Love in Bloom's Read online

  Some guy on the stage—a platform not much bigger than an unabridged dictionary—was wailing an inane poem into a mike that distorted more than amplified his voice. Smoke would not have irritated Susie’s sinuses as much as his poem did. The entire verse consisted of a list of words that rhymed with fuck. At first they’d been pretty pedestrian—duck, luck, stuck—but then the poet had gotten more elaborate—moonstruck, hockey puck, nunchuk, Alma Gluck.

  “So,” Rick was saying to Anna, “there’d be a great part for someone like you in my movie.”

  “I don’t act,” Anna informed him.

  “Everybody acts. Susie’s going to go stand on that stage and do a poem tonight. That’s acting.”

  “No, it’s not,” Susie argued. “It’s standing on a stage and doing a poem.”

  “Ross acts, too,” Rick continued.

  “I act,” Ross confirmed with a nod.

  Susie suppressed a snort of disbelief. She’d bet real money that the only acting Ross did was on the telephone with his mother, when he told her he was eating well and getting enough sleep. He “acted” the way Rick made movies.

  She wondered why she was in such a sour mood. Rick had told her about this slam because he thought she’d enjoy it and because it came with a nice money prize. He’d been doing her a favor, even if the only reason he’d done it was so she would bring Anna or Caitlin along with her. His attraction to her roommates wasn’t exactly breaking news. Whenever he was horny and between girlfriends, he made plans with Susie that would include one of her roommates. He’d never had any luck with either of them, but for some reason he wouldn’t stop trying.

  Anna or no Anna, Susie shouldn’t be so churlish. She’d gotten the night off from Nico’s, decked herself out in her favorite black denim overalls with a slim-fitting black turtleneck underneath, wolfed down a cup of yogurt for dinner and was now sipping some of that migraine-vintage wine with friends. Even inane poetry was better than no poetry.

  She felt as if she’d been suffering from PMS for the past two weeks. She felt as if the sun had dropped ten degrees in temperature at its core, and she was at the catastrophically icy end of the chain reaction that change had caused. She felt as if the world’s supply of Prozac had run out—and she was the world.

  Caitlin had suggested she was reacting to the one-year anniversary of her father’s death. She didn’t think that was it. Jews had that death-anniversary thing worked out pretty well: you mourned for the year, you unveiled the headstone and said some prayers—and then you moved on. Sure, you were allowed pangs and twinges and bouts of tears, but no fixation with calendar dates and tragic anniversaries.

  Frankly, Susie didn’t suffer too many teary bouts. She missed her father, but not that much. He hadn’t been so strong a presence in her life that his absence would be keenly felt. He’d been a phantom, floating in and out of the apartment, floating in and out of his office when she’d visited the third floor. Julia used to do her homework in his office, but Susie would do hers—when she did it—in their mother’s office a few doors down. If she’d done it in her father’s office, he would have gotten on her case to make sure she was actually doing it.

  The only thing he’d ever been really interested in was Bloom’s. Every conversation with him had revolved around the store; every family occasion had been scheduled with respect to the store’s demands. When something fabulous happened—like the day Susie had won the eighth-grade poetry contest—the family had celebrated with a babka from Bloom’s.

  Sure, she missed him. She had to tread carefully around the hole his death had left, so she wouldn’t accidentally fall into it. But that didn’t explain why she’d been in such a pissy mood for the past two weeks.

  She didn’t need an explanation. She knew the cause of her funk.

  The slam’s emcee, a stocky fellow in ostentatious striped pants and a too-tight T-shirt, took the mike and said, “Our next contestant is Susie Bloom. Susie, come on here and see how your, er…luck goes.” Shooting the “fuck” poet a sly, sleazy grin, he searched the room for Susie.

  “Go for it, Suze,” Anna said, nudging her out of her chair.

  “Knock ’em dead, Cous’,” Rick added.

  Inhaling deeply, Susie rose from her chair and wove through the crowd to the tiny stage. The emcee gave her a big, Dentyne-smelling grin and nudged the mike at her.

  “Let’s put them together for Susie Bloom,” he urged the crowd, a few of whom obeyed him, clapping with jaded listlessness.

