Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  Some new crisis, Susie guessed. Fine with her. She could use the distraction. Her own life was so royally fucked up, why not concentrate on her sister’s life for a while?

  She opened the door to let Julia in. Julia didn’t seem at all winded, but her cheeks were nearly as red as her pashmina scarf, which she’d flung dramatically over her shoulder. She was wearing a plain white blouse, blue linen slacks and leather loafers. No jacket. Were her cheeks red from the cold?

  What was she doing here, anyway? Why wasn’t she at Griffin, McDougal running up billable hours?

  “We need to talk,” she announced.

  “Sure.” Susie led her to the microscopic kitchen but gestured with her hand that Julia should remain outside the doorway. If they both tried to squeeze in, one of them would wind up spilling coffee, or possibly breaking the other’s rib with a misplaced elbow. She filled two mugs with coffee, added milk and carried the mugs out into the main room.

  Anna glanced over from the sofa, smiled and waved at Julia, then turned back to the show, evidently eager to be enlightened regarding the pros and cons of toe sucking.

  Susie and Julia sat at the table in the opposite corner of the room, near the window. Julia took her cup and peered into it, as if to make sure nothing was swimming in it before she sipped. Susie tucked one foot under her hips, swung the other, and used her fingernails to peel the orange.

  “Okay, so how come you’re not at work?” she asked.

  Julia sighed. “I took a leave of absence.”

  Susie dropped the orange onto the heaped scraps of rind. “What?”

  “I took a leave of absence from Griffin, McDougal.” She unwound her scarf and gazed down into her coffee cup again. “I’ve got to work full-time at the store, at least for now.”

  “Why?”

  Julia lifted her eyes to Susie again, which Susie decided meant she could stop gaping at her sister and get back to sectioning her orange. “A reporter from Gotham Magazine came in on Tuesday to do an interview. He’s writing a story about Bloom’s. Mom thinks it’s going to be a promotional piece, but it’s not. I think he’s going to write that the store is in financial trouble.”

  “That’s bullshit. The store isn’t in any trouble,” Susie argued. Julia’s worried gaze made her hesitate before biting into a wedge of orange. “It is in trouble?” she asked, her appetite shrinking like an ice cube in the sun.

  “Mom gave me a pile of folders to look at while he was in my office, so I’d appear to be working.” Julia pulled a face at this, obviously not pleased with the deception. “Anyway, I studied them really closely. There are departments at the store that are losing money.”

  “Which departments?”

  “The bagel department, for one.”

  Susie’s appetite vanished completely, leaving room for anger. She had a vested interest in the bagel department—or, at least, in the bagel department’s one-man creative department. “That can’t be!” she protested, so loudly Anna tore her gaze from an analysis of ankle bracelets to glance their way.

  “I’m no business expert,” Julia conceded, “but I looked at the profit-loss statements and bagels aren’t doing that well.”

  “So you’re going to quit your law job and…what? Fire people?” Not Casey, she thought. Please, not Casey. Not while everything was so weird between him and her. Not when she hadn’t even slept with him yet.

  She couldn’t understand why they hadn’t gotten it on by now. She was certainly ready, willing and able. Even if he lived in Queens and was kind of quirky, and the only time they’d ever really spent together was a few minutes in an elevator and at Grandma Ida’s seder more than a week ago. Since then, they’d talked on the phone—mostly about politics, Woody Allen’s movies, whether raspberries belonged in bagels, and Woody Allen’s sex life. But Casey worked during daylight hours, and she worked in the evening, and at the end of a long day at Bloom’s he didn’t want to take the train all the way downtown just to watch her serve pizza at Nico’s.

  She dreamed about him every night. She imagined his naked body, lean and tall and seething with desire for her. She imagined the hands that shaped circles of bagel dough in the kitchen in the store basement shaping circles around her breasts. She imagined his tongue on her, and hers on him. She’d gotten to a point where all she had to do was close her eyes and whisper his name and the temperature between her thighs shot up a good fifteen degrees.

