Blooming All Over (5 page)

Most important, though, Rick was more likely to get money from his father than from his mother.

He actually wasn’t totally broke at the moment. He’d managed to land a temporary job as Camera 3 for a soap opera named
Passions and Power
that filmed at a studio on West Fifty-second Street. The usual Camera 3 had taken a maternity leave, and a friend of a friend of a guy he knew had hired him to fill in. During the two months he’d been working at the studio, Cameras 1 and 2 got most of the action; as Camera 3, he was usually scripted to focus on some secondary character, and the director would use Camera 3 shots only when the secondary character was reacting to something the main characters were doing. Earlier that day, for instance, they’d filmed a scene in which an actress had to tell an actor that he was the father of her son. The Camera 3 script had Rick aiming at the nanny the whole time. At the end of a four-minute scene, Camera 3 was activated for a two-second shot of the nanny hugging a heavily swaddled doll to her bulbous chest and looking shocked.

But the job paid, so Rick wasn’t complaining.

Tonight was going to be a much bigger payday, though. Rick had a plan, one that was going to get his father seriously jazzed.

He arrived at the ritzy Upper East Side building
where his father and Wendy lived. Rick and his brother, Neil, had grown up across town, in the apartment building above Bloom’s, just down the hall from Uncle Ben and Aunt Sondra and the cousins. When Rick’s parents had divorced, his mother had refused to give up the spacious apartment where she’d raised her sons, so his father had moved across town and bought an apartment just as big in a sleek new building.

This was why having money was good, Rick thought as he pawed his unkempt hair and smiled at the doorman in the glittery marble lobby of his father’s building. Have enough money and when you get a divorce you can afford a nice apartment. Have enough money and divorce doesn’t even have to enter the picture—you can afford a nice apartment, period. The one-room apartment where Rick currently lived, in a tenement around the corner from Houston Street, wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet. The kitchen was a three-foot-wide stretch of linoleum, with a minifridge and a two-burner hot plate and microwave oven. The bathroom was so small Rick could pee into the toilet while standing in the shower. He knew this because he’d done it many times. City housing regulations required all domiciles to have a window, and Rick’s was gray with soot and offered a view of a dirty brick wall.

The apartment was not a nice one, and he could barely afford it.

The doorman glowered at him from beneath the brim of his snappy militaristic cap, then buzzed upstairs to see if Jay and Wendy Bloom could possibly want this scruffy, disheveled young man to darken their doorstep. Rick imagined Wendy’s sunny voice chirping into the intercom that of course Rick was welcome, she couldn’t wait to see him and feed him red meat. One of Wendy’s
most charming traits was her enthusiasm. Give her pompoms and a short skirt and she’d be ready for anything.

The doorman lowered his intercom phone and sent Rick a reluctant nod. Grinning, Rick shuffled through the lobby to the elevators. The Velcro on one of the straps of his Teva sandals was losing its grip. That was what he got for wearing them all year long. Now, at least, the weather matched his footwear. He also had on olive-green cargo shorts and a baggy T-shirt reading, Yes, I’m Warm Enough, which he’d worn a lot that past winter, to much better effect. He was always warm. It drove his mother crazy, except for the period a few years ago when she’d been going through menopause and sweating constantly.

The elevator swept him up to the fourteenth floor, which was really the thirteenth floor, except that the building had no thirteenth floor. Most buildings in New York didn’t. Thirteenth floors were considered bad luck, so the floors in most buildings went directly from the twelfth to the fourteenth, as if the Fates didn’t know how to count and wouldn’t notice that the thirteenth floor had been mislabeled to deceive them.

He rang the bell and Wendy swung open the door. As usual, she was perky and chipper, her blond hair bouncing with waves and her boobs just plain bouncing. She had on a summery outfit, flowery pastels that matched the turquoise color scheme of the living room. Rick had often thought that if he had to make a movie in his father’s living room, the vividness of the turquoise walls, the striped turquoise-and-white upholstery of the couches and chairs, the turquoise-, white-, green-and-yellow pattern of the drapes and the dark turquoise
wall-to-wall carpet would burn holes through the camera lens. It was so frickin’ bright.

