Love in Bloom's (7 page)

She hated this office.

“I brought sushi,” Heath announced grandly.

She also hated sushi. But she managed a smile for him, which was all the encouragement he needed to enter her office and drop a clear plastic tray on top of the mountainous stack of folders on her desk.

“I don’t have time for lunch,” she warned him.

“Sure you do.” He dragged over the tiny room’s other chair and flopped down into it. With his snowy blond hair, his long legs and his easy grace, he had a way of making every room he entered his own. When she’d first met him, his presumptuousness dazzled her.

Right now, she didn’t have time for it. She had all those folders to go through—and a few formidable folders at home, sent to her by Grandma Ida’s lawyers. In those folders were documents proclaiming her the new president of Bloom’s, inventory lists and budget printouts. Every time she walked past the package the lawyers had sent her, she swore she could hear it ticking like a bomb.

Nobody at Griffin, McDougal knew about her title at Bloom’s. She couldn’t tell anyone, because then they’d assume she was planning to quit the firm. And she wasn’t. Even being trapped inside this minuscule office with a plastic platter of raw fish and a man boasting an attitude of entitlement so encom
passing he made Donald Trump seem humble was better than joining the family business.

Heath was handsome, at least. He had elegant features, and he dressed in Armani and he was going to make partner within a year. Everybody knew it.

Maybe her life would be simpler if she loved him.

But how could she love someone who brought her raw fish? Smoked she could have handled. Smoked salmon, orange and oily and sliced for a bagel, or cut into scrambled eggs…

“I’m not hungry,” she told Heath. Staring at those suspicious cylinders of gray and white made her even less hungry. Belatedly, she realized she might have sounded rude, so she added, “Thanks for bringing this, but really, I’m going to work through lunch today.”

“What are you working so hard for? Tell me the truth, Jules—” he liked giving everyone uninvited nicknames; she assumed it was some sort of strange WASP custom “—is there anything in any one of those folders that can’t wait fifteen minutes?”

“No. But if you add up everything in all the folders, the answer becomes yes.”

“But I’m free now. So we can eat this sushi together. It’s good stuff—not from the place on Madison Avenue. You remember, the one where Mindy Hawthorne was eating
ika
and she saw a roach scamper across the table?”

Julia knew she shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “
Ika?
”

“Raw squid, Jules. You haven’t been paying attention.”

He’d been trying to teach her about sushi for a long time. And he was right—she hadn’t been paying attention. She was paying attention now, though, and the combination of raw squid and cockroaches convinced her she’d just as soon skip lunch.

“I’m really not hungry,” she murmured.

He pried the lid off the tray, handed her a set of chopsticks wrapped in a tube of paper and pulled another set of chop
sticks off the tray for himself. “Here I am, trying to broaden your horizons, and you say you’re not hungry.”

“It’s the truth.” She gestured toward the tray. “Go ahead, eat. It’s all yours.”

He used the chopsticks to pluck a chunk of something—squid, perhaps, or eel, or some other disgusting specimen of sea life that would never, ever be sold at Bloom’s as long as she was president—and popped the morsel into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed and issued a satisfied sigh.

“This isn’t because of your father, is it?” he asked.

“What?” Her state of mental overload? Her growing pile of folders, which she couldn’t catch up on because she couldn’t bring any of them home to work on, since she had all those materials about Bloom’s to read? Her anger at herself over her inability to ignore those materials and let her mother run the store?

“Your aversion to raw fish. Just because your father died from eating bad fish doesn’t mean this is bad.”

“I hated sushi before my father died,” she assured him.

He popped another blob of fish into his mouth and munched enthusiastically. “Are you free tomorrow night?”

“What’s tomorrow night?”

“Friday,” he enunciated, as if addressing an idiot. “I thought maybe we could go out for dinner, catch a movie, pretend we’re a couple.”

She smiled noncommittally.

“We’ve been enjoying each other’s company for six months now. I’ve even met your grandmother. When are you going to sleep with me, Jules?”