  Sooner or later, she was going to have to storm the bagel department, drag him out from behind the counter and have her way with him. He was always friendly when they talked on the phone. If he didn’t like her, he wouldn’t keep calling her. If they ever saw each other again, she could make a move—but she was afraid of chasing him. She’d already been the aggressor, and she was willing to give him a little more time to aggress before she took matters into her own hands again.

  It did perplex her, though. What kind of man didn’t want to sleep with a healthy, eager, relatively attractive woman?

  A gay man, maybe? But she hadn’t gotten gay vibes from him. It was something else, some reserve on his part. Maybe he was shy—although he’d held his own at Grandma Ida’s. Maybe he was involved with another woman. Maybe he was distracted by the shaky performance of the bagel department at Bloom’s.

  “You can’t shut down the bagel department,” she announced.

  “I wouldn’t dream of shutting down the bagel department,” Julia assured her. “The thing is, trying to figure out how to improve things at the store is a full-time job. I can’t do it while I’m working at Griffin, McDougal, and Mom can’t do it, because if she could, she would have done it already. And Uncle Jay doesn’t have the attention span for it. I wish I could get Adam to come down and help me—he’s got such a good head for numbers—but there’s no way he’d take time off school for this. So I’ve got to do it myself. I’m the president—thanks to you,” she added with a scowl.

  “Don’t blame me. It was Grandma Ida’s decision,” Susie argued. She popped a section of orange into her mouth and handed a section to Julia, who bit into it. “So, when is this magazine article coming out?”

  Julia’s chewing slowed. She swallowed. She glanced toward the window, which would have been filled with bright spring sunshine if the surrounding buildings didn’t block most of the sky. A glint of light hit some of the bars of the fire escape, where a pigeon perched, fat and iridescent green as it basked in the sliver of sun.

  “I don’t know,” Julia finally said. She looked back at Susie. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I think…Shit,” she muttered, her cheeks regaining color. “I’m…attracted to him,” she whispered, as if she was admitting to sex with corpses.

  “Attracted to who?” Susie asked in a robust voice, mostly because it was fun to watch Julia blush and squirm.

  “The reporter.”

  “From Gotham Magazine?”

  “I’m not really,” Julia corrected. “Forget I said anything.”

  “I’m not going to forget you said anything.” Susie found this news so intriguing she didn’t even swat Julia’s hand away when her sister helped herself to another section of the orange. “You’re attracted to him, huh? What does he look like?”

  “Nothing special,” Julia said. “Brown hair, brown eyes, around six feet tall. I mean, if you saw him on the street you wouldn’t look twice.”

  “I would,” Susie insisted. She looked twice at everybody. With young, reasonably attractive men, she looked three or four times. “What’s his name?”

  “Ron Joffe. And really, he’s just a reporter. Someone who’s going to stir up trouble for the store. When I think about it that way, I don’t like him at all.”

  “You don’t have to like him to be attracted to him. Ron Joffe, huh? A nice Jewish boy?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Did you kiss him?” Susie asked.

  Julia’s cheeks grew darker. “No!” she said, so vehemently Anna flinched.

&
nbsp; “You did!” Julia’s sharp denial proved it. “You kissed him? Wow! Was he a good kisser? Did you use tongue? Did you kiss before or after you figured out he was going to do a hatchet job on the store?”

  “Stop it. We didn’t kiss. We just…” She slumped in her chair. “We just sort of touched lips. And it was awful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it shouldn’t have happened. He’s going to do a hatchet job on the store.”

  “So what? Have some hot sex with him. He might change his mind.”

  “I don’t want to have hot sex with him. You’re the hot sexy one, not me.”

