Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  “Aren’t your feet cold?” she asked as she settled into the chair across from him.

  “I never get cold feet,” he joked. He sucked a length of cola through his straw and sighed. “Ahh. A marvelous vintage. Playful yet serious, with a profound sparkle and a note of butterscotch.”

  Susie laughed again. “So, how’s your latest project coming?”

  “Don’t ask.” He took another drink, then reconsidered that pessimistic response. “I’ve got some actors interested in the script, but none of them has a big enough name to bring in money. You know, this city is crawling with excellent actors nobody’s ever heard of.”

  “And they’re all waiters,” Susie pointed out. “I’m the only waiter in the entire city who isn’t an actress.”

  “You’re a poet. Speaking of which, I came here because I’ve got a deal for you. There’s going to be a poetry slam at this club down the street from me. No entry fee, and there’s a two-hundred-fifty-dollar prize. You could get rich.”

  “Not if I keep paying for your drinks.”

  “It’ll be fun, even if you don’t win. Lots of people, wine, words and meter and all that crap, you know?”

  She wondered whether the Bloom’s bagel man ever attended poetry slams. That was an absurd thought—and it had snuck up on her before her ten minutes of not-thinking-about-him was over. God, she hadn’t been infatuated like this since her adolescence, and back then, it was usually over rock musicians or TV stars, not men who put bagels into plastic bags at Bloom’s.

  “You could bring some friends along. You still seeing that big dude with the red hair?”

  Susie opened her mouth, closed it, then took a sip of her cola. Was she still seeing Eddie? It wasn’t as if they were going together. They didn’t phone each other on a daily basis. She didn’t know what he did on those nights he wasn’t with her, and she didn’t want to know.

  And now, when her brain had been hijacked by the bagel man…Shit. If only Grandma Ida had picked her to be president of Bloom’s, she could work with him every day. She could find out his name, so she wouldn’t have to keep thinking of him as Godiva. She could be his boss. She could give him a huge promotion, one that would entail his abandoning the bagel counter for her third-floor office. He could bring bagels with him when he moved up. They could eat bagels together, maybe share them, take turns smearing them with cream cheese, lick the excess cheese off each other’s fingers…

  And then she’d get sued for sexual harassment. Because there was no way she’d be able to have him working in her office, tempting her for eight hours a day, and not act on that temptation. After all, what would be the point of having him there with her if she wasn’t going to do anything?

  “Um, hello? Did I lose you?” Rick asked.

  Susie gave her head a sharp shake and concentrated on her cousin’s face. His hair was as long as hers, but not well cut. A brown fuzz blurred his chin—his feeble attempt at a goatee. His eyebrows were thicker than his beard.

  But he had a sweet face. He had Grandma Ida’s narrow nose and the Bloom physique, lean and low maintenance. Around his neck he wore a lens on a leather cord, his one major affectation. The beard was a minor affectation as far as she was concerned.

  “I’m still here,” she assured him. “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  About how, thanks to her ingenuity, her mother and sister were going to be able to outmaneuver Grandma Ida. About how it would be really cool if Rick could make a movie someday, and the whole family could go to the premiere, and afterward they could have a party catered by Bloom’s. About how if her father were still alive, he would think that was a dumb idea, because he’d always been like his mother, considering pursuits such as filmmaking and writing poetry frivolous. About how if she were Rick, she’d make a movie about Grandma Ida. It would be a horror flick.

  About how she hadn’t yet answered Rick’s question about Eddie. “That big dude with the red hair? No,” she said. “I don’t think I’m seeing him.”

  “So, you wanna bring someone else to the poetry slam? Bring your roommates. I like them.”

  “If you sleep with either of them, I’ll kill you,” she warned.

  “I’m not gonna sleep with them,” he promised. “But just for the record, why would you kill me?”

