Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “Reformed,” Deirdre decided, flipping through the wheel of phone numbers on her desk. “I’ll take care of it.”

  With a weary sigh, Julia nodded, thanked her and continued to her own office. She slumped in her chair and shook her head. If she ever confronted Deirdre about her affair with Julia’s father, Julia would lose her. And if Julia lost her, Bloom’s would collapse.

  Her father and Deirdre had had what they’d had. Maybe it had been nothing more than lust, maybe the result of boredom or too much time spent in proximity. It had been wrong, it had been dishonest, but it was over. Nothing Julia did today could change what her father and Deirdre had done years ago. But what she did today could affect what happened tomorrow.

  She needed Deirdre, if only for those catastrophic times when Baltic-native deliverymen dumped cheese into the meat bin.

  The sound of footsteps, barely muffled by the paper-thin carpeting, alerted her to someone’s approach. She glanced toward her door in time to see Joffe, and her spirits rose like a helium-filled balloon. “Hey! What are you doing here?” she asked, leaping out of her chair and crossing to the door.

  He closed the door and opened his arms. She settled into them and met his lips with a sweet, warm kiss. It still amazed her that being kissed by him was like getting hit by a wrecking ball, only less painful. She felt shattered inside, shaky, on the verge of collapse. She wouldn’t mind collapsing, as long as when she did collapse and wound up on the floor he’d be down there with her, still kissing her.

  But he ended the kiss before they could get to the down-on-the-floor part. “What are you doing here?” she asked again.

  “Your grandmother brought me,” he said.

  “What?” She fell back a step and gaped at him. “Grandma Ida?”

  “I think she wants to set me up with your sister.”

  “You’re kidding.” Julia didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. She opted for laughter. Susie and Joffe together made about as much sense as liverwurst and Camembert.

  “I did my best to discourage her,” he said, moving farther into the room. “She’s a stubborn woman, though.”

  “When did you see her?”

  “Today. She wanted input into the article.”

  Julia pursed her lips, less than thrilled. Grandma Ida had her own agenda, and no one—probably including Grandma Ida herself—knew what it was. “So you interviewed her?”

  “She came all the way to my office to see me. She was insistent.”

  Julia had never been to his office. To think her grandmother had been there miffed her. “Did she tell you anything you can use in your article?” she asked cautiously.

  “Some interesting stuff about your grandfather.” He ran his hands gently over Julia’s shoulders. “In the course of our conversation, it came out that I have some business expertise, and she asked me to figure out why Bloom’s is bleeding.”

  Julia took a moment to absorb his words. She herself had asked him to help her investigate the mystery of the missing merchandise. But she’d asked him when they were in bed together, a woman requesting a favor of her lover. And she’d been asking his help only in trying to discover where the bagels were disappearing to. And he’d pretty much brushed her off.

  This was different. This was her grandmother going behind her back to ask a reporter to find out why the store wasn’t as profitable as it ought to be. It was her boss inviting an outsider in to do the job Julia had so far been unable to do.

  She felt shaky again, shattered inside—but suddenly as cold as the Hudson River in January. She took another step backward, and another, until she reached the sofa and sank onto the cushions. “Why would she ask you to do that?”

  To his credit, Joffe seemed sensitive to her dismay. “I don’t know. A whim, I guess.”

  “You told her no, of course.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  He’d told her yes. Julia drew in a deep breath and struggled to compose herself. “You came here to humor her.”

  “Partly.”

  “And to see me.”

  “Of course.”

  “And now you’re going to leave, go back to your office and write for your magazine.”

  He shook his head. “I’m going to review the store’s records over the past couple of years.”

  “I’ve already reviewed them, Joffe. There’s nothing there.”

  “Then, I’ll find nothing. Your grandmother asked me to do this—”

  “Oh, please. You’re not doing this because my grandmother asked you to. You’re doing it because you’re a reporter. You’re looking for dirt to put into your article.”

