Blooming All Over (8 page)

“He looks like a cowboy—except he’s wearing tights.”

“He’s a cowboy outlaw. See? He’s shooting people.”

Adam preferred movies, where he didn’t need his mother to explain to him when someone was shooting someone else. In the ballet, the Billy guy might have been shooting someone, but it was nothing more than jumping and fluttering fingers to Adam.

All right. His mother deserved points for trying to imbue him with high culture. Adam deserved points for having escaped her influence.

He climbed the stairs to the sun-filled plaza at the center of the complex. The fountain was churning low, perhaps to save water. Many of the umbrella-shaded café tables outside Avery Fisher Hall were occupied by people eating lunch, reading newspapers and talking. Folks streamed in and out of the performing arts library. A pigeon bobbed over to a toddler, no doubt
searching for bread crumbs or some other culinary freebie, and the toddler screamed, raced to his mother and hid his face against her knees. Pigeons—the stuff of nightmares to a three-year-old. Just as scary as a blue shoelace on a wall hanging.

Near the café tables stood a food cart. Adam wasn’t hungry, but the pretzel had whetted his thirst. He joined the line behind a girl who appeared barely out of her teens. While she ordered a latte, he surveyed the beverages listed on a placard behind the cart. Iced mocha. That sounded good.

The girl in front of him reminded him of a drinking straw, for some reason. Her body was stretched out, her neck, bare arms and denim-clad legs too long, her toes pointing outward like a penguin’s. Her dark blond hair was combed back from her face so smoothly it could have been painted onto her scalp, except for where it bulged in a tidy bun the size of a Ping-Pong ball at her nape. As she bent over to poke through her purse for money to pay for her latte, Adam found himself staring at that nape, a few loose wisps of hair curling against her skin. He vaguely recollected a college lecture on the eroticization of the woman’s nape in ancient Japan, or something like that. It wasn’t math, so he hadn’t bothered to remember it.

Had he ever noticed Tash’s nape? Had he ever even seen it? Her hair was so thick and curly, and she never bound it into such a severe bun.

“I’m sure I’ve got another quarter in here,” the girl said, digging deeper into the purse. It was really more a quilted cloth pouch, not much bigger than a paperback novel. Adam didn’t think a quarter could get lost inside it.

He pulled his wallet from his pocket. “Here,” he said, handing a five-dollar bill to the guy behind the counter. “For her latte and an iced mocha for me.”

The girl spun around and stared at him. Her face was as delicate as the rest of her, skin pale, eyes round, nose as sharp as a paring knife. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. Her front two teeth overlapped slightly.

“I don’t have to vote, either. But I do it.”

“Voting is an obligation,” she said solemnly.

“No, it’s not. It’s a privilege. Although, given some of the candidates, I’m not sure how much of a privilege it is.”

She smiled. “I’m not sure how much of a privilege it is to buy a stranger a cup of latte, either.”

“It’s more fun than voting,” he told her, then dropped his change into the tip jar and lifted his mocha.

“I’ve only voted twice so far,” she told him, lifting her latte, “and I enjoyed it. Pushing the little levers was such fun.”

Maybe it didn’t take much to amuse her. Or maybe…maybe she was flirting with him.

Oh.

Nobody had flirted with him since he and Tash had become a recognized couple more than a year ago. Tash herself never flirted. She probably considered it politically suspect. He’d forgotten how much fun it could be. A hell of a lot more fun than voting.

“My name is Adam,” he said, angling his head toward the café tables. “Wanna sit?”

She smiled again, flashing him those crooked front teeth. “My name’s Elyse, and I guess I can spare a few minutes.”

Flirting. Why not? He had nothing better to do.

Bloom’s Bulletin
Written and edited by
Susie Bloom

A woman in town from Miami

Came to Bloom’s to stock up on salami.

“Since I’m here,” she said, “first

Slice me some liverwurst

And why not? A nice pound of pastrami.”

