Blooming All Over (14 page)

But she was crying, and he had to do something. Aware that it was a huge mistake, but unable to stop himself, he arched his arm around her. She slid toward him and leaned against his shoulder.

She didn’t erupt into full-fledged sobs. It didn’t matter; the damage had been done. He had Susie in the curve of his arm, pressed up against him, and the possibility of his ever letting go of her seemed absurdly remote.

She nestled into him, apparently as content to be held as he was to be holding her. And damn it, her head was too close, her hair brushing his chin. All he had to do was tip his face down to kiss the crown of her head.

“Casey,” she whispered, angling her face up so he
could kiss her mouth, instead. He did. Joy blew through him like a hot wind. Too many miserable days had passed since he’d last kissed her—and that time, they’d been standing on the stairway landing, and the kiss had gone nowhere because she’d said no.

She was going to say no again, but for just this one minute he could pretend things were different. He kissed her as if his existence depended upon it, as if his life was riding on the pressure of her lips and the jabs of her tongue. He kissed her as if they were in an inflatable lifeboat on a stormy sea and their kiss was necessary to keep the boat from deflating. He kissed her as if she’d said yes.

She sank back until she was lying on the couch, and pulled him down with her. At another time, he might have had second thoughts about sprawling out on top of her on an old sofa in his boss’s office. But right now he was still sailing along in that little inflatable dinghy, the
yes
boat, and he didn’t care.

He felt her hands between their bodies, working the knot holding the waist tie of his apron shut. His own hands roamed her body, petite but strong, every curve and surface as familiar to him as the house he’d grown up in. When he reached her skirt he kept going, groping for the hem and shoving it up her legs. She abandoned the waist tie of his apron and shoved the front flap up. It bunched between their bellies, but that wrinkle of fabric didn’t feel anywhere near as uncomfortable as the hard-on pressing painfully against his fly.

Her fingers reached for his zipper. “Susie,” he warned.

“I know,” she mumbled, then kissed him again and slid the zipper down.

Once again, he had no idea what she meant. But he
had a pretty clear idea what she was doing with her hands, and he couldn’t find it in him to resist. He wedged a finger inside her panties and she was so wet he nearly came just from the feel of her.

“I know,” she said again, wiggling her hips to help him strip off her panties. Once they were down to her knees, she contorted one leg until it slid free of the leg hole, then shoved Casey’s jeans down past his butt and urged her to him.

One of the greatest moments in his relationship with her had occurred on New Year’s Eve, after they’d left some weirdo nightclub in Alphabet City and returned to her apartment to discover neither of her roommates was back from Times Square yet. They’d appropriated the bedroom, locking the door so Anna and Caitlin couldn’t barge in on them, and stripped naked, and when he’d reached for a rubber she’d said, “Casey, we’ve been together for so long. I’m on the Pill, and I’m not screwing around, and I don’t think you are, either. I trust you.” And he’d made love to her, skin to skin, human to human instead of penis to plastic.

They were human to human today, Casey to Susie, two lovers who’d been apart for too long. It was hot, it was fast, his damn apron and her skirt were in the way, he hadn’t even touched her breasts, and she was already coming before he found his rhythm, her amazing body pulsing around him, every spasm daring him to let go.

He did. No sense going for style points. This was a desperation fuck, and that realization smacked him as fiercely as his own climax—and as suddenly as a vision of babies. For the first time since she’d told him to stop using condoms, he imagined making a baby with her. He imagined that baby being born—his blond hair, her
dark eyes, tiny but with big feet, indicating the potential for basketball-star proportions by the time the kid had passed through adolescence. He imagined Susie nursing their baby, and he imagined himself playing with it, and even changing its diapers, and pushing a stroller on long walks with his wife through Flushing Meadows Park…and going home to a house surrounded by a picket fence.

He got it now. He understood what Susie meant. What she feared was exactly what he wanted. The whole thing—the constancy, the security, the knowledge that everything that mattered most to him could be found safely inside that picket fence.

She was breathing heavily and running her hands aimlessly through his hair. He lifted himself slightly so he wouldn’t crush her, and gazed down into her face. She looked wary, perhaps even a little scared.

“You really want to give this up?” he asked her.

“No. You do.” Her voice wavered, but she remained dry-eyed.

“I don’t want to give this up,” he argued. “I want this all the time.”

“You want sex in my sister’s office all the time?” She propped herself on her elbows and he eased back onto his knees. His jeans and boxers were clumped around his thighs, making his legs feel stiff and clumsy.

Susie swung her feet around, plucked her panties from her ankle and put them on correctly. Casey pulled himself together, too. He’d never before had sex in an apron. He wondered if it qualified as kinky, then thought about some of the other times he and Susie had had sex, the situations, the positions. Sex in his apron wouldn’t even make the top ten.

