Love in Bloom's (28 page)

Julia decided Joffe was a pain in the ass. She wanted him to tell her,
Here’s why you’re losing bagels. You’re miscounting your inventory. You forgot to factor in the X formula. They teach this in business school—you multiply, take ninety percent, work out the square root and calculate the secant. Once you do that, you’ll see that all those bagels are accounted for
.

He didn’t say that, though. He said, “I don’t know what you want me to do. Hold your hand? Write out questions you can ask your people? Serve on bagel patrol? Give me a hint.”

I want you to make everything better
, she longed to whine.
I want you to make all my problems go away
. She couldn’t ask him to do the impossible, so she only said, “Hold my hand.”

He held all of her, wrapping his body around hers and tucking her head against his shoulder. Beyond exhaustion, she felt a deep, throbbing sorrow. She supposed that if she’d thought long and hard about it, she would have reached the same conclusion Susie had reached long ago about their father. But Julia had always believed the best of him. She believed the best of everyone. She believed the best of the employees she didn’t want to interrogate, and her mother and uncle, and her sister, and her grandmother. She even believed the best of Deirdre, who knew everything and kept her mouth shut.

And Joffe. Except for the fact that he couldn’t perform miracles and renew her ability to believe the best of everyone, she believed the best of him.

She’d figure out what to do about the bagels, and Deirdre, and her memory of her father, tomorrow. If Joffe couldn’t help her, she’d work it out on her own.

In the meantime, she’d take comfort in the fact that he was holding her.

“A
ll right,” Ron wheedled. “You don’t have to tell me who your source is. Just blink twice if I guess right.”

Kim Pinsky snorted and flicked her ash-blond mane behind her shoulders. “What I’d like to know is, when the hell am I going to see this damn article?”

“It’s not like I could work on the thing full-time. I have to write my weekly column, too,” he said with abundant indignation. No matter what they argued about, he knew she would win. She always did. The best he could hope for was to pick up a few points by defending his honor.

“Spare me,” Kim said.

“I’ll have the Bloom’s story done by next week,” he promised. “I had it all written up, but then I had another chat with Jay Bloom and I need to tweak some stuff. It’ll be on your desk Monday morning.” He said Jay Bloom’s name in an even tone, but observed his boss’s expression. He was convinced Uncle Jay was Kim’s source. It had to be a third-floor denizen, someone
who would have been familiar with Julia’s use of the term
bleeding
to describe the store’s condition. Of all the third-floor folks, Jay seemed most eager to cause Julia headaches.

Kim’s eyes didn’t flicker, let alone blink.

“It wasn’t Jay?” he asked, stumped. Who else would have wanted to stir up trouble? Julia’s mother? Not given the pride she took in her daughter’s ascension to company president. Deirdre? Not enough personality. Myron? Not enough gray matter.

“You want to know the truth?” Kim tapped an elegantly polished fingernail against her lower lip. “It was no one at Bloom’s. And that’s all I’m telling you.”

“You assigned me this article on a secondhand tip?”

“A very reliable secondhand tip. You’ve gotten something good out of it, haven’t you?”

“Not what I expected.” He’d gotten a tawdry little family scandal he didn’t want to write about and a financial struggle that wasn’t particularly dire. Missing bagels, big deal. He’d gotten a story about a bottom line that was seeping but not hemorrhaging, about a stagnant company trying to jump-start itself.

And Julia. He’d gotten her.

“If it’s going to be a good story, the source doesn’t matter.” Kim held her hand out as if expecting him to place the pages of his draft into it. “If it’s good enough, we’ll put it on the cover. But I need to see it.”

“Next Monday,” he swore, backing out of her office.

Once he’d returned to his own, much punier, much drabber office, he slouched in his chair and called up the article on his computer. He was aware that although it had a nice, warm undertone—all that nostalgia stuff, the paean to traditional foods and so on—it was thin and watery. He didn’t want to strengthen it enough to hurt Julia, but he knew that if he submitted it in its current form to Kim, she would stuff it down the toilet. Better to crank it up before he showed it to her.

If only she’d confirmed for him that Jay was her source. The guy’s preening and posturing irked Ron, and most of the
revisions were going to be at his expense. But Ron would feel more gleeful about targeting Jay if he knew Jay was the one who’d instigated the article in the first place. The jerk would be hoisted by his own petard—whatever the fuck a petard was.

And let brother Ben hoist himself, too, Ron thought. If Julia’s father had kept his pants on, Ron might have been willing to tread lightly on the guy’s memory. He wasn’t going to humiliate the Bloom family by writing about Ben’s peccadilloes, but he could nail the SOB on other issues—his being detached and driven, for instance. While Julia and the rest of the family hadn’t criticized him for devoting himself to the store above all else, enough people outside the family had described him as a cold bastard. Ben Bloom wasn’t going to emerge from the article qualifying for sainthood.