Welcome to the May 28th edition of the
Bloom’s Bulletin
. Spring has sprung, and the shelves of Bloom’s have sprung full of delicious spring fare—fresh salads, chilled soups like gazpacho and zucchini and hot and cold sandwiches perfect for picnics in Central Park. To wash down your al fresco feasts, Bloom’s sells bottled water, both sparkling and still, from spas around the world, as well as fruit juices, gourmet sodas and iced tea. Don’t hold me to it, but I’ve heard green tea cures
everything
.

Cooking the books?

No—Bloom’s is booking the cooks! On June 1, Bloom’s will begin a new lecture series featuring well-known chefs and cookbook authors. Every month a different cook will teach some simple recipes and answer your questions. All sessions will begin at 7:00 p.m. Our first guest will be potato maestro Tina Klopewitz, author of
Tina’s Taters, More Tina’s Taters and Mashed, Hashed and Crashed—Potatoes for the New Century
. She will be demonstrating creative ideas for stuffing potatoes and solving the age-old dilemma of what to do with the skins. Come meet the queen of spectacular
spuds, who promises to make you think about potatoes in an entirely new way.

Feeling your oats?

Imported Scottish rolled oats are on sale all this week. Denying yourself the pleasure of delicious porridge made from steamed Scottish oats would be downright gruel!

Did you know…

The Yiddish word
tsimmis
is used to describe an imbroglio or a complicated, out-of-control problem, as in, “Don’t make such a tsimmis out of the fact that your sister spilled purple grape juice on your favorite white cashmere sweater.” But
tsimmis
is actually the name of a stewed-carrot dish. Bloom’s founder, Ida Bloom, never made
tsimmis
herself, but she remembers her mother’s
tsimmis
: “She would slice the carrots into thin sticks and stew them with spices and maybe onions, I don’t remember. Caraway seeds, maybe. Then she’d put the
tsimmis
in jars and refrigerate them. Of course, she didn’t have a refrigerator. In those days, it was an icebox. Sometimes the
tsimmis
got ice particles in it. Not that it mattered. I hated the way it tasted.”

Employee Profile:

Cashiers come and cashiers go, but Rita Martinez came and never went. For five years, Rita has been scanning merchandise, swiping credit cards and double-bagging frozen-food items for satisfied Bloom’s customers. Why does she stay? “Bloom’s is great,” she says. “Being here is like being with family.”

Rita moved to New York City from Arecibo, on Puerto Rico’s northern coast, when she was five years old. “At first I was scared of the big city,” Rita admits. “All those tall buildings, and everyone talked a foreign language! But I started school and learned English and New York became my home. One thing I loved about living here, right from the start, was all the different kinds of food. Italian, Thai, Cuban—which is similar to Puerto Rican, but different, too—and of course kosher-style food like we sell at Bloom’s. The first time I ate a knish, I thought,
ay
, what is this? So good! Better than fried plantains, even! And bagels. My whole family loves bagels. Last year at Christmas, we hung bagels on our tree.” According to Rita, cranberry bagels, with their red tint, looked especially festive in contrast with the pine needles.

Rita is married and has two
bebés
, Joey and Viviana. “They love rice and beans,” Rita says, “but they also love kugel.” Rita says her pet cat, Carmella, also likes Bloom’s Heat’n’Eat kugel, but only if it’s cut into tiny pieces.

Wise Words from Bloom’s founder, Ida Bloom:
“You want to make a fool of yourself? Who’s stopping you?”

On sale this week:
marble halvah, imported Jarlsburg, Heat’n’Eat Flanken, marinated artichokes and more. Details inside!

“R
on. Stop,” Julia said in the firmest voice she could muster—which wasn’t very firm, because she wasn’t entirely convinced she wanted him to stop. Lying naked and sated in the afterglow of some spectacular sex, their legs still entangled and the bedsheets twisted around them, Ron traced an invisible line on her right breast with the tip of his index finger. Everywhere he touched he left a tingle, and whenever his finger strayed particularly close to her nipple it twitched and grew pointier, as if to alert him to its presence:
Here, Ron! Touch me here!