She sighed to keep herself from answering “Never.” She didn’t know if she’d ever sleep with him. What she knew was that she wasn’t in love with him, and for some reason that meant a lot to her.

Much as she adored Susie, much as she conceded that they had exactly the same brown eyes, the same narrow Bloom nose and the same hair, straight and thick and nearly black, she sometimes wondered whether they’d sprung from different gene
pools. Susie seemed to have no qualms about sleeping with men she didn’t love. And damn it, she
enjoyed
herself when she slept with them. She truly got a kick out of sex. Julia had slept with a grand total of three men in her life, and she hadn’t gotten anything out of it at all.

She’d been madly in love with the first boy she’d slept with, in college, and she’d been so eager to keep him happy in the relationship that she hadn’t wanted to upset him by saying that the sex just didn’t feel as good to her as it seemed to feel to him. After they’d broken up, she’d had a fling with a fellow she’d met during a summer internship, just to prove she wasn’t hung up on her first lover. That relationship hadn’t worked out so well, either. Her third big affair had been in law school, and that time she’d tried, hesitantly and with great embarrassment, to suggest things he might do to make the experience more pleasurable for her. His response had been “Don’t you trust me?”

Trust had never been the problem. Orgasms had.

She’d decided she wasn’t going to venture down that path again until she met a man who knew the difference between trust and orgasms. So far, Heath had done nothing to convince her he was that man.

“Please don’t pressure me about this, Heath.” She wished her voice didn’t have a begging little whine in it.

“We’re adults.”

“I know how old we are,” she said. “I just don’t feel right about sleeping with you.”

“I always thought Jewish women were earthy. You know, loose.”

“Is that what they taught you in Sunday School? That Jewish women are loose?”

“Actually—” he ate another piece of sushi “—the only woman who got any airplay was Mary. Look, Julia—I like you. I think you like me. I think you’re beautiful. I think we’d be very good in bed together. I know for a fact that
I’d
be very good. That’s a joke,” he added before she could object. “I think the world wouldn’t come to an end if we did this. I think we’d
have fun, and I think fun is a good thing. How about you? Do you think fun is a good thing?”

She sighed again. She really did like Heath, even though he was an obnoxious twit. “I don’t know what fun is these days. My life is swamped right now. I’ve got too much on my mind.”

“Sex could take your mind off all those things that are on your mind.”

“Maybe it could.” She smiled wearily and shook her head. “I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing before I do anything with you. I’m sorry, Heath, but that’s just the way it is.”

He shrugged and polished off the last of the sushi. If sex meant all that much to him, he would be pressuring her. Or abandoning her.

Maybe he didn’t mind her refusing him because he was sleeping with other women. Julia found the possibility oddly comforting.

She simply couldn’t imagine herself lying under him while he had fun and was very good, and thinking about anything other than Bloom’s and all those papers the lawyers had sent her. No matter what tricks she and her mother pulled, no matter how successfully they maneuvered the situation, how effectively they bamboozled Grandma Ida, how well they deceived Uncle Jay…

She was the president of Bloom’s. Even sex with Heath wasn’t going to change that.

J
ulia’s cell phone bleated.

Because she was buried in the stacks of the firm’s law library, the phone sounded louder than usual. Because she knew the call would concern her family, it sounded louder still. Only members of her family would phone her on her cell phone rather than her office phone while she was at work—and calls from her family always seemed to ring very loudly.

She glanced around and saw no one in her vicinity. Balancing a leather-bound tome of legal precedents in her left hand, she used her right hand to pull her cell phone from the pocket of her blazer and flip it open. “Hello?” she whispered. Even though no one was nearby, her surroundings demanded a hushed tone.

“Julia, it’s Mom. You’ve got to get over here right away.”

Julia sighed. The book felt like a boulder in her hand. Six hundred seventy-four pages of case law in alimony judgments could weigh a lot. She slid the volume onto an empty space on one of the shelves. “I’m working,” she reminded her mother.