But that was Wendy, too. She glowed like a fluorescent bulb—a little hummy, a little flickery but emitting a whole lot of lumens. “Rick!” she exclaimed, sounding surprised to see him, even though he’d been announced just minutes ago by the doorman and she herself had invited him for dinner. “Come on in! Look at you! You shaved, didn’t you?”

The beard had refused to fill in. He’d cultivated it for more than a year, but it remained so scraggly he’d finally given up on it. “Yeah, I shaved,” he said.

“Jay!” Wendy hollered, waltzing barefoot across the sea-hued carpet. The living room had had a beautiful inlaid parquet floor, but she’d insisted on covering it with carpet because she liked to walk barefoot. “Jay, guess what? Rick shaved!”

He heard the sound of a toilet flushing, then his father lumbered down the hall and into the living room. His father was a good twenty years older than Wendy, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he’d married her. Still, for a guy inching past his midfifties, Jay Bloom didn’t look bad. He still had a thick head of dark hair, with only a few strands of silver threading through it—maybe he was using one of those hair-color products with the manly names, as if hair dye for men had to be an entirely different product from hair dye for women—and he was trim and fit, thanks to his regular squash and golf games. His father had always been a natural athlete. So had Neil. Rick could put a spiral on a football if he had to, but fortunately, he didn’t have to very often, because it was a bit of a challenge for him. He hadn’t inherited his father’s jock genes, but he hadn’t inherited his mother’s dour intensity, either.
Sometimes he wondered whether he was really theirs. Maybe they’d found him in a basket outside their door.

His father pumped his hand and slapped his back hard enough to dislodge a rib. “How’s it going, Ricky? You enjoying that new job of yours?”

It was only a short-term gig, but if his father wanted to think of him in conjunction with a job, Rick couldn’t blame him. “Yeah, it’s good.”

“Get the boy something to drink,” his father urged Wendy, then thought to ask Rick, “You want something to drink?”

“Sure.”

“Get him something to drink,” he repeated.

Wendy sent Rick another high-wattage smile. “What do you want to drink?”

“I don’t know. What are you offering?”

“What are we offering?” Wendy asked Jay.

“Come on,” Jay said to Rick. “I’ll get you a drink.”

The kitchen was a little less turquoise than the living room, which soothed Rick’s eyes. His father produced a beer from the fridge and Rick accepted it gratefully. His father preferred harder stuff, expensive stuff. Rick had simpler tastes, which was fortunate, because, given his perpetual lack of funds, he couldn’t afford complicated tastes.

He took a swig of beer straight from the bottle while his father clinked ice cubes into a crystal highball glass, then poured in something expensive and complicated. Only after the beer slid cold and sour down his throat did Rick realize that no red meat was sizzling in the broiler or sitting on a plate on one of the polished granite counters, marinating in its own juices. Panic seized him—he
had
been invited for dinner, hadn’t he? They
were
planning to feed him, weren’t they?

“We thought we’d do takeout,” his father said.

Rick sighed with relief that he wouldn’t have to feed himself—and spend his own scarce funds to do so. “Bloom’s food?” he asked. According to Susie, Julia was always encouraging people—not just Bloom’s employees but Bloom family members—to eat the store’s food. She had this novel theory about how they should take pride in what they sold and should familiarize their taste buds with the store’s products. In years past, when Uncle Ben ran the place, Blooms rarely if ever ate Bloom’s food. His mother considered it an unjustifiable extravagance in a world where children on distant continents had to eat twigs and grubs to keep from starving. His father considered much of Bloom’s inventory too oppressively Jewish. His aunt Sondra, uncle Ben and grandma Ida had maintained that eating Bloom’s food equated with eating the store’s profits. Julia was trying to change the culture of the business. A mighty ambitious task, considering that it required changing the culture of the family.