Her nipple might want his touch, but her mind didn’t. She had too many things to worry about.

“Stop what?” he murmured, sounding both sleepy and sexy.

“Stop distracting me.”

“Is that what I was doing?” He lifted his head from the pillow and smiled down at her. She took in his dark, disheveled hair, his angular face, his intense brown eyes and that wicked so-sue-me grin. His expression should have warned her that he was up to no good, but his kiss still took her by surprise. If he’d kissed her lips she could have handled it, but no, he had to kiss her yearning, burning nipple, which would have cried out with pleasure if it had had a mouth.

“Ron, come on!” She nudged him away. “We’ve already made love.”

“Oh—did we use up our quota?” he asked, faking a look of shock and innocence.

She shoved him a little harder. “Don’t tease me. I’m trying to be worried and you’re not letting me.”

“Well, shame on me,” he said, settling back into the pillow beside her. “Better call the police and have me charged with abuse. Denying you the right to worry? What kind of bastard am I?”

“Can you get serious for just two minutes?” She pushed herself to sit and pivoted to face him. She crossed her legs, noticed where his gaze was focused, drew her knees together, pulled her legs up against her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins, folding herself into a neat little bundle with all her X-rated parts concealed. “The dinner party on Friday is going to be a disaster.”

Ron could have sworn to her that the dinner party would be fine, but theirs was a relationship grounded in honesty. So he only shrugged and said, “Big deal. It’ll be a disaster. If we’re lucky, it won’t end with someone lying on the floor with a butter knife stuck between his ribs.”

“
His?
You think the murder victim is going to be a man? Who? You?”

“I don’t think there’ll be a murder victim. Especially not from a butter knife.”

Julia sighed. Ron had a habit of making light of things. She found his attitude exasperating. She also loved him for it. She envied his ability not to take things too seriously, not to feel responsible for the whole damn world. Perhaps this attitude was due to his
refusal to allow his family to become so involved in his life.

Well, they were going to be involved in his life Friday night. His life and Julia’s. And it was going to be a disaster.

“First of all,” she said, trying not to respond to his lazy smile, his sleek chest, his magician hands and his enticingly flat abdominal muscles—thank God the sheet draped the way it did, or the rest of his body would be visible and he wouldn’t even have to touch her to distract her. “We’re going to have both your parents in the same room. At the same table. Maybe you’re onto something. Maybe we should just set the table with butter knives. Steak knives could be too dangerous.”

“My parents aren’t going to kill each other,” Ron promised. “They’ve had ample opportunity to do that over the past several decades, and they haven’t yet.”

“But they hate each other.”

“They’re divorced. They’re supposed to hate each other.”

“They thrive on that hatred. It feeds them. It nullifies all their positive energy. Haven’t you ever wondered why neither one has remarried?”

Ron rolled his eyes. “Sounds like it’s time for some cheap psychology. Let me guess. You think they’re still in love, right?”

Julia didn’t consider the possibility deserving of ridicule. “Do you? You know them better than I do.”

“My parents got divorced twenty-two years ago. If they still loved each other, they probably would have figured it out somewhere along the way.”

“But they never remarried.”

“Maybe they decided they just weren’t cut out for marriage.”

Which led to one of Julia’s biggest worries. What if Ron, their firstborn, the result of their genetic merger, the product of their rancorous household, was inherently not cut out for marriage? He’d asked Julia to marry him and she’d said yes, and he’d given her the most beautiful engagement ring in the world, nothing ostentatious, one single, perfectly set carat in a band of white gold. And he doted on her—when he wasn’t teasing her—and phoned her when he got held up at work and freely mingled his dirty laundry with hers. And when he made love to her, he made love to
all
of her, not just certain specific anatomical regions. He whispered to her and stroked her hair and peered into her eyes, and when they came he groaned with such sweet relief and gratitude and triumph, obviously as thrilled for her as for himself.