  She’d written her poem nearly two weeks ago, just as this mood had begun to infect her. She’d fussed with the poem since then, revised, reshaped—but now it was too late to make any more improvements. She’d memorized it, and she’d give her recitation her best effort—and maybe there would be some prize money for her when she was done with it.

  She adjusted the mike downward to accommodate her height, nodded at the crowd and began.

  Round

  Endless, round, rolling roll

  Round, round, hollow hole

  Surrounded by roundness.

  Eat. Chew. Devour.

  Nubile circle.

  The bagel you gave me.

  I taste it still.

  Her poem was shorter than most, but it said what it needed to say, and like a bagel, it required nothing extra. It existed unto itself.

  A paean to the bagel man.

  She couldn’t believe two whole weeks had elapsed and she remained obsessed by him. He wasn’t a downtown kind of guy. He didn’t dwell in her environs. She knew nothing about his background, his education level—his use of the word nubile might have been simply a fluke. She didn’t even know his name.

  Yet she’d been mooning over him, moaning over him. One five-minute exchange at the bagel counter, and she was possessed.

  “That was great!” Rick gushed once she’d made her way back to their table amid the ragged percussion of applause, finger snapping, table pounding and foot stomping.

  “It wasn’t great,” she retorted, wondering why Rick was so enthusiastic. He must want something. Anna, probably.

  “It was fine,” Anna said, flipping her waist-length black hair back over her shoulder to reveal the six silver studs in her left ear. “Why are you putting yourself down?”

  “I’m not putting myself down. I’m being realistic.” She glared at Ross, exasperated that he wasn’t the bagel man. “What did you think? Great or not great?”

  “I like the way it ended on the word still,” he said. “Still, you know? That’s cool.”

  It wasn’t cool. Nothing was cool. Nothing would ever be cool until she could at the very least find out the bagel man’s name. Once she could put a name to him, he’d become a person to her. Not an idol, not an object of fantasy, but a human being, blood and bone and flesh. And sleepy, sexy eyes.

  If his name was Engelhoffer Pigeontoe, it could change things.

  Well, her sister was the friggin’ president of Bloom’s. If anyone could find out the name of an employee, surely the president could. Susie would ask Julia. Not their mother, who would want to know why Susie was asking, and who, if Engelhoffer Pigeontoe or Studman Godiva or Billy Bialy or whatever turned out not to be Jewish would make a big deal about it, as if Susie was planning to pledge her troth and whelp a litter of young ones with him. She didn’t want to marry him, for God’s sake. She just wanted to be in love with him for a while.

  Julia would understand that. Tomorrow, Susie would telephone her and ask her to find out the guy’s name. If Julia was over at her law office, she could look him up in the personnel files the next time she showed her face at Bloom’s. How big could the bagel staff be? If there were ten names, Susie would simply choose the name that came closest to Studman Godiva.

  She had a plan, and that made her feel infinitely better. She smiled at her companions, said, “Still is definitely cool,” then turned in her seat, careful to avoid smashing her knees against Anna’s chair, and listened to the new poet at the microphone as he recited
a poem on the subject of convection ovens, in perfect iambic pentameter.

  Julia’s boss wanted a summary of all the alimony decisions handed down by Superior Court Judge Marcus DelBianco over the past six years. Julia’s mother wanted her to decide which flavors of canned macaroons to carry—“The rocky road macaroons sold very well last year, but the banana ones just died on the shelf, go figure”—and sign the order forms so there would be something official with her signature on it. Grandma Ida wanted her to arrive a half hour early for the family seder, “so we can talk.” Heath wanted her to sleep with him. And Susie wanted the names of all the men who worked in the bagel department—“or specifically, that one man. You know which one I mean.”

  Julia’s bathroom sink was full of hair.

  “I can’t do this,” she said to her reflection in the mirror above the sink. “I am stressed. My hair is falling out.”

  She wasn’t sleeping well. She wasn’t eating well. She took a bite of the cinnamon doughnut she’d brought into the bathroom to munch on while she fixed her hair. She couldn’t see her scalp, but the hair in the sink looked dire, black strands slithering into the drain as if she’d already gone down feet first and those strands of hair were all that was left of her.

