Love in Bloom's (23 page)

“With a nearly complete stranger.” Susie assessed the situation, shook her head and chuckled. “He’s that good, huh?”

“He was very good.”

“So what do you need my advice for? Sounds like you’re doing a hell of a lot better than I am.”

Julia hardly thought so. What had occurred Friday night and well into Saturday with Joffe was what she imagined occurred to Susie all the time, and Susie undoubtedly handled it with a lot more savoir faire. “The thing is, I don’t know how I feel about the whole thing. I guess that’s where I need advice. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

“Replete?” Susie suggested. “Fulfilled? Fucked?”

“Stop.” Julia felt the heat rise into her cheeks.

“If he were chocolate, what would he be?”

“Chocolate? What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” Susie jiggled her foot and fingered one of her silver hoop earrings. “Enjoy it, Julia. Don’t get all hung up. Have fun. You’re allowed. You and Mr. Condom should screw yourselves silly. Why not?”

“I don’t…I don’t love him,” Julia struggled to explain. “I mean—maybe someday I could love him. He’s very lovable. He’s got a good job, and he’s literate, and he’s age-appropriate—”

“Age-appropriate?” Susie struggled against a laugh. “So he isn’t some teenage stud you picked up?”

“No.”

“Or a silver-haired sugar daddy?”

“I think he’s around thirty. We never got that specific.”

“Okay. So you’re getting off on him, and maybe someday you’ll fall in love with him. Where’s the problem?”

“I’m not in love with him now.”

Susie shook her head again. “Who cares? I’ve slept with guys I wasn’t in love with, and it hasn’t made my hair fall out or my
soul turn black like Madame Bovary’s. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of good poetry out of those relationships.”

“I’m not a poet.”

“Then, you’ll get some prose out of it. Maybe a limerick or two. ‘There once was a fellow named Condom, And sex with him was kind of
rahn
dom…’”

“Stop!” Julia giggled. “His name isn’t Condom.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ron Joffe.”

“The reporter from
Gotham?
” At Julia’s nod, Susie hooted, “Way to go! All right. There once was a fellow named Joffe, Who was more stimulating than coffee…”

“I don’t want to hear the rest.”

“You’ll have to,” Susie declared. “I’m on a roll.” She pondered for a moment, then resumed: “He made Julia climax, Like clockwork, a Timex, And instead of chocolate, he was toffee.”

“Why do you keep mentioning chocolate?” Julia asked.

“Because I’m chocolate deprived.” Susie sighed dolefully. “Look at me. Do I look like I’ve lost weight?”

“No, but you do look like shit. Are you coming down with something?”

“Terminal horniness. I’m living like a nun, Julia. It’s horrible. A Jewish nun, can you imagine?”

“I live like a nun most of the time. It’s not so horrible,” Julia argued—although now that she’d had a taste of the non-nun’s life, she wondered if she would find celibacy debilitating. After all of one night—and most of the next day—had she become a sex addict? Was it like heroin or cocaine, where one hit was enough to hook a woman for life?

What if the more she got to know of Joffe, the less she liked him? What if she found out he was a jerk? What if he published nasty things about the Bloom family in
Gotham?
What if he hadn’t asked her to call him as soon as she got home from her mother’s, so they could make arrangements to spend Sunday night together? What if a day came when he vanished from her life?

She’d survive. She was sure she didn’t love him. But now that she’d had a taste of really, really good sex…More than a taste—she’d been a glutton. What would she do if her supply of Joffe dried up and she could never indulge like this again? Would she end up as dreary and glum as Susie was now?

“I thought you were seeing What’s-His-Name, the bagel guy. Casey.”

“I am seeing him,” Susie said. “One minute at a time. Don’t ask, Julia—it’s really pathetic.”

Julia conceded with a shrug. But mentioning Casey pulled her mind in another direction. “You see Casey every now and then?”

“Not often enough. I’m working on your damn windows and putting in my hours at Nico’s. We’ve been taking breaks together when I’m at the store, but still, it’s been frustrating.”

“Well, listen.” Julia sat forward again, wondering if what she was about to ask Susie would be even harder to articulate than her questions about sex. “We’re missing bagels.”

“What bagels?”

“At the store. Nearly a hundred and fifty bagels disappear from Bloom’s every week. And some other things, too—cream cheese, coffee, brunch foods in general. Mom thinks I’m making a big deal about nothing. Myron has gone over the books and can’t figure it out. No one seems to care about this but me.”