He loved her. She was convinced of that. But what if growing up in a broken home had taught him damaging lessons about marriage?

And what about her? Her parents had been married for thirty years and would still be married today if her father hadn’t eaten contaminated sturgeon and succumbed to salmonella poisoning two years ago. But her father had also been sleeping with Dierdre Morrissey at the office—tall, gawky Dierdre, the executive who knew the store better than any Bloom family member. Julia hadn’t learned about the affair until a year after her father’s death, and by then it had seemed quite beside the point. Dierdre was essential to the smooth running of the store, and if Julia’s mother didn’t mind having an office right next to Dierdre’s, why should Julia make drastic changes?

Still, like Ron, she was the offspring of a dysfunctional marriage, even if no one had ever bothered to
acknowledge how dysfunctional it was. Maybe she carried a betrayal gene within her cells. Maybe someday she’d turn to a skinny, buck-toothed assistant for comfort.

Oh, sure. With a guy like Ron Joffe at home in her bed, she was going to look at anyone else?

So maybe her marriage was congenitally doomed, and maybe it wasn’t. She still had plenty of other things to worry about. “My mother doesn’t cook very well, so I asked Lyndon to do the cooking.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” Ron reassured her. “Lyndon’s a great cook.”

“But Grandma Ida isn’t invited. She’s going to be pissed that Lyndon is taking off the evening and leaving her all alone in her apartment so he can go downstairs to my mother’s apartment and whip up a feast for us.”

“So invite Grandma Ida,” Ron said calmly, as if it were the most reasonable idea in the world.

“Are you kidding? She’d dominate the entire evening. She’d issue edicts. She’d insist on controlling the whole wedding.”

“She’d probably come down on your side,” Ron pointed out. He toyed with her feet, running that mischievous index finger between her toes, over her polished nails, up and down her instep. She considered slapping his hand away, but his touch felt too good. She would simply have to keep her mind focused and not let him detour her.

“What do you mean, my side?”

“She’ll want the wedding catered by Bloom’s, won’t she?”

“Who knows? With Grandma Ida—” her toes wiggled when he located a ticklish spot along her arch
“—you never can predict what she’ll do. She’ll go deaf for a moment, then snap out of it and decide we should have the reception at Elaine’s, because the same outfit that supplies Bloom’s with salt and pepper also supplies Elaine’s.”

“Really?” Ron seemed to find this strangely fascinating.

“It’s probably the same outfit that supplies every food service company in the city with salt and pepper. The thing is, who cares? Grandma Ida gets hung up on
mishegas
like that.” Julia sighed, half from frustration and half from pleasure as Ron wrapped his hand around the back of her ankle, along her Achilles tendon, and rubbed. God, that felt good.

“So don’t invite Grandma Ida.”

“She’ll be pissed. And hurt.”

“Big fucking deal.” Ron let his hand drop and rolled onto his back. “You worry too much,” he addressed the ceiling.

She knew he was exasperated with her—but, as he himself would put it, big fucking deal. He might not care where their wedding was held or who catered it, but he wasn’t the president of a major food emporium with its own catering department. He was the business columnist at
Gotham
magazine, where unless you were a local celebrity of some sort, no one cared where you got married or what your guests ate at the reception.

“And my brother. What are we going to do about him?”

“Adam?” Ron shrugged. “Why do we have to do anything about him?”

“Mom says he wanders around the apartment in a daze. She said he keeps saying he’s got to call Tash,
but she’s overheard him on the phone talking to someone named Elyse.”

“Your mother is eavesdropping on his phone calls? Jesus.” Ron rolled his eyes again.

“So who’s Elyse?”

“Am I supposed to know?”