The fact was, Bloom’s food was delicious. Rick had probably eaten more of the stuff in the year since his cousin had taken over the store than he had in his entire life up to then. Not that he could afford Bloom’s food on a regular basis—and since he lived downtown, Bloom’s wasn’t exactly his neighborhood deli—but Susie frequently brought Bloom’s food home with her after she’d spent a day doing whatever she was doing for Julia at the store, and if he timed things right, he could show up at her apartment right around when she and her roommate Anna did. Her roommate Caitlin wasn’t bad, but Anna really spiked his pulse rate. She had that whole Asian thing going for her, the stick-straight black hair, the eyes, the cheekbones, the tight little ass. If he
timed his arrival just right, he could wind up sharing with Susie and Anna a feast of pot roast and stuffed kugel or bagels with smoked-whitefish pâté spread on them or two-inch-thick corned beef sandwiches on seeded rye, with dill pickle spears so sour they made his tongue curl. And sometimes during one of those meals, Anna would look at him and smile, leaving him with the distinct impression that all was not hopeless.

“Chinese,” his father said, startling Rick. Had he spoken Anna’s name? Mentioned her ethnicity to his father? He relaxed when his father explained, “There’s a new Szechuan place around the block that Wendy wanted to try. How does that sound?”

Free food was free food. “Great,” Rick said.

They returned to the living room to give Wendy the word about dinner. She was so excited about trying this new Szechuan place that she actually clapped her hands and gave a little skip. “I’ll call in an order. You boys leave the choices to me. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

Jay watched her prance down the hall, then shook his head and smiled. “She never disappoints me,” he murmured.

Rick decided that wasn’t a topic he wanted to pursue with his father. He cleared his throat, took a sip of beer, cleared his throat again and waited until Jay stopped ogling Wendy. Rick was real happy his dad had found bliss with his blond trophy wife, but they had more important things to talk about.

“Listen, Dad, I’ve got this idea,” Rick said.

The vestiges of Jay’s smile vanished. “I’d better sit down.”

Rick labored not to let his hurt and indignation show. He knew his father thought he was a fuckup. Just be
cause he hadn’t managed to become the next Spike Jonze or Todd Solondz yet, just because after earning a degree in cinematography from NYU’s film school he’d managed to produce a grand total of one commercial—for a cheese grater, the manufacturer of which was trying to get Bloom’s to carry his product—and he was now Camera 3 on
Passion and Power
, and he still hadn’t found anyone to produce his masterpiece, a script that could change the face of cinema if only he could get a fifty-million-dollar budget and a few A-list actors to star in it…none of this meant he was a failure. But his father often acted as though he was.

He took another sip of beer, flopped onto the fluffy turquoise-and-white armchair across from the couch where his father sat, and squared his shoulders. “I’ve got this idea for a TV show,” he said.

“If you’ve come to me for financial backing—”

“Hear me out, Dad, okay?” Sure, he was usually looking for financial backing when he approached his father with an idea, but wasn’t that what fathers were for? “It’s a show about Bloom’s. I was thinking, like, a cooking show. An infomercial-type thing. Maybe a half hour long. We could have people demonstrating how some of the Bloom’s specialties are prepared, or do a video essay about the history of chopped liver or something. We could have someone doing recipes, like Emeril only Jewish. You know, preparing batter for latkes, then spooning them into sizzling oil and shouting
‘L’chaim!’
instead of
‘Bam!’
The show would be an extension of what you’re doing with the Web site and mail-order businesses. It would increase sales. And it would be fun.”

His father looked puzzled. He stared into his glass,
took a sip, frowned, shook his head. “A Bloom’s TV show?”

“We could get it on local-access cable. They’re always desperate for filler. Or late-night TV. Insomniacs could watch it and race to their computers and order stuff. A lot of channels need filler. If they can run infomercials about exercise balls, they can show infomercials about Bloom’s.”

“Do they show infomercials about exercise balls? What the hell’s an exercise ball, anyway?”

“It’s this ball that you roll around on for exercise, I think,” Rick answered, honestly not sure. “The thing is, I bet there’d be a market for a Bloom’s infomercial. Or a series of infomercials. I mean, we’re talking about
Bloom’s
. The most famous delicatessen in America.”

His father’s frown deepened. “I don’t know, Rick.”

“What don’t you know?” The concept was so damn brilliant! And he’d get paid to bring that concept to life. Real money. And his father would win kudos, too, because he was supposedly in charge of nontraditional marketing for the store, and an infomercial would qualify as nontraditional marketing.

“I don’t know how you came up with such an idea.”

“I’m a filmmaker, Dad. It’s my career.”
Career
might be a stretch, but if his father was going to sneer at him anyway, what difference did it make if he puffed himself up a little?