  Not lately, Susie thought, suffering an unexpected twinge of envy. How come Julia was getting to share awful kisses with some reporter she hardly even knew, and Susie was in a torrid phone relationship with a guy who’d actually been to her family’s seder, and yet she hadn’t shared what she was sure would be fabulous kisses with him? It didn’t seem fair.

  “What about Heath?” she asked.

  “What about him? I just took a leave of absence from Griffin, McDougal.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to take a leave of absence from him, too.”

  “Who’s Heath?” Anna called over from the TV. It was broadcasting an advertisement, so she obviously felt she could join in their conversation.

  “Julia’s boyfriend.”

  “Is he a Heath Bar?” Anna asked.

  Susie pondered this. She’d met Heath a couple of times, and he’d always seemed dreadfully Waspy and polished. A Heath Bar might be too exotic for him, the hard toffee too crunchy. He was probably more of a nonpareil.

  “What’s she talking about?” Julia asked.

  Susie shook her head. Julia would never understand. She wasn’t a chocoholic the way Susie was. “It’s not worth explaining. So, you broke up with Heath?”

  “We were never together enough to break up,” Julia answered. “I never really felt…”

  “What you feel with this reporter.” Susie completed the thought. “Heath doesn’t kiss awfully like Ron Joffe does, huh.”

  “No,” Julia admitted, sounding rueful about it.

  “This reporter turns you on,” Susie said helpfully. “He makes you hot. He’s going to ruin the store, and all you want is for him to ruin you.”

  “He’s not going to ruin anything,” Julia said. “But he’s going to write an article that will appear in the most widely read magazine in New York, saying Bloom’s is in financial straits.”

  “Maybe you can seduce him into changing the slant of his story,” Susie suggested.

  “All right, look.” Julia straightened in her chair. “That’s not what I came here to talk about. God knows why I’d ever want any romantic advice from you. We have such different attitudes about things like that.”

  “Yeah, like I’m a slut and you’re a prude.”

  “I’m not a prude,” Julia retorted.

  “And I’m not a slut. So what did you come here to talk about?”

  “I need you to help me with the store.”

  Susie reflexively shook her head. “I’m not getting sucked into the family business. No way. I’ve got a tattoo, remember?”

  “Listen to me, Susie! If the store is failing, we’ve got to save it. Dad isn’t here anymore. It’s up to us.”

  “What do you mean us? You’re the president.”

  “And if the store goes under, you’re going to have to start supporting yourself full-time slinging pizza, because you sure as hell aren’t going to make ends meet with your poetry. Bloom’s is our future, Susie. Our legacy. Our trust funds. Our children’s inheritance, if we ever have children. And anyway, I don’t see what the big deal is. You’re selling pizza—you could just as easily be selling overpriced balsamic vinegar in fancy bottles.”

  “Yeah, but Bloom’s is uptown.”

  “Get over it, Susie. This is important. You’ve taken the subway before—you can take it again. Here’s what I need you to do. Redesign the windows.”

  “What windows?”

  “At Bloom’s. You do the windows at Nico’s, right? I want you to come up with a new design for the windows at Bloom’s. We need to update the look of the place. It hasn’t changed in a dozen years. It’s got to look new without losing its good-old-days feeling. I figure you can start with the windows and then move on to the rest of the store.”

  “You want it to look new and old at the same time.” Susie wished she were watching the foot fetish show. She wished she’d stayed in bed an extra half hour. She wished she’d told Julia she was on her way out and they would have to get together some other time. Because what Julia was asking of her was just too…tempting.

  Oh God. She couldn’t work at Bloom’s. She couldn’t commute uptown every day and work in the same building as her mother, the building where she’d grown up, where she’d rebelled, where Grandma Ida, who had never liked her, lived. She couldn’t spend her days designing displays of kugel and knishes and latkes.

  “And you could see that guy every day,” Julia added. “The one you brought to the seder. What was his name again?”

  “Casey. He works in bagels. You’re probably going to lay him off.”