It bothered Ron that he would even consider exercising restraint in his reporting. But damn it, he didn’t want Julia injured by what the magazine published. She deserved to have someone on her side. She couldn’t count on her mother or her doofus uncle. Probably not even her sister, who seemed far too content working at that low-rent pizza palace downtown. If Ron turned out to be the only person standing between Julia and the big ugly world…well, it was a hell of a place for him to be standing, given his job, but he wasn’t going to move.

He scrolled down the first page of the article, remembering how Julia’s eyes had welled with tears as she’d read it. It wasn’t
that
good, but it pulled the right strings and pushed the right buttons. Ron was a professional. He knew what he was doing when he pounded the keyboard.

His phone rang. His eyes still on his monitor, he lifted the receiver. “Ron Joffe here.”

“Mr. Joffe?” a honey-smooth male voice coursed over the line. “My name is Lyndon Rollins. I’m calling for Ida Bloom.”

Ida
. The one Bloom he’d been denied access to. He sat straighter. “Yes, Mr. Rollins. What can I do for you?”

“Mrs. Bloom heard that you were putting together an arti
cle about Bloom’s for
Gotham Magazine
. She would like to meet with you.”

“Great!” Ron grabbed a pencil and notepad. “How about now? I could come right over—”

“She’d prefer to come to you,” Lyndon Rollins said.

“She wants to come here? I know she’s…well, what I mean is that if traveling is difficult for her, I could—”

“She’s eighty-eight,” Lyndon declared, barreling past Ron’s attempts at tact. “But she isn’t housebound. We can be at your office in an hour.”

“One hour is fine.” One hour barely gave Ron time to review all his notes and formulate some questions, but he could do it. He gave Lyndon the magazine’s address, thanked him and hung up.

Ida Bloom
. The grand dame, the queen of the realm, the delicatessen Hera descending from Mount Olympus to talk to him. He wondered why, then decided he didn’t care.

He spent the next hour scrolling through his computer files and plowing through his notes. Five minutes before her scheduled arrival, he ducked into the bathroom, combed his hair and popped a breath mint—approximately the same last-minute grooming he underwent before seeing Julia. He had a tie in his desk drawer, but it featured a pattern of dancing Daffy Ducks, so he decided to leave it off. Returning to his office, he cleared his throat a few times, stared at the telephone and waited for the receptionist to announce Ida Bloom’s arrival.

Ten minutes later, his phone still hadn’t rung. Damn. If he’d known Ida was going to stand him up, he would have guzzled a cup of coffee rather than sucking on a Tic-Tac.

He took a deep breath. He’d dealt with difficult interviewees plenty of times, tardy ones, imperious ones. He’d never before dealt with an interviewee who was the grandmother of the woman he was sleeping with—but things were good with him and Julia, and really, the fact that they’d set the world on fire a few times over the past week had no bearing on what he and Ida would talk about.

Why did she want to talk to him, anyway? Why would she
say
she wanted to talk to him and then not show up? Why was he feeling even edgier than he had the evening he’d met Julia for dinner at the Italian place on Restaurant Row? That had turned out all right—much better than all right. He assured himself that this would turn out all right, too.

It occurred to him that Ida Bloom must be problematic. After all, she’d tossed Julia into the presidency and left her to fend for herself. And of the two sons she’d raised, one was an asshole and the other was a dead asshole. Hera or not, old Ida had some explaining to do.

The phone rang. He flinched, then took another deep breath, tasted the residual mintiness on his tongue and answered to hear the receptionist announce that Ida Bloom had indeed arrived.

He strolled down the hall to the reception area to greet her. He was startled by her size, or lack thereof. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall, although her puffy, artificially black blob of hair added an inch or two to her height. Her shoulders were narrow, her body slim and erect in a plain navy-blue skirt, a pink blouse, a maroon cardigan and flat leather oxfords with ridged antislip soles. Not that he was any judge of geriatrics, but she didn’t look eighty-eight years old. He would have guessed seventy, at most.

She was accompanied by a slender, dark-skinned young man with a fringe of braids framing his face and a smile as big as the Staten Island ferry. “Mr. Joffe?” he said. “I’m Lyndon Rollins, and this is Ida Bloom.”

Ron shook Lyndon’s hand, but Ida’s stern expression didn’t invite a handshake. She was of a prefeminist generation where men and women didn’t shake hands, but he knew she wasn’t some delicate blossom who required gentle handling. His research into the history of Bloom’s informed him that she’d been a powerhouse during the business’s early years, putting in as much time and labor as her husband while they built their shop into the institution it was today. Still, one look told him she didn’t want a handshake.