  “That’s it,” she muttered, pulling back the hair from her temples and fastening the locks at the back of her head with a tortoiseshell clip. “My life is going down the drain. I’m going down the drain. I’m drowning.”

  She took another bite of the doughnut. It tasted like raw flour with a tang of cinnamon.

  “Like I give a rat’s ass about macaroons. Like I give a rat’s ass about Marcus DelBianco. Like I’m going to ask Deirdre to pull out the personnel files for me so I can figure out the name of this jerk Susie’s panting over. Like I want to figure out why the numbers from the bagel department don’t add up. Like I want to spend a half hour talking to Grandma Ida before everyone else arrives at her seder.” Given the other crises clamoring for her attention, sleeping with Heath almost sounded palatable.

  Why couldn’t she be like Susie? Why couldn’t she just get a swooning crush on a guy, have wild and sweaty sex with him, and then move on? Why couldn’t she not have to be working sixty hours a week at Griffin, McDougal and another twenty-five hours a week trying to psyche out the macaroon-buying habits of the typical Bloom’s customer? Susie didn’t realize how lucky she was.

  Grandma Ida’s seder would be next week. Passover used to be one of Julia’s favorite holidays—right up there with Thanksgiving because they both involved eating—but she wasn’t looking forward to it this year. Maybe she could skip the “next year in the Holy Land” part of the ceremony and just pop over to the Holy Land this year, putting a good eight thousand miles between her and her family. She wondered if she could order a Seder-in-a-Box from Jerusalem.

  Maybe she’d bring Heath with her. They could have sex in the Holy Land. She didn’t expect she’d enjoy it much, but it would be one less item on her to-do list.

  She didn’t want the life she was living right now. She didn’t want sex with Heath. She didn’t even want the doughnut she was forcing down her throat, swallowing several times with each bite. She wanted moist lox and eggs, and a toasted bagel on the side, and a rugele. And a cup of fresh-brewed Kenyan coffee. And a lover she could love. Was that really asking so much?

  Apparently, it was. With a heavy sigh, she tossed the remainder of her doughnut into the garbage pail, dabbed some tinted gloss on her lips and left the bathroom. Griffin, McDougal awaited—along with everyone else. And since Julia was a good girl, she’d try to satisfy them all.

  Well, probably not Heath.

  Ron Joffe didn’t need sensory aids when he was writing his weekly City Business column. But for a story about Bloom’s, he did. Not just gustatory aids—although he was certain that devouring some Bloom’s delicacies would put him in the mood for this assignment—but visual aids. Specifically, pictures of the players.

  He found a photo of the Bloom brothers, the late Ben and still-alive Jay, in a spread about smoked fish published in the Journal of the American Delicatessen Association, a professional organization he suspected very few people outside the delicatessen industry knew about. Good-looking men, both of them, beaming above a platter of sable. Both Blooms had full heads of dark, well-styled hair, brown eyes, sharp noses and smug grins. Ben wore a suit and tie, while Jay sported a blazer and a shirt open at the collar. What did that tell Ron? That older brothers dressed more conservatively than younger brothers?

  He learned a lot more about Ben Bloom from his obituary in the New York Times, two columns of text accompanied by a posed studio portrait. The son of immigrants who’d started the business selling knishes from a pushcart, he’d graduated from Columbia, married Sondra Feldman and built the company into a “major force in the delicatessen world.” Christ. Who would want to be a major force in the delicatessen world? That was like having the biggest house in Newfoundland. Some people might actually care about such a prestigious designation—probably the same people who subscribed to the Journal of the American Delicatessen Association.

  Moving on, Ron did an Internet search of Bloom’s current president, Ben’s daughter Julia. She was listed in the Wellesley College Alumnae Directory, and he immediately pictured her father’s face feminized and attached to a female body in a prissy high-necked white dress. Or maybe in one of those clingy, stretchy, body-hugging minidresses that seemed to have been designed for no other purpose than to cause men to get erections in public. Did Wellesley women dress for sex? He wouldn’t know; he didn’t have any Wellesley women among his circle of acquaintances.