“Adam’s going to want to join us for dinner because Lyndon will be making real food. My mother always makes low-calorie stuff, salads with fat-free dressing, fish fried in Pam.”

“Tell Lyndon to fix a plate for Adam to eat in the kitchen. This is not a crisis, Julia.”

It was a crisis. She figured her wedding to Ron would be the only one she ever had, and she wanted it to be perfect. She wanted everyone to get along and no one to be petty or selfish or overly demanding. She wanted to look beautiful, and she wanted Susie, her maid of honor, to be happy, and she wanted a pretty gown that didn’t cost as much as a Learjet, and she wanted Bloom’s to cater the reception. Right now many of the key members of the wedding were not getting along, most of them were innately petty, selfish and demanding, she had an incipient pimple in the crease next to her left nostril—although she suspected that by the time she and Ron booked a place for their wedding they’d be lucky to get a date a year from now, and the pimple would probably be gone by then. She had a brooding, melancholy sister and the few gowns she’d looked at so far, while not as expensive as a Learjet, carried price tags that made her think of all the starving children in the world and left her paralyzed with guilt. And her mother was still whining about having a reception at the Plaza because her brother had hosted his son’s bar mitzvah there.

“Maybe we should elope,” she said dolefully.

“Fine with me.”

“Just take the subway down to City Hall, sign some papers and be done with it.” She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the fantasy.

“We could even bring some bagels from the store with us and eat them afterward. That way you could say Bloom’s catered the reception.”

She scowled. “You’re making fun of me.”

“You won’t let me make love with you. This is the best alternative I can come up with.”

“I will let you make love with me,” she retorted. “Just not now, while I’m busy worrying.”

He reached up, clamped a hand onto her shoulder and pulled her down against him. As worried as she was, she couldn’t help nestling into him, resting her head on his chest and extending her legs along his. “Listen to me, Julia,” he said, his voice vibrating in his chest, against her ear. “We’re not going to elope, because you want a nice wedding. And that’s what we’re going to have.”

“How are we going to have a nice wedding when I can’t even agree with my mother about the food?” she mumbled into the curve of his neck. “And your parents are going to kill each other with butter knives, and—”

“Julia. All these problems you’re worrying about aren’t
your
problems. If your brother doesn’t like your mother’s fat-free cooking, he can get his ass in gear, find a job and buy his own food. If your grandmother doesn’t like it that Lyndon is preparing the dinner Friday night, explain to her that slavery was abolished a hundred forty years ago and she doesn’t own the guy. He’s free to cook for whomever he wants. And if my
mother and father get into it, that’s their crap. Butter knives aren’t going to draw blood.”

She sighed. Ron was right. Even if he wasn’t, pretending he was soothed her. “In other words, you’re saying Friday night is going to go fine.”

“No. It’s going to be a disaster.” He chuckled. “But who cares?”

Three-thirtyish was a good time for Rick to visit Susie at Nico’s. Earlier, she’d be cleaning up from the lunch rush; later, she’d be prepping for the dinner rush. But at the afternoon’s midpoint, the downtown pizzeria experienced a lull, and Susie was usually available to talk then.

He paused outside the eatery to admire her latest window arrangement for the restaurant. A poster displayed the image of a young graduate robed in solemn black clutching a diploma rolled into a tube and tied with a red ribbon. In place of the standard mortarboard, the graduate wore a pizza, with stretchy strands of melted mozzarella dangling over the crust to resemble a tassel. A whiteboard propped next to the poster bore a poem in Susie’s even print, adorned with drawings of small red tomatoes:

Shielding his eyes with his hand, he peered through the window into the café. An old guy was ensconced at a corner table, reading a newspaper. On the table in front of him sat one of those thimble-sized cups restaurants served espresso in. What a scam—put a few chintzy drops of bitter coffee in a dollhouse cup and charge twice as much as for an eight-ounce mug of regular joe.