He smoothed his shirt into his jeans, then smoothed
the apron down over it. His prick was damp, his balls twinging. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.

“Julia said we had to talk,” Susie reminded him.

“So talk.”

“I’m leaving town for a while,” she said. Her voice sounded wobbly again, hesitant, almost teary.

She was leaving town. He didn’t bother to ask how long “a while” was.
Goodbye
was all he had to know.

“I’m going to help my cousin make a movie.”

Her cousin was flakier than phyllo pastry. Running off to make a movie with him was the exact opposite of a picket fence.

“I don’t want to go,” she admitted. “I mean, I
do
want to go, I think it’ll be an interesting adventure. Maybe we’ll rent a truck.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.
Bon voyage? Have a good life? Take another little piece of my heart?

“But I don’t want to leave you. I just feel…” She sighed shakily. “I feel like I don’t have a choice.”

“You do have a choice,” he disputed her.

“Not the choice I want.”

“Okay.” He felt his emotions leaking out of him like hydraulic fluid out of an old car engine, leaving behind a collection of dry, rusting metal. “Go and make a movie.” He stood, gave himself a minute to make sure his legs were steady and strode to the door. He wanted to look back at her, one last glimpse. But it would only hurt.

So he opened the door and walked away without turning.

S
usie wound up renting the same Truck-a-Buck van—the one with the bloodstains on the door—that she and Julia had rented for Adam’s graduation weekend. She saw this as some sort of sign; she wasn’t sure of what. Maybe a sign that Truck-a-Buck had a very small fleet of vans available for rent. She and Rick had loaded up the back with video equipment, two suitcases and—rather ominously—sleeping bags and a tent. Susie had inherited Rick’s brother’s sleeping bag when she’d left for college, but she’d never used it for camping as her aunt Martha had thought she would. Mostly she’d used it for sleeping on other people’s floors. Camping seemed awfully quaint in a world where roofs, electricity, wall-to-wall carpeting and indoor plumbing were relatively easy to come by. But Rick had suggested that they bring camping gear with them, just in case, and Susie had been too chicken to ask just in case
what
.

She’d driven the first leg of the trip, through New York and Connecticut and across the Massachusetts border, where she and Rick had pulled off at a Mass Pike rest stop in a little building that looked like a Walt Disney World set for
The Crucible
. After using the facilities and stocking up on maps and vending machine snacks—pretzels and corn chips for Rick, M&M’s and a chocolate-covered granola bar for her—they traded positions. Rick took the wheel and Susie settled into
the seat that Grandma Ida had occupied on the drive to Cornell.

Sunglasses perched on her nose, legal pad propped on her knees, Susie tore open the wrapper of her granola bar, took a lusty bite and assured herself that it was a healthful snack, despite its chocolate coating. All those oats and nuts and fiber inside…surely that had to count for something.

She didn’t like the limerick she’d come up with for the next
Bloom’s Bulletin
. Rhyming
sweet
with
treat
was such a cliché. But the theme of the limerick was desserts, and
meat
just wouldn’t work. The store didn’t sell anything with feet still attached, and anything with feet would probably qualify as meat. She could use
Heat’n’Eat
, but the
Heat’n’Eat
products were all entrées, not desserts.

But it was too late to worry about the limerick anymore. She’d sent the text of the upcoming
Bulletin
to Julia’s work computer last night, and while she could probably squeeze under the printer’s deadline if she e-mailed Julia a new limerick tonight, she lacked the inspiration. The rhymes she came up with for
sweet
sucked:
discreet, deplete
, the enema brand
Fleet
. Why torture herself? Why torture Julia?

She decided to work on the film script, instead. Rick had diagrammed a bunch of scenes and shots, but when Susie had skimmed his working script yesterday, she’d discovered it alarmingly lacking in words—specifically, the words she was supposed to say on camera. “You can write that part,” Rick had told her. “You know what you want to say.”

She couldn’t begin to guess what she wanted to say. “Tell me again why we’re going to Maine?” she asked.

Rick rolled his shoulders in a lackadaisical shrug. “Food,” he said.

She wished he sounded a bit more definitive. She wished he knew what the hell he was doing. While she was glad to be out of the city, riding in a truck, cruising along the Mass Pike, whizzing past fir trees and speed limit signs and SUVs with Live Free Or Die New Hampshire license plates on them, or Red Sox bumper stickers, or Harvard decals, and putting progressively more distance between herself and Casey, she couldn’t shake her apprehension about this trip.