  “It would be incestuous.” Besides, she would have to listen to Caitlin or Anna describe her cousin in terms of chocolate, something she’d prefer to avoid. Much as she loved Rick, she dreaded to think of how he’d emerge from the chocolate test. Would he be a Mr. Goodbar? Malt balls? Every time she saw him afterward, would she have to think, Anna said he was a Milk Dud? It would just be too weird.

  Rick cupped his hands over his mouth and spoke, making his voice sound as if he were addressing her from a distance on a two-way radio crackling with static. “I’m losing you…come in, Suze, come in…Hello? Are you out there? Captain, I think we’ve lost her.”

  “I’m here,” she snapped. His teasing was beginning to wear on her. She’d given him a free cola—he ought to treat her kindly. Hadn’t he ever been in love?

  Not that she was in love. Nothing like it. Just a silly, giddy crush on a man with bedroom eyes and the devil in his smile. Devil’s food cake.

  If Rick didn’t like it…well, he could give her back his free cola.

  Mine, Sondra thought, standing in the center of Ben’s office. This should be mine.

  She still remembered the day, more than fifteen years ago, when Isaac had retired as president of Bloom’s. He’d remained a co-CEO with Ida—their idea of corporate hierarchy was imaginative, to say the least—but the years had played hard on him and he’d decided he no longer had the stamina or interest to continue running the store on a day-to-day basis. It was time, he’d said, to let Ben take over.

  Sondra had always been fond of Isaac. He’d been a gentle fellow, somewhat cowed by Ida. To this day, the old witch probably still believed he’d married her as a way of breaking into the food retail business, when Sondra was certain he’d married her only because he loved her.

  What food retail business, anyway? When Isaac had arrived in America, Ida’s parents were selling knishes from a pushcart on Broadway. If Isaac had been hoping to marry money, he could have chosen better.

  But he’d taken over their pushcart, then moved the operation into a tiny storefront. He’d asked Ida to manage the books, while he managed the inventory, cooking and selling and kibitzing with customers, putting in long days even on shabbat, building the company pickle by pickle. More than good product, it had taken social skills, and Isaac had had social skills in abundance—unlike Ida, who’d wisely remained in the back office with her Burroughs machine and her ledger books.

  Bloom’s had bloomed. It had expanded into an adjacent storefront on one side, and then an adjacent storefront on the other, widening until it took up the entire ground floor of the building. It expanded down into the basement, which was used partly as a storage area and partly as a kitchen. Then it expanded up, taking over the second floor for offices. And up again to the third floor, so the second floor could be used for kitchenware. Eventually the family had taken ownership of the entire building.

  Even as he’d prepared to retire from his empire, Isaac Bloom had seemed little altered by his success. He’d still called Sondra “sweetheart,” and his first question to her had always been, “You taking good care of my boychik?” That was all he’d ever cared about—that she took good care of Ben. It was Ida who cared about everything else, who would never be able to open her heart to Sondra no matter how well she took care of Ben.

  Sondra had done her best to make Ben happy, but nothing she could do for him would have made him as happy as his mother had the day she’d told him “Your father is retiring and you will take over.” A more thoughtful woman might have asked rather than told him, but Ben didn’t mind. He’d wanted to be president of Bloom’s.

  The office hadn’t changed much from its Depression-era atmosphere when
Ben had moved into it. Sondra still remembered the slight shudder she’d experienced as she’d entered the musty, gloomy room with its filmy windows overlooking Broadway and the side street, and the bulky, homely furnishings—file cabinets an indeterminate brownish-taupe shade, a coat tree that looked like a prop from a high school production of a Kaufman and Hart play, the squeaky swivel chair on four wheels that weren’t quite level, and the desk, a massive, scratched block of old wood stained with cigarette burns, water rings and spilled ink.

  Sondra had immediately set to work redecorating the office for Ben. She’d bought a simple teak desk that had looked ultramodern when it was new and retained its stylish flair even today, a brown leather chair on five wheels that all touched the floor at the same time, a couch of matching brown leather, attractive teak file cabinets and vertical blinds for the windows. Ida had shrieked over the money spent on the new decor, but for God’s sake, the woman shrieked every time the price of postage stamps went up a penny.