“And…? You think Casey should care about it?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him,” Julia admitted. “I don’t know him, and I don’t want to come across as the demanding boss lady when I’ve been in the job less than two months. I thought, since you know him better than I do, maybe you could see if he’s had anything to do with the disappearing bagels. I’m not saying you should accuse him or anything—”

“Accuse him? You think he’s stealing a hundred and fifty bagels a week?” Susie bristled with righteous anger.

“I have no idea who’s doing what. But he works in the bagel department. Maybe he knows something. Do you think you could maybe feel him out about it? Casually.”

“Oh, sure. I could casually say, ‘Casey, where the fuck are all the bagels?’”

“You could use a nicer vocabulary.”

Susie scowled. She swung her foot and gazed toward the window, which was filled with the murky light of an overcast noon. “Maybe I could talk to him,” she finally said. “Only because it would add a few more minutes.”

“A few more minutes to what?”

Susie pushed away from the soft cushion of the futon. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said as she crossed to the door and swung it open. “You’re getting sex.”

Julia watched her sister depart but remained in the director’s chair. From down the hall she heard the lilt of her mother’s voice; Sondra was still on the phone. She closed her eyes and reviewed her conversation with Susie: the limerick, the reassurances, the bagel stuff, the chocolate references.

A lot of it didn’t make sense—but then, Julia rarely turned to her sister when she wanted things to make sense.

Susie made sense about one thing, anyway. Julia was getting sex.

S
usie dared to be hopeful. Today was Monday, and she’d convinced Casey that they should spend next Saturday together. She would trek out to Forest Hills, where he lived, and kill some time with him there, and then they’d ride the subway—at least a half hour together in transit, probably closer to forty-five minutes—to her downtown neighborhood for dinner and a movie. She had in mind a midnight flick, because that would mean a whole bunch more hours in each other’s company. By the time the movie ended, it would be too late for him to travel all the way back to Queens alone, so she would insist that he spend the night at her place. He wouldn’t be able to accuse her of plotting a seduction, since Anna and Caitlin would be around. But hours were hours. If she and Casey both slept in the living room, it ought to count toward the final tally.

By her calculation, they’d spent at least five hours together so far. Every day she had come to Bloom’s to contemplate the windows and the store’s general appearance, she’d shared a
lunch break with him, shadowed him to the basement kitchen when he went downstairs to restock the inventory, ridden the elevator with him and talked. Those minutes added up—excruciatingly slowly, but tick by tick, tock by tock, the time was accumulating.

He hadn’t kissed her again, thank God. He’d already established himself as a heterosexual, and given how they’d both responded to that one kiss, she knew another kiss would either lead to something more or, more likely, leave her hating him because the kiss
hadn’t
led to something more. That he’d kissed her once and then walked away had infuriated her. If he did it again, she’d hate him.

Maybe she already hated him. She wasn’t sure. She could easily hate him for putting her off. No man had ever strung her along like this before. She’d had men say no to her, and she’d handled rejection without tears or trauma. But Casey
hadn’t
rejected her. He wanted her, maybe even as much as she wanted him, which made his refusal to let them do what they both wanted incredibly frustrating.

But also intriguing. What kind of guy said no when he wanted to say yes? What kind of guy would put both the woman and himself through this kind of torture? As much as she might hate Casey, she had to admit he fascinated her. And she still wanted to screw him senseless.

To her amazement, she also wanted to spend time with him. Twenty hours was a ridiculously arbitrary goal, but in the meantime, she was getting to know him. All those minutes they’d spent together not having sex, they’d wound up talking. In the elevator or sipping coffee from steaming cardboard cups in the tiny staff lounge on the second floor, Susie had chattered to keep from jumping him. She’d peppered him with questions, and he’d answered every one. He’d told her about his father, an electrician, and his mother, a school bus driver, and his sister, a dog groomer. He’d told her he’d attended the Culinary Institute of America for a year because he enjoyed working with food, but then he’d decided becoming a chef or running a
restaurant would mean wretched working hours and too much stress, so he’d transferred to St. John’s University and taken a degree in English. English! He liked poetry, even if his first love was food.

He was funny. He knew dozens of jokes that began “A man walks into a bar.” He was a regular in a neighborhood basketball game on Thursday nights. The other regulars were all friends of his from high school. He listened to Pearl Jam, Frank Zappa and late Beatles albums, when the group had gone druggy-experimental. Art museums bored him, he was a terrible dancer and he preferred the sports reporter on channel four to the one on channel two. Oh, and he thought that
charoseth
stuff he’d eaten at Grandma Ida’s seder was incredible and it was a shame that Jews ate it only during Passover and not throughout the year.