At least one positive thing would come out of it: having more distance between Casey and herself. She couldn’t believe they’d banged each other on the couch in her sister’s office. More than that, she couldn’t believe having sex with him had been so easy. She couldn’t believe it had felt so natural. She couldn’t believe it had satisfied such a deep hunger, one she’d refused to acknowledge until that encounter in Julia’s office.

Sex wasn’t everything. It was a hell of a lot, of course, but there had to be more for a relationship to matter. With Casey, of course, there
was
more, a lot more: laughter and ideas and empathy, trust and shared tastes, companionship and comfort. She and Casey were out of sync, though. Their dreams didn’t mesh—and dreams were much, much more important than sex.

She took another bite of her granola bar and let the chocolate melt on her tongue, gooey and sweet, with just a hint of bitter. Thank God for chocolate. When a woman had to go without sex, chocolate was like methadone—the next best thing.

“So what kind of food is in Maine?” she asked, perusing the camera shots Rick had outlined as if they were supposed to make sense to her.

“Lobster,” Rick said.

“Lobster? We can’t use lobster in this movie!”

He glanced over at her, his eyes obscured by his Ray?Bans, his hair clamped down beneath a cap with the bill bent into a semicircle and a Daffy Duck appliqué stitched onto it. He wore fraying cargo shorts and a T-shirt depicting a heap of empty Budweiser cans and the caption Cans Film Festival. Around his neck a camera lens hung on a lanyard. He’d started wearing the lens necklace right after he finished college. Susie wasn’t sure what purpose it served, other than to announce to the world that he was a pretentious cinéaste.

“Why can’t we use lobster?” he asked, turning back to the road.

“Lobster is
trayf
.”

“Oh, like anyone cares about that,” he said with a snort. “Like Bloom’s is
glatt
kosher.”

“It’s not
glatt
kosher,” Susie said. “They sell meats that aren’t kosher. They sell cheeses just one aisle over from the meats, so yes, Ricky, it’s possible for a person to enter Bloom’s empty-handed and emerge with a salami-and-cheese sandwich. But you can’t put lobster in this film. Lobster isn’t just something you can’t eat with cheese. It’s something you aren’t supposed to eat at all.”

“You eat lobster.”

“Yeah, if someone else is buying.” Susie loved lobster, but who could afford it
and
a decent hairstylist? “I’m not kosher.”

“Bloom’s customers aren’t kosher, either.”

“But the store is kosher-
style
. Have you ever seen them sell a lobster in there? Or even a lobster salad? Even a teeny-tiny little shrimp? Has clam chowder ever been the soup du jour?”

“Shit,” Rick muttered, then shot her another look. “I was figuring on filming down on Cape Cod, doing something with clams.”

“You can’t,” Susie said firmly. If nothing else, she would protect Julia’s investment in this film. Protecting it meant not letting Rick depict Bloom’s as a store that sold nonkosher delicacies. “People have this image of Bloom’s as the kind of place Jews go to,” she explained. “Wizened old Jews named Hymie and Rivka. Feisty, loudmouthed Jews who run unions and vote straight Democratic, no matter what. Yuppie Jews who haven’t been inside a temple since their bar mitzvah, but now they’ve got a baby and they want to return to their roots.”

“Lots of non-Jews shop at Bloom’s,” Rick argued.

“Of course they do—because they want that Jewish-ish experience.”

“Jewish-
ish?
”

“You know what I mean. They don’t want to go to some orthodox
shul
and watch men in prayer shawls
daven
for four hours on a Saturday morning. They just want some bagels. They consider it exotic.”

“What does this have to do with lobsters?” Rick asked.

Susie had to think a minute, to remember where the discussion had started. “If you put lobsters into the Bloom’s soup, it’s going to make the place seem less Jewish-ish. It’s going to undermine the store’s identity.”

“Okay. Fine.” Rick brooded for a minute. “Can we use potatoes?”

“Potatoes are kosher.”

“Great. Maine is full of potatoes.”

Susie wrote
potatoes
on the top yellow sheet of the pad. He was going to use potatoes. Did he have even the slightest clue what he was going to use them for?

This road trip was a mistake. Susie’s entire life was a mistake. She should have been Julia, the mature and
sensible Bloom daughter, the sort of woman who, faced with the option of attending law school or getting a tattoo, would never choose the tattoo. If Susie were more like Julia, she could be planning her wedding right now, instead of fleeing to Maine with her crackpot cousin to make a movie about potatoes.

Of course, Julia was halfway to meltdown planning her wedding, so that was no bargain.

Crackpot
, Susie thought.
Crock-Pot
. “Instead of soup, I think we should make Bloom’s stew.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Stew is thicker,” Susie told him. “Beyond that, the word resonates as a metaphor.”

“A metaphor for what?”

“I don’t know, but it resonates.” She wrote
stew
on the pad. Potato stew? It sounded so bland she took another bite of her granola bar, just to remind herself what flavor was all about.