  Well, Sondra shrieked every time the postal rates went up, too. But that was different. Everybody shrieked about that.

  The one thing Ben had refused to let her do was remove his father’s desk from the office. It occupied one corner of the room, locked and empty, with only a potted plant standing on it—another addition of Sondra’s. Since plants supposedly exhaled oxygen, she’d felt it important that Ben have one in his office so he could breathe more efficiently while he worked.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered to the spirit of Isaac Bloom, which hovered somewhere in the vicinity of the old desk. “I took good care of your boychik.”

  And now he was gone, a whole year, because she hadn’t been in St. Petersburg to take care of him when he’d eaten that kaflooey sturgeon.

  He was gone, and this office should be Sondra’s.

  All right, so it was going to be Julia’s. Susie’s plan was cockamamie, but it just might work. And it would keep that bastard Jay from taking over and running the company into the ground, a genuine risk given that the store’s earnings had dropped since Ben’s death. Jay was exactly like his father—except without the brains, the discipline, the ambition or the diligence. No way could he run Bloom’s, unless he had someone else doing the actual work.

  The only someone who fit that profile was Sondra, and she’d be damned if she was going to do the actual work while Jay got to sit in this office, pretending he was the boss.

  So she and Julia would manage this charade. It could work. It would work. Sondra was so proud of her daughters, one for concocting this scheme and the other for becoming president of Bloom’s. A daughter of hers, president of Bloom’s…It made her chest swell like a balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, even though Julia didn’t know her ass from her elbow when it came to running a business.

  Well, she wasn’t going to be running Bloom’s. Sondra was. And if Ida ever found out…

  Let the old bag find out, Sondra thought with a huff. Let her find out it had been Sondra all along, Sondra nudging Ben when he needed a nudge, Sondra keeping Jay out of Ben’s hair, Sondra monitoring which coffees sold better, charting the growth in popularity of decaf, pushing to get a nice selection of herbal teas on the shelves. It was Sondra who had kept things running smoothly on the home front so Ben could stay focused on Bloom’s. Sondra who had enrolled the kids at Dalton and checked their homework and taken them to Dr. Schwartz for their shots and strep tests. Sondra who had made sure they had nice friends and didn’t stay out all night. Did Ben’s offspring ever get head lice? Half the city’s schoolchildren were infected with head lice at one time or another, but did Julia, Susie or Adam show up with a single louse?

  Sondra had made sure they didn’t.

  She’d done everything. She ought to be president of the goddamn world. For thirty years she’d been Ben’s wife, his assistant, his valet, his housekeeper, his bookkeeper, his polestar—and she still didn’t have a title or a salary, for all the hard work she did. The company had been paying her a nice sum each month since Ben’s death, but that little worm of an accountant, Myron Finkel, had explained that this was because Ida wanted Sondra to keep receiving Ben’s salary. Ben’s. Even when he was dead it was still his.

  She wanted her own salary. She wanted her own title. She wanted her own corner office.

  She wanted this office. She’d been the one to put the plant on that old desk, to fill the room with healthy air. Now it was her turn to breathe.

  Thank God for her daughters. They’d make sure she got her turn.

  Heath filled Julia’s doorway. She hadn’t recalled leaving her door open, but maybe she had. She was working too hard; she could barely remember her own name, let alone whether she’d left her door open.

  Her office at Griffin, McDougal was slightly larger than a coffin and about as lively. A couple of bookshelves protruded from brackets screwed to the wall behind her desk, and it had taken her several months to get used to bowing her head when she rose from her desk so she wouldn’t bang her skull against the lower one. The wall across from her used to have a Mostly Mozart poster tacked to it, but Daniella, the persnickety office manager, had told Julia that posters were against the rules. “This isn’t a college dormitory.” She’d sniffed. “If you want to decorate your office, get a properly framed picture and run it by me.”