Susie couldn’t believe she’d learned so much about him and they hadn’t even seen each other naked. Sometimes he would touch her—a pat on the arm, a brush of his hand against hers—and she’d react all out of proportion, her body sizzling as if he’d lit a fuse inside her. When their twenty hours were finally up and they tore off their clothes, she’d probably explode.

In the meantime, she loathed him. But sooner or later, maybe Sunday morning after their Saturday marathon, she and Casey were going to take this thing to the explosion level.

She tried not to think about him as she stood, armed with several bags full of polyurethaned bagels and a pile of signs containing clever sayings, in the newly empty showcase window facing Broadway. She’d decided each window would focus on a different product. The first would have the theme “Eat Your Bagels.” The second would have the theme “A Life Without Gadgets Is Not Worth Living.” The third would be “Coffee: Nectar of the Gods” the fourth, “Staff of Life, Stuff of Dreams.” Only the first window had been emptied out so far. The rest remained jammed with Bloom’s clutter, a multitude of products jumbled together without any organizing principle. A kosher garage sale.

She’d get them worked out soon. Today bagels, tomorrow the world.

Pedestrians on Broadway paused to watch her through the glass. She could feel their eyes on her even when she had her back to the street. Down at Nico’s, whenever she changed the windows, she attracted an audience of neighborhood folks—guys with nose rings, girls with green hair, the usual. At Bloom’s, the onlookers were Upper West Side types—well-toned intellectuals clad in Banana Republic and Birkenstocks, carrying PBS and Lincoln Center tote bags. The afternoon was sunny and Broadway was teeming with pedestrians.

Susie ignored them.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she sorted through her signs. She’d picked them up from the printer that morning and shown them to Casey while they’d eaten lunch in the lounge—a chunk of Havarti and a box of stoned wheat crackers which he’d purchased using the employee discount that Julia had instituted to encourage Bloom’s workers to partake of the food they sold. “You’re the bagel expert,” she’d asserted after he studied all the signs. “What do you think?”

“Some are funnier than others,” he’d said. “I like this one—‘A bagel saved is a bagel earned.’ It’s just the right amount silly.”

“I was going to print one that said ‘It’s better to steal a bagel than to waste one,’ but I thought people might see that as an invitation to rob Bloom’s.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” Casey had agreed solemnly, although his eyes were full of laughter. Such beautiful eyes, she’d thought. Hershey’s Kisses eyes, only green. “Of course, it would be hard to steal the bagels, given that they’re all in bins behind glass. Whoever is behind the counter has to get the bagels for the customer. They can’t just help themselves.”

“They could still steal a bagel. You could give them one, and they could hide it in their pocket and walk out without paying for it.”

“Yeah, I guess. But they can’t just lift one without me or Morty noticing.”

“Is there much theft in the store?” she’d asked casually. She hadn’t wanted to pump him for information, but Julia was hung up about the missing bagels, and Susie was a good sister. If she could solve the mystery, she’d be the heroine of the Bloom family, and Julia could move on to other obsessions.

Casey had shrugged. “All I know is the bagel department. And I don’t do the final tallies. Morty does that. I’m more of the quality control guy. He’s the quantity control guy.”

Susie had abandoned the subject. Casey wasn’t stealing the bagels. He didn’t even seem aware that they were being stolen—if, in fact, they were. It was always possible someone was making the wrong calculations on all those printouts Julia pored over. Maybe Morty couldn’t count. Maybe when a bagel fell it rolled away like a tire, and there were hundreds of forgotten, petrified bagels lying in some dark corner under a shelf, like one of those tire dumps that occasionally caught on fire, causing stinky black smoke to plume into the air and making Susie wonder why piles of old tires wound up in segregated dumps rather than being mixed up with other garbage in more ecumenical dumps.

She lifted the first sign, the one Casey had judged just the right amount silly, and strung fish line through the hole at the top. Then she stood, looped the clear plastic string over one of the metal beams in the center of the window alcove and tied the string in a knot. The sign would remain readable even if it rotated, because she’d had the slogans printed on both sides.

Threading another sign, she felt someone staring through the glass at her—not just pausing to watch her for a minute but really staring, as if transfixed. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him. Dark brown hair, an angular face, a lopsided smile, a lean body. Neat blue jeans, a white shirt and an old, out-of-shape tweed blazer. Battered leather sneakers, no tie.

Not bad. Not Casey, but not bad.

Shrugging, she strung up the second sign, adjusting the fish line to alter the height. “A bagel a day keeps the doctor away,” it read. Once she had all eight signs hung, she’d spread the
polyurethaned bagels all around the showcase. She hadn’t worked out the arrangement yet; she was a word person, not a visual person. But she hoped inspiration would strike her when it came time to do something with the bagels.