“Your grandmother is on the loose. She just stopped in, said Lyndon was taking her for a walk around the block, and after she got her airing she would be back to see how things were going. You’ve got to be at the store when she gets back, Julia. You’re the president.”

She’d been the president for a whole week, and so far she’d managed to avoid the store. She’d grown quite fond of that aspect of the job: not having to do it.

“I can’t just drop everything and run over there,” she argued. “I’ve got a job to do here, too.”

“What am I supposed to tell your grandmother? You’re in an all-day meeting with a herring vendor?”

Julia sighed again. “All right,” she conceded. “I’ll get over there as fast as I can.”

“What do you want me to tell Ida if she gets back here before you arrive?”

“Tell her I’m on my way. Tell her I still have things to take care of at Griffin, McDougal. Whatever you do,
don’t
tell her I’m in a meeting with a herring vendor.” Merely thinking about such a thing made her want to take a shower.

But for her mother’s sake, she would schlep across town and show her face on the third floor of the Bloom Building. She stashed her phone, lugged the alimony volume back to its proper shelf so the librarian wouldn’t have to waste a day looking for it when it turned up missing and then hurried down the spiral stairs to the floor where her office was located. Griffin, McDougal occupied three floors of a steel-and-glass box on Park Avenue. The building’s elevators stopped at all three floors, but internal stairways also connected the floors, and they were faster than the elevator.

She ducked into her office to grab her briefcase and the files on her desk, then stopped by Francine’s desk on her way out. “Family crisis,” she said. “I’ve got to run. I’ll call in later to let you know how things are going.”

Her usually cheerful secretary bit her lip in a show of concern. “It’s not sturgeon again, is it?”

“This time it’s herring,” Julia confided before darting out the door.

The day was a good ten degrees warmer than that fateful morning a week and a half ago, when she’d traveled to the Bloom Building and learned about the future Grandma Ida had planned for her. Today was beautiful, sunny and full of springtime—no wonder Grandma Ida had gone out for a walk with Lyndon. Julia could imagine her grandmother with her hand hooked through Lyndon’s arm, the two of them moving along Broadway in a pace that was a cross between stately and halting. For her age, Grandma Ida was in terrific shape, but the last time Julia had gone for a walk with her, it had taken them nearly an hour to circumnavigate the block. Of course, that was at least partly because Grandma Ida had had to stop to check out the other store windows in the neighborhood, critique the other pedestrians and complain about a yappy little dog someone was walking, the rudeness of certain drivers and the utter unfashionability of those ladies who wore sneakers with their business suits.

Julia waved at an approaching cab, but it zipped past her. The second cab she spotted stopped for her, and she dove in and gave the driver the address. As he pulled into the uptown flow, she sank back against the cracked upholstery and let out a long breath.

She didn’t want to be the president of Bloom’s. She couldn’t imagine why she’d let her mother and Susie talk her into this. She just couldn’t do it. Griffin, McDougal needed her.

Right. They needed her to look up a bunch of figures an office temp could look up just as easily. That looking up figures made her feel needed was the most pathetic aspect of her entire situation.

She wasn’t saving the world. She wasn’t fighting for justice, defending the innocent and prosecuting the guilty. She was trying to help her boss put together an argument for why his multimillionaire client shouldn’t have to pay the woman he’d been married to for twenty years a penny more than three thousand dollars a month in alimony.

The scumbag
should
pay her more. His wife had put up with him for those twenty years, and after meeting him Julia was aware of what an enormous sacrifice that must have been. But he was the one paying Griffin, McDougal—paying them big, paying them more than he wanted to pay his ex-wife—and Julia’s job was to protect his assets.

Her other job was to convince her grandmother she was running Bloom’s.

The cabbie was listening to loud sitar music on his radio. The nasal whine of it made her skull vibrate. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be tearing across town in this cab with monotonous ragas reverberating in the air. She didn’t want to save a sleazy multimillionaire cheapskate a few bucks a month in alimony, and she didn’t want to do anything that could be mentioned in the same sentence with the word
herring
.

