and hot entrées, the clatter of voices and footsteps and churning cash registers. In the article, Uncle Jay was depicted as rather lightweight, Deirdre as rather grim, Sondra as a yenta and Myron as having the personality of library paste, although Joffe put it a bit more tactfully. Julia herself came across as overwhelmed but learning on the job, which was true. At least he hadn’t made her sound like a ditz.

  She’d just finished reading the article, when Joffe mentioned her cousin. “I know lots of people looking for projects to invest in.”

  “If they’re your enemies, send them to Rick,” Julia suggested.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I love him. But I don’t think he’s ever going to make a movie.”

  “Probably not. The thing is, I know investors who’ve got money to burn and like to think of themselves as artistic. They buy paintings that are never going to appreciate. They invest in Broadway shows—which is about as sound an investment as buying lottery tickets. Some of them might like to get in on the ground floor of an independent movie—even if it never leaves the ground floor.”

  “How do you know people like that?” she asked.

  He grinned. “I’m a financial writer, remember? I hobnob with Wall Street types.”

  “You’ve got an MBA.”

  “That, too.”

  She stacked the pages of his article and set them aside, then helped herself to another cracker and munched on it thoughtfully. “Joffe, I need your help.”

  She must have sounded pretty somber, because he straightened up and stared at her. “With what?”

  Everyone she’d discussed the bagel situation with at Bloom’s had laughed at her, and perhaps he would, too. But after reading his article, she felt she could trust him. He respected Bloom’s, and she couldn’t figure out the damn bagel problem on her own. Maybe he could help. “It’s such a small thing, it probably isn’t worth thinking about,” she admitted. “The store is losing nearly a hundred and fifty bagels a week.”

  “Losing them?” He frowned.

  “They just disappear. There’s no record of them. They aren’t bought. They aren’t thrown out at the end of the day. They just disappear.”

  “You’ve talked to the bagel department?”

  “Susie talked to one of the guys in the department. He didn’t know anything—although she’s hot for him, so who knows how the conversation went.”

  “You’re hot for me, and this conversation is going fine,” Joffe said with just enough arrogance to make her want to throw a pillow at his head. “Maybe I should talk to the guys in the department.”

  “No,” she said hastily. “We need to keep it in the family. Anyway, it’s not just bagels. There are other unaccountable losses. Cream cheese. Sometimes a little lox or smoked whitefish. A pound of coffee here and there, or tea.”

  “Shoplifting,” Joffe told her. “Every store has problems with it, Julia. The losses are built into the pricing structure. If these thefts are causing Bloom’s to falter—”

  “It’s not shoplifting,” she explained. “This is organized. There’s a consistency in the amount of stuff vanishing each week. I can’t go around accusing my employees of stealing stuff, but something’s going on. I don’t know how to investigate it.”

  He ruminated. “My specialty is finance, not retail,” he conceded. “But maybe if I inspected your books—”

  “I’ve inspected the books. Myron has inspected the books. You’re not going to find anything in them that we haven’t already found.”

  “Then you’re going to have to start talking to your employees. You don’t have to accuse them, just question them.”

  “Oh God.” She shuddered. She was still so new at running the store. To rage at the personnel, giving them the fifth degree over missing bagels…It would resemble that awful scene from The Caine Mutiny, when Humphrey Bogart accused the crew of stealing his strawberries and everyone realized he was crazy. If she started interrogating people at Bloom’s about the missing bagels, they’d think she was crazy, too.

  “Your other option is to write off the loss and forget about it,” Joffe said.

  “That’s what my mother and Uncle Jay want me to do.” She sighed, tossed the box of crackers onto the night table and sank into the pillows. Tears of dejection and fatigue threatened her eyes. “I wonder if it was going on while my father was still alive. I wonder what he would have done about it. Screwed Deirdre, probably.”

  “I guess you don’t want to discuss this bagel problem with her,” Joffe surmised.

  “I don’t want to discuss anything with her ever.” She sighed. “Do you think I should discuss it with her?”

  “She seems to know what’s going on, a lot more than other people who work at Bloom’s do. And if you want to keep wor
king with her, Julia, you’re going to have to talk to her.”

  “I doubt I can even look her in the face.”

  “So talk to her over the phone. Or else forget about the whole thing. It doesn’t sound like something that’s going to drive the store into bankruptcy.”