He led her and Rollins down the hall to his office and inside. She gazed around and sniffed. “This is your office?” she asked, obviously underwhelmed.

He didn’t think it was so bad. In fact, he thought it was better than Julia’s office on the third floor of the Bloom Building. True, it was smaller, and its solitary window overlooked an air shaft, but the carpeting was newer. He lacked a leather sofa, but his chairs were ergonomically designed. Ida Bloom settled into one, folded her hands primly in her lap and studied his animal posters, her gaze lingering on the picture of an orangutan, which had always seemed somehow obscene to Ron, though he wasn’t sure why. Something about the beast’s wide, flaccid lips, maybe.

He sat at his desk and gave her his best smile. “I’m really glad you came, Mrs. Bloom. I’ve wanted to talk to you. I hope you don’t mind if I tape our conversation.”

“Tape?” she asked suspiciously. “What do you mean, tape?”

He pulled his tape recorder from a desk drawer and set it up. “The microphone is built in. If you speak in a normal voice, it’ll record you. Pretend it isn’t there.”

“Why do you want to tape me?”

“I can’t take notes fast enough,” he explained. “If I relied on my written notes, I might miss something important. Using the tape recorder means I won’t miss anything. Okay?”

She eyed the machine dubiously, then lifted her gaze to him. “So, tape.” Her incongruously dark hair seemed plastered in place. It didn’t move when she did.

“Thanks.” He pressed the button to turn on the machine.

She craned her neck to view the tape as it moved from spool to spool. “It’s working now?”

“It certainly is.”

“It’s too small. I never knew from such a small tape recorder.”

“Well, this one fits in my pocket, which can be handy. Shall we get started?”

“You want to start? So start. What’s with this article, anyway?”

What kind of question was that? How was he supposed to
answer? “It’s a good article,” he assured her. “Julia saw an early draft and was pleased.”

“So, you showed Julia.” She sniffed again. Her nostrils pinched together when she inhaled. “What did she tell you?”

For now, he decided to let Ida ask the questions—although he wished she would phrase them to offer clues about what she was getting at. “If you mean what did Julia tell me about Bloom’s, mostly she discussed the store’s worldwide fame and the variety of its merchandise. The article isn’t going to be an ad for Bloom’s, though. It will deal with the dynamics of a family running a tightly integrated business.”

“We have no dynamics,” Ida declared firmly.

Ron exchanged a glance with Lyndon Rollins, whose face gave nothing away. His smile was placidly neutral.

“We’re a very ordinary family, Mr. Joffe,” Ida insisted. “Except maybe my granddaughter Susie. You’ve met Susie?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What did you think of her?”

He’d thought she seemed pleasant enough. “She’s got some funny ideas for updating the display windows.”

“What do you mean, funny? Funny ha-ha, or funny like mayonnaise goes funny if it’s kept out of the refrigerator?”

“Funny ha-ha.”

“So you’ve met both my granddaughters.” Ida nodded and tapped her fingers together. They were slightly bent and swollen with arthritis, but her nails were painted a pearly pink. “Sondra—you met her?”

He nodded. “Your daughter-in-law.”

“She told me about you. She said, maybe Susie would like you. Julia I don’t worry about. She’s got that boyfriend, the
goyishe
lawyer, I don’t know what’s going on with them. At least he’s a lawyer. But Susie! With the tattoo and the hippie life—I know, it’s the wrong decade for hippies, no? The wrong century. But you know what I’m talking about. She’s a poet.”

“The world needs poets,” Ron murmured, making a mental note to ask Julia about this
goyishe
lawyer boyfriend. Was that
the blond guy she’d kicked out of her office the day they’d found the condoms in the old desk? Or was there some other
goyishe
lawyer? She’d gone to NYU law school and joined a law firm while the ink was still wet on her diploma. She probably knew hundreds of
goyishe
lawyers. Thousands. They definitely had to discuss this.

He realized Ida was chattering away, and forced himself to pay attention. “Susie needs a nice boy in her life. Someone like you. Stable. You work at a desk. You work with computers. She’s been friendly with someone in the store’s bagel department—not Morty, the other one. What’s his name?” she asked Lyndon.

Her companion shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“She brought him to the seder.”

“I remember that. His name escapes me.”

“A big boy, very tall.” Ida turned back to Ron. “All right, so his name is not important. But you—you work at a desk. That’s a very stable thing to do.”

He wondered if Ida Bloom had come all the way to his office to make a match between him and Julia’s sister. The absurdity almost made him laugh out loud. “Susie strikes me as the sort of woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t need her loved ones interfering,” he said.

“You’re such an expert? You think my family has dynamics. What do you know about Susie?”