Love in Bloom's (10 page)

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 dreamy 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.

She was wearing her favorite black jeans—for which she’d paid only forty dollars at a denim emporium above an Indian restaurant in the East Village—along with a teal T-shirt and her black denim jacket, which Caitlin and Anna had jointly
given her for her twenty-fifth birthday. She’d donned hoop earrings, a silver bangle that was sort of David Yurman-ish, only a bit more industrial-looking and a lot cheaper, black leather sneakers and a touch of black eyeliner. She wasn’t sure
nubile
would describe her, but she felt good about her appearance. Her haircut was truly a miracle—nearly a month old, and it still looked great.

Up ahead she saw the store, with its sign of high-kicking Bloom’s-Bloom’s-Bloom’s extending across the top of the showcase windows. She took a couple of deep breaths to steady her pulse, shivered as the lines of her poem—which had not been deemed worthy of the two-hundred-fifty-dollar prize, damn it—flashed across her brain like the electronic headlines gliding around the skyscraper at the center of Times Square, and marched toward the store.

The familiar aromas of Bloom’s wrapped around her as she stepped inside: cheese, warm bread, coffee, parsley. Honey and vanilla. Olives and onions. An indigestible stew of fragrances, yet they didn’t clash. They swirled around one another in a chaotic ballet that made her hungry. That puny orange hadn’t been much of a breakfast.

She’d simply have to buy a bagel.

Smiling to herself, she moved farther into the store. As always, it was crowded, but the crowd was different on a Thursday morning from what she usually found when she visited. The people meandering up and down the aisles, steering carts or carrying plastic baskets, looked not like tourists but like native New Yorkers—retirees and young mothers on outings with their toddlers. Susie was surprised by the number of cutting-edge strollers clogging the aisles. The women pushing them were trim and well made up, clad in Banana Republic and L.L. Bean and wearing blindingly large diamonds on their ring fingers. Their children were just too precious in their Baby Gap outfits, sucking on high-tech pacifiers.

The women all looked older than Susie. A good thing, since she was years away from settling down and having children—
and when she did, she wouldn’t have state-of-the-art children. No, her babies would be scruffy and energetic, like her. They would refuse to sit sedately in their Mercedes strollers and Jaguar strollers, but would instead race up and down the aisles the way she used to, terrifying the clerks and making the customers either gasp or giggle. She expected to have utterly wonderful children.

She might just skip the husband part, too.

She moved as directly as she could to the bagel counter, veering around babies in unbearably cute caps and plodding elders who clogged aisles while they bickered over whether the sesame breadsticks were a better deal if they bought the fourteen-ounce package instead of the eight-ounce package. She swept past the coffee corner and the gourmet bottles of olive oil priced as if they were liquid gold, reached the bagel counter—and he wasn’t there.

How dared he not be there? Had Julia fired him?

Maybe he’d quit. Maybe he’d been so terribly underpaid he’d walked out. Why hadn’t Julia done something about the salaries of the bagel workers?

The older fellow who’d been working the bagel beat last time Susie was at Bloom’s stood behind the counter today. Perhaps he’d been unable to quit. Perhaps he had a wife and kids and a mother crippled by arthritis, all of them crammed into a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, and he couldn’t afford to walk away from Bloom’s, even though that rotten bitch of a president, Julia Bloom, exploited her workers.

Susie would organize them. She’d bring in union representatives, and if Julia balked, she’d design rhyming picket signs for them. That would teach her sister to let a Godiva-quality employee get away.

She strode to the counter, and the exploited laborer on the other side gave her a smile. “What can I get you, sweetie?”

“Actually, I was wondering about another guy who works here sometimes.”
Or used to,
she almost added.

“Another guy, huh?” He rubbed his index finger along the seam where his cheek met his bulbous nose. “Don’t tell me he broke your heart. You’re too pretty to let any man do that to you.”

In spite of herself, she smiled. “He hasn’t had a chance to break my heart yet,” she explained. “I need to find out his name.”