  “I’m not,” he said, sounding far from persuasive. “Julia, you yourself asked me to do this.”

  “I asked you to help me figure out why the bagels were unaccounted for. I never asked you to review the store’s records!”

  “Well, your grandmother did ask me.”

  “Did you promise her you wouldn’t write up what you found?”

  “She didn’t ask for that promise.”

  “Suppose I asked for it. Would you give it to me?”

  He gazed at her from where he stood near the door, his eyes much too clear, too beautiful. She knew before he spoke what his answer would be.

  “No.”

  “Then, you can’t see the records.”

  “Your grandmother—”

  “My grandmother is eighty-eight years old.”

  “And sharper than some recent presidents. Julia, she opened the company’s books to me. I’m going to look at them. In return, I hope I’ll be able to make some suggestions that will strengthen the company. Okay?”

  “No.” She felt stronger now, strong enough to shove herself to her feet and glare at him. “It’s not okay. You’re going to publish in your magazine that the store is teetering, it’s poorly run, the new president doesn’t know her ass from her elbow—”

  “Sure, you’re the new president. You’re learning on the job. I’ll put all that into the article, Julia. Do you honestly think I’d write an article that would make you look bad?”

  What she honestly thought was that he’d write an article that would make him look good. If doing so meant making her look bad—publishing a hard-hitting exposé about mismanagement and family strife in the delicatessen business—he’d do it without qualms.

  Even worse than the comprehension that Joffe would smear Bloom’s was the realization that he was doing it at her grandmother’s invitation. Grandma Ida, who’d ignored Julia’s objections and put her in charge, had just given her a vote of no-confidence. She’d asked in an outside consultant—none other than a business reporter for a splashy, glossy, top-circulation magazine—to fix things Julia had been unable to fix. It was one thing for Julia to ask Joffe for help, and quite another for Grandma Ida to go behind Julia’s back and ask him for help.

  All she’d ever wanted to do was make Grandma Ida happy. She hadn’t requested this job, hadn’t positioned herself for it, hadn’t been grateful when it was forced upon her. But once she’d committed to it, she’d worked hard and tried her best. Everyone had told her to shut up and forget about the missing bagels, but she hadn’t—and now her perseverance had caused her grandmother to undercut her.

  It was enough to make her wish she’d never quit her job researching divorce settlements at Griffin, McDougal.

  In fact, it was enough to make her want to divorce her whole family. And Joffe, too, even though she wasn’t his wife. Just for the satisfaction of causing him grief, she wanted to marry him—so she could drag him through the ugliest, nastiest divorce New York had ever seen.

  19

  Three windows down, one to go, and Susie was hungry. Carrying two plastic forks and her purchase from the heat-n-eat counter, she climbed the back stairs to the third floor, shouted a greeting to her mother through the open doorway to her office and knocked on Julia’s door before entering. Julia had asked her to come up for lunch. “We need to talk,” she’d said omino
usly.

  Something was going on with Julia—something bad, Susie suspected. Julia had been mopey all week, dressing in shades of gray that reminded Susie of chilly rain. Julia’s gloominess had lasted too long to be hormonal—besides which, she never had hormonal mood swings. She was always so dogged and earnest, so determined not to be a slave to her cycles. Susie often wondered whether mood-and-hormone immunity was something they taught in law school. It sure hadn’t been part of the curriculum at Bennington. Among her classmates, it had seemed that those with steady temperaments and chaste love lives were ostracized. “Don’t hang out with her,” someone might warn. “She’s so, like, pleasant.”

  Julia was almost always pleasant—except for recently.

  She’d taken the news of their father’s infidelity pretty hard. Maybe Susie should have taken it hard, too, but she’d never thought as highly of their father as Julia had, so discovering he was a schmuck hadn’t flattened her. She’d deduced long ago that there could be only two possibilities when it came to him: either he was screwing around or he was celibate. He simply hadn’t been home often enough to have a tight relationship with his wife. And Sondra was always inundating her children with her love—either because Ben wasn’t around to receive any of it or because she didn’t love him that much in the first place.