  “No, I’m not. But maybe you can help him to revive the department. Or you can drag him off to the supply closet and screw him during your lunch break. I don’t care, Susie. I need your creativity to give the store some spark. I haven’t got a creative bone in my body. I need you.”

  Every day with Casey. Either he’d flee from her or he’d let her screw him in the supply closet—she’d have to find out where one was located—or they’d continue their strange relationship, munching on bagels and sipping coffee and arguing whether the world would have been a better place if Woody Allen had never heard of Ingmar Bergman.

  She supposed that seeing him every day, for as long as it took her to redesign the windows at Bloom’s—because she wasn’t going to commit to anything more than that—would make working in the family business bearable.

  “Okay,” she said, reaching for the last wedge of orange. “Okay, I’ll do the windows. Now, tell me some more about this sexy reporter from Gotham Magazine.”

  10

  Calling a meeting was a power thing. At Griffin, McDougal, associates never called meetings. They didn’t have the clout. If they wanted a meeting, they had to ask a partner to call one. It was a rigid hierarchical process, and Julia had always resented it, even though she herself had never had any reason to call a meeting. She’d thought the rule was silly, and she’d muttered that if ever she were in charge, she’d do away with such nonsense.

  But here she was, the president of Bloom’s, calling a meeting. She was in charge. Authority pulsed through her, intoxicating and scary. What if everyone resented her the way she’d resented the partners who called meetings at Griffin, McDougal?

  She had hoped Adam would be able to come down from Cornell for her meeting, partly because he was a math whiz—Myron Finkel still seemed to prefer his sixties-era adding machine to a calculator, so someone with a more modern approach to crunching numbers might offer a desperately needed perspective—but mostly for moral support, because he was family and Bloom’s was a family matter. She’d telephoned him at his dorm over the weekend. His roommate had answered the phone, and when he’d gone to find Adam she’d heard Phish music playing in the background. This had reassured her; she associated Phish with more benign drugs than, say, Korn. She did wish bands that named themselves after foods would learn how to spell.

  Adam had eventually found his way to the phone. She’d told him about her leave of absence from the law firm and her decision to become the de facto president of Bloom’s, and he’d said that was cool. She’d explained that Bloom’s might not be in the greatest of fiscal health, and he’d said that was cool, too. Adam wanted to be a college professor when he grew up. It was as close as he could get to spending the rest of his life living in a dorm and playing Phish—and possibly indulging in benign drugs, altho
ugh Julia didn’t want to explore that particular subject with him.

  “So I’m going to hold a meeting. We’re going to air some dirty linen,” she’d told him.

  “That sounds cool.”

  “And I thought, as one of Dad’s children, you might want to be there.”

  “I can’t, Julia. I’ve got midterms coming up.”

  She wondered if he considered midterms cool.

  So all right, she would hold her meeting without Adam. She’d have Susie there, at least. And Deirdre, who wasn’t anyone’s blood relation. And Grandma Ida. Either Julia’s meeting would be a triumph or it would be a debacle.

  She considered starting her morning with two doughnuts for extra energy and a desperately needed sugar high, but then came up with a better idea. This was Bloom’s, after all. People ought to have enough faith in what they were selling to eat it.

  She entered the store at nine a.m. and headed straight for the bagel counter. Susie’s friend was there, a natty white apron tied around his waist and his hair pulled into a ponytail. “Hey,” he said, giving her a smile. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “I’m Susie Bloom’s sister,” Julia said. “Julia Bloom.”

  “Right!”

  He wasn’t movie-star material, and he didn’t make her heart pound like drums along the Mohawk, but he was cute in a cheerful, gangly way.

  “Julia! Hi! How’s Susie?”

  “She’s going to be here later. You can ask her yourself. After my meeting,” she added, surveying the bagels in the bins. “How fresh are these?”

  “I pulled them out of the oven a half hour before opening time.”

  “And you have…what are those, pesto bagels?”