  “I can’t forget about it. Bloom’s should be doing better than it is. It’s like a tire with a slow leak in it—it’s holding up okay, and you can drive on it as long as you remember to add a little air once a week. But you know in your heart that leak is there, and sooner or later you’re going to have to patch the damn tire.”

  “Then patch it. You’re the boss. If you want to fix the tire instead of refilling it with air all the time, you’re the one who’s going to have to patch it.”

  Julia decided Joffe was a pain in the ass. She wanted him to tell her, Here’s why you’re losing bagels. You’re miscounting your inventory. You forgot to factor in the X formula. They teach this in business school—you multiply, take ninety percent, work out the square root and calculate the secant. Once you do that, you’ll see that all those bagels are accounted for.

  He didn’t say that, though. He said, “I don’t know what you want me to do. Hold your hand? Write out questions you can ask your people? Serve on bagel patrol? Give me a hint.”

  I want you to make everything better, she longed to whine. I want you to make all my problems go away. She couldn’t ask him to do the impossible, so she only said, “Hold my hand.”

  He held all of her, wrapping his body around hers and tucking her head against his shoulder. Beyond exhaustion, she felt a deep, throbbing sorrow. She supposed that if she’d thought long and hard about it, she would have reached the same conclusion Susie had reached long ago about their father. But Julia had always believed the best of him. She believed the best of everyone. She believed the best of the employees she didn’t want to interrogate, and her mother and uncle, and her sister, and her grandmother. She even believed the best of Deirdre, who knew everything and kept her mouth shut.

  And Joffe. Except for the fact that he couldn’t perform miracles and renew her ability to believe the best of everyone, she believed the best of him.

  She’d figure out what to do about the bagels, and Deirdre, and her memory of her father, tomorrow. If Joffe couldn’t help her, she’d work it out on her own.

  In the meantime, she’d take comfort in the fact that he was holding her.

  18

  “All right,” Ron wheedled. “You don’t have to tell me who your source is. Just blink twice if I guess right.”

  Kim Pinsky snorted and flicked her ash-blond mane behind her shoulders. “What I’d like to know is, when the hell am I going to see this damn article?”

  “It’s not like I could work on the thing full-time. I have to write my weekly column, too,” he said with abundant indignation. No matter what they argued about, he knew she would win. She always did. The best he could hope for was to pick up a few points by defending his honor.

  “Spare me,” Kim said.

  “I’ll have the Bloom’s story done by next week,” he promised. “I had it all written up, but then I had another chat with Jay Bloom and I need to tweak some stuff. It’ll be on your desk Monday morning.” He said Jay Bloom’s name in an even tone, but observed his boss’s expression. He was convinced Uncle Jay was Kim’s source. It had to be a third-floor denizen, someone who would have been familiar with Julia’s use of the term bleeding to describe the store’s condition. Of all the third-floor folks, Jay seemed most eager to cause Julia headaches.

  Kim’s eyes didn’t flicker, let alone blink.

  “It wasn’t Jay?” he asked, stumped. Who else would have wanted to stir up trouble? Julia’s mother? Not given the pride she took in her daughter’s ascension to company president. Deirdre? Not enough personality. Myron? Not enough gray matter.

  “You want to know the truth?” Kim tapped an elegantly polished fingernail against her lower lip. “It was no one at Bloom’s. And that’s all I’m telling you.”

  “You assigned me this article on a secondhand tip?”

  “A very reliable secondhand tip. You’ve gotten something good out of it, haven’t you?”

  “Not what I expected.” He’d gotten a tawdry little family scandal he didn’t want to write about and a financial struggle that wasn’t particularly dire. Missing bagels, big deal. He’d gotten a story about a bottom line that was seeping but not hemorrhaging, about a stagnant company trying to jump-start itself.

  And Julia. He’d gotten her.

  “If it’s going to be a good story, the source doesn’t matter.” Kim held her hand out as if expecting him to place the pages of his draft into it. “If it’s good enough, we’ll put it on the cover. But I need to see it.”

  “Next Monday,” he swore, backing out of her office.

  Once he’d returned to his own, much punier, much drabber office, he slouched in his chair and called up the article on his computer. He was aware that although it had a nice, warm undertone—all that nostalgia stuff, the paean to traditional foods and so on—it was thin and watery. He didn’t want to strengthen it enough to hurt Julia, but he knew that if he submitted it in its current form to Kim, she would stuff it down the toilet. Better to crank it up before he showed it to her.