  Julia hadn’t had a chance to purchase a “properly framed picture.” So the wall facing her desk featured only four thumbtack holes marking the corners of a poster-size rectangle.

  She hated this office.

  “I brought sushi,” Heath announced grandly.

  She also hated sushi. But she managed a smile for him, which was all the encouragement he needed to enter her office and drop a clear plastic tray on top of the mountainous stack of folders on her desk.

  “I don’t have time for lunch,” she warned him.

  “Sure you do.” He dragged over the tiny room’s other chair and flopped down into it. With his snowy blond hair, his long legs and his easy grace, he had a way of making every room he entered his own. When she’d first met him, his presumptuousness dazzled her.

  Right now, she didn’t have time for it. She had all those folders to go through—and a few formidable folders at home, sent to her by Grandma Ida’s lawyers. In those folders were documents proclaiming her the new president of Bloom’s, inventory lists and budget printouts. Every time she walked past the package the lawyers had sent her, she swore she could hear it ticking like a bomb.

  Nobody at Griffin, McDougal knew about her title at Bloom’s. She couldn’t tell anyone, because then they’d assume she was planning to quit the firm. And she wasn’t. Even being trapped inside this minuscule office with a plastic platter of raw fish and a man boasting an attitude of entitlement so encompassing he made Donald Trump seem humble was better than joining the family business.

  Heath was handsome, at least. He had elegant features, and he dressed in Armani and he was going to make partner within a year. Everybody knew it.

  Maybe her life would be simpler if she loved him.

  But how could she love someone who brought her raw fish? Smoked she could have handled. Smoked salmon, orange and oily and sliced for a bagel, or cut into scrambled eggs…

  “I’m not hungry,” she told Heath. Staring at those suspicious cylinders of gray and white made her even less hungry. Belatedly, she realized she might have sounded rude, so she added, “Thanks for bringing this, but really, I’m going to work through lunch today.”

  “What are you working so hard for? Tell me the truth, Jules—” he liked giving everyone uninvited nicknames; she assumed it was some sort of strange WASP custom “—is there anything in any one of those folders that can’t wait fifteen minutes?”

  “No. But if you add up everything in all the folders, the answer becomes yes.”

  “But I’m free now. So we can eat this sushi together. It’s good stuff—not from the place on Madison Avenue. You remember, the one where Mindy Hawthorne was eating ika and she saw a
roach scamper across the table?”

  Julia knew she shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Ika?”

  “Raw squid, Jules. You haven’t been paying attention.”

  He’d been trying to teach her about sushi for a long time. And he was right—she hadn’t been paying attention. She was paying attention now, though, and the combination of raw squid and cockroaches convinced her she’d just as soon skip lunch.

  “I’m really not hungry,” she murmured.

  He pried the lid off the tray, handed her a set of chopsticks wrapped in a tube of paper and pulled another set of chopsticks off the tray for himself. “Here I am, trying to broaden your horizons, and you say you’re not hungry.”

  “It’s the truth.” She gestured toward the tray. “Go ahead, eat. It’s all yours.”

  He used the chopsticks to pluck a chunk of something—squid, perhaps, or eel, or some other disgusting specimen of sea life that would never, ever be sold at Bloom’s as long as she was president—and popped the morsel into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed and issued a satisfied sigh.

  “This isn’t because of your father, is it?” he asked.

  “What?” Her state of mental overload? Her growing pile of folders, which she couldn’t catch up on because she couldn’t bring any of them home to work on, since she had all those materials about Bloom’s to read? Her anger at herself over her inability to ignore those materials and let her mother run the store?

  “Your aversion to raw fish. Just because your father died from eating bad fish doesn’t mean this is bad.”

  “I hated sushi before my father died,” she assured him.

  He popped another blob of fish into his mouth and munched enthusiastically. “Are you free tomorrow night?”

  “What’s tomorrow night?”