  Who knew? Susie was no expert when it came to love. Sex she understood. Love…Love was so damn intimate. It meant sharing more than climaxes. She loved Julia and at least some of her other relatives, but men? To love a guy meant knowing his tastes, knowing his dreams and goals, knowing red licorice was his favorite comfort food and scouring the tub was his least favorite chore, and he thought T.S. Eliot was overrated, and his best shot was a three-pointer from slightly to the left of the top of the key. It meant knowing that to him bagels were a medium, not an end in themselves, and that when he was eight he’d wanted to be Beast from X-Men when he grew up, and that not having sex with him was like being deprived of chocolate for a month. Sheer torture.

  Not that she was in love with Casey Gordon.

  But it was Friday afternoon, and her marathon with him would begin tomorrow morning, when she ventured into that foreign land known as Queens, New York. By Sunday morning, they would have completed their twenty hours, and Susie had every intention of bingeing. Who was it who’d nicknamed orgasms petit morts? Small deaths. Susie was anticipating death-by-chocolate.

  Julia was seated at her desk in one of her overcast-sky outfits. She’d set up a computer on one corner of the desk—their father had never installed one in his office, claiming Jay could take care of the computer end of the business. Now that Julia was in charge, however, a computer had invaded the late Ben Bloom’s inner sanctum. From where Susie stood, just inside the doorway, she could see that the monitor was filled with some sort of graphics program.

  Julia spun in her chair and faked a smile. “Hi, come on in.”

  “What are you working on?” Susie enquired, closing the door and then crossing to the desk. She put down the plastic tray holding their lunch and dragged over a chair from near the sofa so she could sit close to Julia.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. What did you bring?” Julia eyed the container.

  “Stuffed cabbage. I hope that’s okay. It looked good and smelled even better.”

  Julia’s cheeks went almost as gray as her sweater set. “Wonderful,” she muttered.

  “You wanted something else? You should have told me.”

  “No, stuffed cabbage is fine. I’ve heard the way they make it downstairs is delicious.” She sounded about as enthusiastic as a death row inmate being offered a tour of the gas chamber. She picked up a plastic fork, tapped the tines idly against her blotter and turned her gaze back to her monitor. “All right, you want to know what I’m working on? The Bloom’s Bulletin.”

  Susie shifted in her chair so she had a better view of the monitor. The image on the screen resembled a newspaper page, with rectangles outlined to hold articles and Bloom’s Bulletin typed in a large Old English font across the top. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a newsletter we’re going to start publishing. It’ll advertise our weekly specials, of course, but it’ll also contain recipes, employee news, anecdotes and stories about the products we sell—you know, like maybe an article explaining the difference between Turkish and Greek olives.”

  “I know that mystery’s been keeping me up nights,” Susie joked as she pried the lid off the container. A puff of tangy fragrance wafted into her nostrils: sour cabbage and sweet tomato sauce and earthy beef and rice all mixed together to jolt her stomach awake.

  “It’ll also announce our singles’ night.”

  “Singles’ night?”

  “I’m going to institute a singles’ night at Bloom’s. Thursday night, probably, from eight to ten. Maybe we’ll have cheese tastings or something.”

  “Eeeuw. Eating cheese is going to give everyone bad breath.”

  “Well, something else, then. Cracker tastings.”

  “Coffee tastings.”

  “Right!” Julia’s smile actually looked genuine for a second. “Or we can get experts in to give talks.”

  “What kind of talks?”

  “I don’t know. An olive expert can explain the difference between Turkish and Greek olives. Who cares, as long as the customers mix and mingle.”

  “And if some married person appears at the door suffering from a craving for Turkish olives, you’re not going to let him in?”