  Before Wellesley, Julia Bloom had attended Dalton. The exclusive prep school was just a subway ride away.

  The lion on the wall across from his desk gave him a feral look: It’s springtime. Go prowl.

  Fortunately, Kim Pinsky wasn’t in her office, so Ron was able to leave the building without justifying himself to her. Out on Union Square, he wove through the mid-morning crowd to the subway station and caught an uptown train. Swaying and jostling as he clung to one of the center poles, he contemplated what he expected to learn about Bloom’s from a visit to Dalton. Not much. But at least he was out and prowling.

  He needed something. Something different, something new. The Bloom’s article was a start, but he needed more. A challenge. A mystery to solve. Sex.

  Well, that last item was a given. He wasn’t involved with anyone at the moment—by his own choice, he reminded himself. He’d had something nice going over the winter, but she’d wanted marriage and what they’d had going wasn’t that nice, so he’d suggested that she find herself a more nuptially inclined man. She’d been willing to wait for him to come around, though. In fact, she’d been so convinced she could persuade him to marry her within a year that she’d offered a fifty-dollar wager on it.

  He’d refused the bet. What was he going to do—continue to see her for the next year and then break her heart by telling her he didn’t want to marry her, and oh, by the way, could she please pay him the fifty bucks she owed him?

  So he was alone, and it was spring, and he had to write an article about a Dalton and Wellesley alumna who was currently running a “major force in the delicatessen world.” Did schools like Dalton and Wellesley view Julia Bloom with pride, or were they embarrassed to have a graduate of their elite programs managing a deli?

  The receptionist in the main office at Dalton specialized in supercilious frowns, but she gave him a few yearbooks to look through. He found Julia Bloom in the third one. In her senior photo she had straight black hair that fell well past her shoulders and features like her father’s, only downsized: a sharp nose, an angular chin, lips etched into a slight pout and dark eyes that seemed to take up half her face. She looked younger than eighteen in the photo, but pretty.

  He thumbed through the book, searching for other photos of her. He found a candid shot of her sprawled out in a window seat with a book open on her knees and a dre
amy look in those caramel-soft eyes, and other photos in club shots: the Debate Club, the Honor Society, Amnesty International and an organization that volunteered stints at soup kitchens around the city. Apparently, there was no Future Deli Owners club at Dalton.

  He flipped back to her senior portrait. Amazing eyes, he thought. Young eyes. Eyes that hadn’t seen much of the world. Eyes that probably hadn’t seen much of smoked fish conventions, either.

  His research had told him that her grandmother wielded the real power at Bloom’s. Ida Bloom was the one he really wanted to interview for his article. But he sure wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes with Julia, if only to see whether her eyes had grown wise or cynical in the past ten years. They couldn’t possibly be as innocent and trusting today as they’d been in that yearbook photo.

  Just out of curiosity, because it was spring and he was a man, he’d like to have an up-close-and-personal look at those eyes.

  Susie wasn’t used to being uptown in the morning. She was usually still asleep at ten a.m., but since she wasn’t sleeping with anyone at the moment, she’d figured what the hell, arisen at nine, eaten the only clementine in the fridge that didn’t have blue mold staining its rind and headed to the Upper West Side.

  Julia hadn’t come through. God knew why—all Susie had asked was for her to take a peek at the personnel records—but several days had passed and Julia still hadn’t gotten around to doing this one tiny favor. She was the president of the company—surely she could ask Deirdre to look up a simple thing for her.

  But no, she hadn’t done it. Susie had to take matters into her own hands.

  She climbed the subway stairs, emerged from the kiosk on Seventy-Second Street and oriented herself to the angle of the sun. Broadway in the seventies was a jumble of stores—big, little, national chains and independents, pricey restaurants and Cuban-Chinese cafés, elegant boutiques and down-to-earth shops where a person could still buy a pair of jeans for less than seventy dollars. “Working man’s pants,” her father used to call jeans. A working man would have to be earning a heart surgeon’s salary to afford most jeans nowadays.