“His name.” The man nodded as if this were the most ordinary request in the world. “Well, we’ve got a good four, five guys who work here. Couple of ladies, too, but you did specifically mention that it’s a guy.”

“He’s got longish blondish hair, green eyes…in his twenties, I’d guess.”

“Now, that sounds like about five different guys who work here,” the man said.

For a moment she believed him. Then she realized he was teasing her.

“That’d be Casey,” he said.

“Casey?” What a divine name. Much better than Engelhoffer—or even Studman. “Casey
What?”

“Now, I don’t know about giving you his last name. I don’t think that would be right.”

A white-haired woman in a garishly colored warm-up suit, the fabric of which hissed when she walked, approached the counter. Susie generously stepped aside so he could serve her. She wanted two of everything, and then she wanted to change her mind about half her selections, and then she wanted to complain about the freshness of the bagels she’d bought at Bloom’s last week: “They were fresh, but not
fresh
fresh, you know what I’m saying? Make sure these are
fresh
fresh, Morty. I’m not kiddin’ around.”

“
Fresh
fresh,” he said with a nod. He caught Susie’s eye and winked, then pulled one of the raisin bagels out of the bag. “This one feels fresh, but not
fresh
fresh. I’ll put in another. There, that’s better,” he concluded, sliding a different raisin bagel into the bag. “Will that do it for you, sweetheart?”

“Don’t get fresh with me,” she snapped, taking the bulky bag
and dropping it into her cart. She pushed her cart away from the counter, muttering.

“Is she a regular?” Susie asked.

“She’s a fine gal,” he said. Susie decided she liked him—for protecting Casey’s identity and for not speaking ill of a fussy customer. If she ran Bloom’s, she’d make sure he got a good salary and excellent benefits.

“So…about Casey. Can you tell me his shifts?”

“He’s here now,” he said. “He’s downstairs checking on the new batches, which—” he leaned forward conspiratorially “—will be even
fresher
fresh, once they come out of the ovens.”

“I’ll remember that. In the meantime,” she said, feeling much better now that she knew Casey was in the building, “I’ll take an egg bagel.”

“You got it.” He used a waxy square of tissue to protect the bagel he lifted out of the bin for her.

“Thanks.” She crossed to a cashier, paid for it and left the store.

One of the outdoor basement entries was open, the heavy steel doors yawning wide against the sidewalk, the room at the bottom of the steep metal stairway bright with light. The outside entries were used by truckers delivering stock; they were equipped with both stairs and conveyor belts. Bloom’s staff had access to an indoor stairway and a freight elevator, but she’d always loved the sidewalk entrance. When the steel doors were shut and flush with the sidewalk, they seemed mysterious. They rattled and echoed when stepped on; they were strangely textured and rusty-looking. She could pretend they were the portals to hell.

She knew that what was going on underneath them was not hell, but a bustling world of shelves and hand trucks and a separate kitchen area where the heat-n-eat meals, the roast meats and the salads, the knishes and the kugels were prepared, and where the breads, bagels and specialty cakes were baked so they would be
fresh
fresh when they reached the shelves upstairs. She’d rarely been allowed into the basement as a child, but every now and then she’d managed to sneak in. She’d loved wander
ing through the maze of shelving, counting the inventory, comparing the packaging.

She’d loved even more venturing into the kitchen, where she definitely hadn’t belonged. The cooks would yell at her—it was too dangerous for a little girl to be there, what with all those hot surfaces and sharp implements. But oh, the aromas. The sight of dishes being prepared—not just the traditional Jewish foods but pasta salads, potato salads, couscous with chopped onions and peppers, rotisserie chickens. She would stand in the doorway, as quiet as she could manage, and take it all in, wondering why once she went upstairs to her family’s apartment she’d find nothing as exotic as the foods being cooked here. No couscous for her family’s dinner. No chopped liver and pickled herring and latkes. If Sondra was going to serve a rotisserie chicken for dinner, she’d buy it at the supermarket down the street, where it was cheaper.