  “Of course we’ll let him in. But the thing is, it’ll be a social evening. Folks will linger, they’ll flirt…and they’ll buy stuff. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a terrific idea.” Susie herself could not imagine spending an evening at Bloom’s, trying to pick up anyone—other than the tall, sexy guy behind the bagel counter, perhaps. But it sounded like a reasonable way to bring people with shared interests together, in this case their shared interests revolving around garlicky salami and dill pickles. It could be the Upper West Side version of a poetry slam—an excellent idea, if you wanted to meet Upper West Side–type people. Maybe singles could even recite poetry. “‘A man who preferred olives Greek, Went to Bloom’s, a new lover to seek…’” she began.

  “Oh, that’s great! God, Susie, you’re so brilliant. We could put your poetry in the Bloom’s Bulletin, starting with that limerick.”

  “I haven’t written the rest yet,” Susie protested, but she was so glad to see Julia smiling that she completed the rhyme. ‘“The ladies were rallyin’ for olives Italian! They decided the man was a geek.’”

  “Never mind,” Julia said with a laugh. “We’ll leave that one out of the bulletin.”

  Pleased with herself for having wrung a bit of laughter out of her sister, Susie broke off a chunk of one of the stuffed cabbages, bit into it and sighed happily. It was delicious, just like grandma used to make—if one’s grandmother ever did much cooking, which neither of Susie’s grandmothers did. “Try this—it’s good,” she said, nudging the plastic tray toward Julia.

  Julia dropped the plastic fork as if to keep herself from eating. “Maybe later. Listen, Susie—here’s my thought. I want you to edit the Bloom’s Bulletin.”

  “Me?”

  “Like I said, it would come out once a week. We’d have stacks throughout the store for browsers to pick up, and maybe we’ll do a mailing. I’ve looked into the cost of bulk mailing versus inserting it in the Sunday paper, but I think people would be more likely to read it if it wasn’t stuffed in with all the other Sunday circulars. So we’d do a bulk mailing. It’ll put Bloom’s on the map with a younger clientele. It would be witty, fun to read.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you’d be the publisher.”

  “Wait. I’m the editor and the publisher?”

  “Probably the author, too—although you could get other people to write some of the articles for it. Like reminiscences about how their grandmother always skinned her knuckles while
grating horseradish by hand, or how their grandfather was afraid to eat tomatoes when he first came to this country, he thought they were poison or something. You’d be in charge. You could solicit stories.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re a poet.”

  “Yeah, and I could write limericks about grating horseradish.” Actually, Susie thought it might be fun putting together a weekly newsletter, but she couldn’t just say yes. Writing the newsletter would mean working for Bloom’s—which she was already doing with the windows, but only on a contract basis. The newsletter thing would be ongoing. She’d be an actual employee, on a salary. She’d see her mother every day. If she worked full-time for Bloom’s, the family might think she’d gone straight or something.

  “What about Nico’s?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “I’ve got a job there.”

  “You can quit.”

  “Quit Nico’s?” Susie did her best to appear outraged by the mere suggestion. She speared another chunk of cabbage, chewed and found herself hoping Julia would continue to ignore the food so Susie could eat the whole thing. “Nico needs me.”

  “He needs you to change his window once a month, and you could still do that. He sure as hell doesn’t need you to serve pizza. Anyone can serve pizza.”

  “You think?” Susie snorted. “It’s a highly skilled position. It takes strength and patience.”

  Julia laughed. Not a hearty laugh, more like a smile mixed with heavy breathing.

  “Okay, so maybe I’m not the strongest, most patient person in the world,” Susie conceded. “Nico loves me.”

  “I love you, too. And I’ll pay you more than he pays you.”

  The offer suddenly became more tempting. “I make a lot in tips, don’t forget.”

  “I’ll take that into account.”

  “So how much would you pay me to write this newsletter?”

  Julia broke Susie’s heart by using the edge of her fork to cut a small chunk of stuffed cabbage. “We’ll have to figure that out when—” She faltered, then covered by popping the food into her mouth.