She couldn’t be in two places at once. She wasn’t a magician, she wasn’t a superwoman—and Aunt Martha notwithstanding, she wasn’t even sure she was a feminist. Let Susie be president of Bloom’s. She was the one who’d concocted this scheme. She was obviously a genius, even if she did have a tattoo. Let her run the damn store. Let her do Julia’s job at Griffin, McDougal, too, if she was so damn smart.

Julia had built up a nice head of steam by the time she’d paid the cabbie an obscene amount for having transported her less than three miles. Climbing out of the cab, she straightened her spine, adjusted the shoulder strap of her briefcase, and lifted her chin, doing what she could to project height and dignity. She was going to tell them all the truth. She was going to say this deception was absurd and refuse to be a part of it anymore.

But then what would happen to her mother? And Uncle Jay? And Grandma Ida? And Bloom’s? Not only would Julia be jeopardizing the entire family legacy, but everyone—including Susie—would be royally pissed at her.

Julia supposed she could continue the pretense for a little while. She wasn’t going to wait for Grandma Ida to die—that was a really morbid aspect of the plan—but in time things
might settle down. Sondra would gradually take over more of the president’s job, and Grandma Ida would be so pleased by the way the store was running that she wouldn’t delve too deeply into who was actually running it. And Uncle Jay…well, maybe he could get a raise and a fancy new title. Director of outside sales and service. Chief mail order and Internet executive. Something impressive. Something that would make The Bimbette swoon, honored beyond words to be married to a powerful chief-director-hotshot like Uncle Jay.

Julia paused before entering the store. The cluttered windows always made her breath catch, but not exactly in a positive way. The overwhelming array of
stuff
—bottles of herbed vinegar, stacked boxes of crackers, wooden crates of tea bags, flourishes of radicchio and parsley, wedges of low-fat Jarlsburg, cylindrical tins of butter cookies and humble paper bags of biscotti, cinnamon sticks, olives from Greece, Turkey and who knew where else, braided cloves of garlic and braided loaves of bread—gave her heartburn. Maybe they ought to have a roll of antacids on display in the window, too.

She entered the store, avoiding eye contact with any of the employees—as if they’d have a clue that she was their president—and climbed the stairs to the kitchenware floor. In the early afternoon lull, the aisles weren’t too crowded, and she found herself studying the merchandise with a curiosity she’d never felt before. Why was the store selling table fans? What did that have to do with food? Why did they have such a limited selection of salt and pepper shakers? Wouldn’t salt and pepper shakers be a relatively cheap item to keep in stock? Couldn’t they carry some whimsical designs? Most of the salt and pepper shakers for sale here resembled the boring shakers found on the tables in greasy-spoon diners.

She reached the staff-only door at the rear of the kitchenware department, used her key to unlock it and took the private stairs to the third floor. A kind of calm ruled on this floor, due mostly to the absence of clutter. A hall wide enough to double as a reception area was lined with offices, many of
which had their doors open so people could scream back and forth to one another without leaving their desks. “Who stole my Seder-in-a-Box layouts?” Uncle Jay hollered from the depths of his office.

“Nobody stole them.” Julia’s mother’s voice emerged through another open doorway. “Besides which, isn’t it a little late to be promoting the Seder-in-a-Box?”

“The Seder catalogs are already out, Sondra.” Jay’s disembodied voice slithered through the hall. “What am I, an idiot?”

“You want me to answer that?” Sondra’s voice shot back.

“I need the Seder-in-a-Box photos to load onto the Web site. Believe it or not, some people order their seders at the last minute. That’s what we have a Web site for.”

“I thought we had a Web site to keep you busy,” Sondra muttered. Julia could hear her—and she hoped Uncle Jay couldn’t.