  If only she’d confirmed for him that Jay was her source. The guy’s preening and posturing irked Ron, and most of the revisions were going to be at his expense. But Ron would feel more gleeful about targeting Jay if he knew Jay was the one who’d instigated the article in the first place. The jerk would be hoisted by his own petard—whatever the fuck a petard was.

  And let brother Ben hoist himself, too, Ron thought. If Julia’s father had kept his pants on, Ron might have been willing to tread lightly on the guy’s memory. He wasn’t going to humiliate the Bloom family by writing about Ben’s peccadilloes, but he could nail the SOB on other issues—his being detached and driven, for instance. While Julia and the rest of the family hadn’t criticized him for devoting himself to the store above all else, enough people outside the family had described him as a cold bastard. Ben Bloom wasn’t going to emerge from the article qualifying for sainthood.

  It bothered Ron that he would even consider exercising restraint in his reporting. But damn it, he didn’t want Julia injured by what the magazine published. She deserved to have someone on her side. She couldn’t count on her mother or her doofus uncle. Probably not even her sister, who seemed far too content working at that low-rent pizza palace downtown. If Ron turned out to be the only person standing between Julia and the big ugly world…well, it was a hell of a place for him to be standing, given his job, but he wasn’t going to move.

  He scrolled down the first page of the article, remembering how Julia’s eyes had welled with tears as she’d read it. It wasn’t that good, but it pulled the right strings and pushed the right buttons. Ron was a professional. He knew what he was doing when he pounded the keyboard.

  His phone rang. His eyes still on his monitor, he lifted the receiver. “Ron Joffe here.”

  “Mr. Joffe?” a honey-smooth male voice coursed over the line. “My name is Lyndon Rollins. I’m calling for Ida Bloom.”

  Ida. The one Bloom he’d been denied access to. He sat straighter. “Yes, Mr. Rollins. What can I do for you?”

  “Mrs. Bloom heard that you were putting together an article about Bloom’s for Gotham Magazine. She would like to meet with you.”

  “Great!” Ron grabbed a pencil and notepad. “How about now? I could come right over—”

  “She’d prefer to come to you,” Lyndon Rollins said.

  “She wants to come here? I know she’s…well, what I mean is that if traveling is difficult for her, I could—”

  “She’s eighty-eight,” Lyndon declared, barreling past Ron’s attempts at tact. “But she isn’t housebound. We can be at your office in an hour.”

  “One hour is fine.” One hour barely gave Ron time to review all his notes and formulat
e some questions, but he could do it. He gave Lyndon the magazine’s address, thanked him and hung up.

  Ida Bloom. The grand dame, the queen of the realm, the delicatessen Hera descending from Mount Olympus to talk to him. He wondered why, then decided he didn’t care.

  He spent the next hour scrolling through his computer files and plowing through his notes. Five minutes before her scheduled arrival, he ducked into the bathroom, combed his hair and popped a breath mint—approximately the same last-minute grooming he underwent before seeing Julia. He had a tie in his desk drawer, but it featured a pattern of dancing Daffy Ducks, so he decided to leave it off. Returning to his office, he cleared his throat a few times, stared at the telephone and waited for the receptionist to announce Ida Bloom’s arrival.

  Ten minutes later, his phone still hadn’t rung. Damn. If he’d known Ida was going to stand him up, he would have guzzled a cup of coffee rather than sucking on a Tic-Tac.

  He took a deep breath. He’d dealt with difficult interviewees plenty of times, tardy ones, imperious ones. He’d never before dealt with an interviewee who was the grandmother of the woman he was sleeping with—but things were good with him and Julia, and really, the fact that they’d set the world on fire a few times over the past week had no bearing on what he and Ida would talk about.

  Why did she want to talk to him, anyway? Why would she say she wanted to talk to him and then not show up? Why was he feeling even edgier than he had the evening he’d met Julia for dinner at the Italian place on Restaurant Row? That had turned out all right—much better than all right. He assured himself that this would turn out all right, too.

  It occurred to him that Ida Bloom must be problematic. After all, she’d tossed Julia into the presidency and left her to fend for herself. And of the two sons she’d raised, one was an asshole and the other was a dead asshole. Hera or not, old Ida had some explaining to do.

  The phone rang. He flinched, then took another deep breath, tasted the residual mintiness on his tongue and answered to hear the receptionist announce that Ida Bloom had indeed arrived.