“Okay, so stew.” Rick pondered the word. “So we’ll start in a potato field. I thought a seaside shot would have been great—real picturesque, you know? Waves rolling in, a breeze, marsh grass, and you’d be saying something like, ‘Lobster. It’s great, with or without drawn butter.’”

“I’d never say anything like that. I don’t even know why they call it ‘drawn’ butter. What’s it drawn from?” She shook her head. “I’d probably say something along the lines of how ugly lobsters are. I mean, what could have possessed the first person who ate a lobster? He pulled this ugly green beast out of the ocean. The normal reaction would be to throw the thing away, and he’d probably still have nightmares about it for a few days. Instead, this mook tosses the thing into a pot of boiling water, and when it turns red he pulls it out, cracks the shell open and discovers it’s pretty tasty?”

“Yeah, and thinks to dip it in drawn butter, too,” Rick added.

“It’s just weird. If you didn’t know what a lobster was, would you eat it?”

“If you didn’t know what a potato was, would you eat it?” Rick countered. “They grow in the ground. They’re dirty and lumpy and gray. And if you bite into one raw, it tastes pasty. How did they figure out baked potatoes were the way to go?”

“Yeah, or latkes,” Susie said, jotting notes. This was a promising concept. “Imagine the first person who made a latke. Grating the potato, adding egg and onion and what else?”

“How should I know? I’ve never made latkes.”

“Neither have I.”

“But you’re a girl.” Rick grinned. “I thought girls were supposed to know how to make latkes.”

She decided not to let him provoke her. “Flour, I think. Or matzo meal. I could phone Lyndon and ask him to ask his friend Howard. Lyndon and Howard aren’t girls, and they know how to cook things.”

“Speaking of girls, how’s Anna doing?” Rick asked, his tone so casual Susie knew he was intensely interested.

Susie sighed. She truly hoped this expedition wouldn’t turn into a how-can-I-get-Anna-to-like-me? marathon. “You’ve had a crush on her for, what, two years? Get over it, Rick.”

“Why? What does she have against me?”

“Nothing. She likes you. But there’s no chemistry.”

“She hasn’t seen my lab,” he said. “Is she dating anyone else?”

Susie weighed whether to be honest or helpful. Helpful would entail nudging Rick in a new direction, helping to wean him from his Anna obsession. But she
couldn’t lie to her cousin. “She goes out sometimes, but nothing serious.”

He relaxed visibly in his seat. “I love her hair. It’s so long.”

Susie ran her fingers through her cropped chin-length hair. That was such a guy thing, loving long hair. Susie had worn hers long for a while, and it had been a pain, always getting snarled, catching in the hinges of her sunglasses, taking forever to dry after a shampoo. She’d also tried a punkish cut, very short, around the time she’d gotten her tattoo. But dykes had kept coming on to her, so she’d grown it in a bit. She liked the length it was now. She’d had one of the stylists at Racine give it a trim yesterday so it would look fresh for the film. She’d even contemplated having the film’s budget pay for the haircut, but twenty-five thousand dollars wasn’t much. They had to make it last.

Casey liked her hair the way she wore it. He’d probably like it long, too. Or buzz-cut short. That was the problem with him—he cared more about the woman than her hair. Why couldn’t he be a shallow jerk like Rick? Then Susie wouldn’t be missing him so much.

Damn. They’d barely reached the New Hampshire border, and she was already missing him, languishing like a gothic heroine with consumption. Thinking about the way his hands felt in her hair caused a sharp twinge in her chest, and a softer twinge lower down. She missed him. He was the greatest single straight guy on earth, or at least in New York, and she’d walked away from him. Run away. What was
wrong
with her?

Potato stew
. The words stared up at her from the pad. That was her life—starchy, soggy and of indeterminate taste. Casey was the finest chocolate, not this stale granola bar, not a bag of M&M’s peanuts but sinfully rich Godiva. And Susie was a lobster—ugly,
wrapped in a shell and distinctly unkosher. Potato stew had to be easier to digest than a lobster-and-chocolate combination plate.

“So what are we going to do about our parents?” Julia asked Ron.

He bent over to peek through the window in the microwave, which was wedged into the few square inches of counter space between the fridge and the coffeemaker in his cramped kitchen. “Heat’n’Eat something?” he asked, straightening up and sliding off his old tweed blazer. He wore T-shirts or work shirts and jeans to work, but usually with a jacket. He’d once explained to Julia that the jacket was his nod to professionalism.

She happened to know that his
real
nod to professionalism was the brilliant weekly business column and the occasional feature articles he wrote for
Gotham
magazine. But jackets flattered him. They flattered him even more when he removed them.