She stepped into her mother’s office, which was separated from her father’s old office by a narrow room occupied by Deirdre, her father’s tall, svelte secretary. Julia had always been fascinated by Deirdre, partly because of her height, her freckles and her intriguing overbite, and partly because the woman seemed so utterly competent. When Julia was a child, doing her homework or crayoning pictures in a coloring book on Grandpa Isaac’s old desk in her father’s office, all her father would have to do was shout “Deirdre!” through his open door, and the woman would instantly materialize, holding whatever papers he needed, supplying whatever information he was looking for, assuring him that she’d taken care of anything he could possibly have wanted taken care of. Julia was in awe of her.

She entered her mother’s office. “What’s a Seder-in-a-Box?” she asked.

Her mother spun in her swivel chair and leaped to her feet. “You’re here!” Excitement and relief energized her muted voice. “Go to Dad’s office. I’ll be right there.”

Sondra seemed agitated enough that Julia decided not to argue. She could get her questions answered later; for now, she should position herself in her father’s office—which was actu
ally her office now. And maybe, while she was waiting for her mother to join her and explain Bloom’s from A to Z, she could get a little work done on those alimony files.

With a nod, she left her mother, tiptoed past Deirdre’s office and entered the corner office. The vertical blinds were adjusted to let in as much natural light as possible, and in the stripes of sunlight Julia could see specks of dust dancing in the air. The carpet was nearly bald in spots—her childhood memories of this office had included a carpet as thick and soft as plush velvet, but that had been years ago. To be sure, she’d remembered everything as being bigger than it actually was. Her father’s desk was smaller than her desk at Griffin, McDougal, and her grandfather’s idle desk in the corner looked old and forlorn, the varnish eroded and the top surface slightly warped. Tiny cracks laced the leather of the sofa, and the chair behind the desk seemed to list to starboard.

So much for the exalted position of president. Maybe Grandma Ida had named Julia president because she didn’t want any of her other loved ones to have to work in this seedy, dreary room.

Julia crossed to her grandfather’s old desk and fingered the limp leaves of the coleus wilting in a pot on one corner. The poor plant looked as if it hadn’t had a drink since New Year’s Eve. If she were her father, she’d turn around and find Deirdre filling the doorway, holding a watering can.

But she wasn’t her father, and when she turned, no one stood in her doorway. She returned to her father’s desk, set her briefcase on it and settled into the chair. It was too big for her. Her feet barely touched the floor.

“A Seder-in-a-Box,” her mother said, waltzing into the office and carrying an ominous-looking computer printout of a multipage spreadsheet, “is an arrangement of traditional
Pesach
dishes that we pack into a box and ship to customers. The box includes some of that matzo we import from Israel, jars of chicken soup with homemade matzo balls, a tub of fresh-ground horseradish,
charoseth,
gefilte fish, macaroons, parsley—
everything but the roast shank and the hard-boiled eggs. It was a big seller last year.”

Instant seder, Julia thought. Add eggs and stir. It sounded peculiar to her—but what did she know? She was only the president.

“So, your uncle Jay puts pictures of the different seder arrangements we offer—different sizes, some with wine and some without—on the Web site. People order it. It makes him feel like a big
macher,
contributing something worthwhile to the company.”

“How many sales do we get over the Internet?” Julia asked.

“That’s not for you to worry about.” She pulled Julia’s briefcase off the desk and hid it in the well, accidentally setting it on Julia’s left foot and nearly crushing her big toe. Then she spread the computer printout across the dusty blotter. “This is what you’re working on, okay? It’s an inventory list.”

“I’d really rather hear more about the Web site,” Julia said, wiggling her toe inside her shoe to make sure it wasn’t broken.

“When your grandmother comes in here, you should be
doing
something, not learning about the Web site. Okay? This is easy. You just look this over, see what we’ve got a lot of and what we should be ordering more of. You’ll notice the coffee continues to show a lot of activity, no thanks to your uncle Jay, the schmuck. Let him worry about the Web site. It keeps him busy. You all set? Are you hungry?”