Bending to lift a third sign, she glimpsed the dark-haired man still outside the window, still watching her, his posture relaxed and his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. How long was he planning to stand out there ogling her? Sure, he was cute and she was flattered, but five minutes was way longer than any sane person should waste observing her while she did this. His presence on the other side of the glass was beginning to get creepy.

She wished she could ignore him. But he was only a couple of feet away from her, and his unwavering gaze was like a spotlight—even if she couldn’t see it, she could feel its heat between her shoulder blades. Maybe she ought to ask Casey to go outside and have a few words with the guy. Not only was Casey taller than him, but going to the bagel department to tell Casey about the guy would add a few more minutes to the time-o-meter.

Pestering him about a curious pedestrian just to bulk up her time with him didn’t seem fair, though. Besides, Casey was working, and boss Julia could get pissed if Susie pulled him away from his job only so she could move a little closer to having sex with him. Sooner or later, the weirdo outside the window would grow bored and go away. She ought to pretend he wasn’t there.

She hung the fourth sign, the fifth, the last three. Each was at a different height, some closer to the glass and some farther from it, to give a staggered appearance. Before she started with the bagels, she needed to see how they looked from the street.

After climbing down from the window into the store, she stretched her limbs, then jogged past the cashiers and out the main door. The traffic noises and the slightly sour scent of the outside air wrapped around her and filtered through her brain, refreshing her.

She moved down the sidewalk to the window—and the weirdo was still there, staring at the signs and chuckling. As she neared him, he turned to her and smiled.

She could run, she could scream, she could kick his shins black and blue—but he looked pretty harmless, even without the barrier of glass to protect her. “You must be Susie,” he said, which simultaneously reassured and alarmed her. Either he knew her somehow or he was a stalker. If he recited her social security number, she’d definitely start kicking.

“I’m Ron Joffe,” he said, extending his right hand. “I write for
Gotham Magazine
. Julia told me she’d hired you to redo the windows.”

The reporter. The guy Julia was sleeping with. Okay.

She shook his hand and nodded, resisting the impulse to wink and smirk. “When is that article coming out, anyway? Everybody’s dying to read it.”

“Soon,” he said vaguely. He really was kind of cute. Not her type—he had to be at least thirty, which as far as she was concerned was too old to be age-appropriate, as Julia would put it—but not bad.

She pivoted to look at the window. The signs were readable, although she’d have to check in the morning, when the sun hit the windows, to make sure the glare on the glass didn’t obscure them.

He pivoted to study the window, too. “They’re funny, but the window looks pretty barren.”

“It’s not finished,” she told him, wondering whether this conversation, held against the buffeting noise of cars and buses and the jostling of passersby, was going to wind up in
Gotham Magazine
. “Don’t judge it until it’s done.”

“Well,” he said. His hands were back in his pockets, giving his shoulders an amiably slouchy shape. “I’ve got to see your sister. I’m glad we had a chance to meet.”

That was it? Her grand interview? Her moment in the media spotlight? Big whoop. She’d be lucky to merit a subordinate clause in his article.

The signs in the window looked all right, at least. Maybe she should go inside and drag Casey out to the sidewalk to get his input. She’d told the magazine reporter it wasn’t fair to judge the window until she’d finished with it, but if she fetched Casey and brought him outside, it would chip a few more minutes off the twenty-hour block.

Grinning, she headed into the store to find him.

Ron actually did have business to discuss with Julia. He’d brought her a tear sheet of his rough draft so she could review it. The story wasn’t done yet—that morning, he’d talked to a chatty teller at the bank that handled most of Bloom’s business, and he hadn’t yet incorporated information from that conversation into the piece. And he’d sure as hell like to hear more from Julia about whether she thought her business was hemorrhaging or just trickling blood.

The weekend they’d spent together had complicated matters. He hadn’t actually believed that screwing Julia would bring him closer to his story—but even if he had, he discovered that he possessed too much integrity to exploit their intimacy. One of the systems that Julia had succeeded in short-circuiting inside him was the one that said, “The story is the only thing that matters.”

Julia mattered. The way she moved, breathed, laughed and came mattered. Last night they’d made love on the living room floor and in the shower, and then she’d tried going down on him. It had been clear she’d never done that before, but her ineptitude had excited him more than any skilled female mouth might have. He’d returned the favor, with a bit more proficiency, and by the time she was done moaning, she seemed so exposed, so vulnerable, he couldn’t possibly say afterward, “So, Julia, can you give me a ballpark figure on how much money Bloom’s is losing per annum?”