Authors: Judith Arnold
He laughed. “What brings you down here to the netherworld?”
“I was dying for some pizza.” She glanced at her scarcely touched slice and forced another feeble smile. “Rick, this is a friend of mine, Ron Joffe. Ron, my cousin Rick.”
“You must be one of Jay Bloom’s sons,” Joffe guessed.
Rick’s eyebrows vanished behind the hank of hair that fell across his forehead. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve told him a little about the family,” Julia said quickly. She didn’t want Rick to learn that Joffe was a reporter. If he did, he’d start badgering Joffe in the hope of gaining connections or money for his filmmaking ventures. And Joffe would interview Rick to learn more about the Bloom family for his article.
She had the rough draft in her briefcase, which was wedged between her feet under the table. She ought to have skipped this trip downtown, gone home and read the damn thing. She was never going to have a chance to talk to Susie, especially not now that Rick was present, and she was stuck eating pizza when she should have been eating Bloom’s stuffed cabbage, and her father was a two-timing bastard—a dead one, but still—and her head hurt.
She brought her attention back to the two men at her table and realized that her caution in introducing Joffe had been for naught. Rick was describing the plot of his movie—not so much a plot, actually, as a string of concepts: “There’s a car chase, of course—gotta have a car chase—and sex and anomie. You know what anomie is? I think any flick that’s going to be taken seriously these days has to have some anomie in it.”
“Who’s producing it?” Joffe asked.
Bad move, but it was too late. Rick happily launched into a soliloquy concerning his financing woes. Julia nudged her plate toward Rick, figuring he must have come to Nico’s because he was hungry, and excused herself to use the ladies’ room.
On her way to the back hall where the rest rooms were located, she spotted Susie behind the counter, handing an order to one of the chefs on the kitchen side of the pass-through window. When Susie turned away, Julia grabbed her hand and dragged her down the hall.
“I’m working,” Susie reminded her, although she didn’t put up much resistance.
Julia nudged her into the one-seater ladies’ room, followed her in and locked the door. “We have to talk.”
Susie crossed to the mirror above the sink and fussed with her hair. “About what? You like the bagel showcase? I’m not done with it yet, but—”
“Susie. Listen to me. Dad was having an affair with Deirdre Morrissey.”
Susie spun around so fast she banged the paper towel dispenser with her elbow. “Ow! My funny bone,” she wailed, rubbing her arm.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Daddy and Deirdre Morrissey.” Susie twisted her arm in an attempt to view her wound.
“Doesn’t that shock you?”
Susie regarded Julia enigmatically, then shrugged. “You want to know the truth? I always figured he was screwing around with someone. He was never home, for God’s sake. If the only thing keeping him from us was Bloom’s, I mean, that would be pretty pitiful.” She rubbed her elbow and ruminated. “Deirdre? I don’t know. She’s not exactly hot stuff.”
“Damn it, Susie! You’re supposed to be shocked.
I
was shocked.” In truth, Julia wasn’t sure about that. At least she was conscious of the fact that she
should
have been shocked.
“I mean, Deirdre.” Susie shook her head. “She’s so skinny, and those teeth of hers. I figured, if Dad was screwing around, it would have been with someone like The Bimbette.”
“The Bimbette?” Julia wasn’t sure which image nauseated her more: her father with Deirdre or her father with a woman like Uncle Jay’s Wendy, all twinkly and buxom. “I thought he was having an affair with the store.”
“The store was his one true love,” Susie agreed. “The rest was just getting his rocks off.”
“Why aren’t you upset? You should be.
I’m
upset.” Merely saying the words forced Julia to acknowledge that she wasn’t as upset as she wanted to be. “Don’t you even feel bad for Mom?”
Susie hoisted herself to sit on the sink counter. She swung her feet and twisted her arm again, searching her elbow for a bruise. “I feel bad for Mom that Dad was never around, and
the only way she could spend time with him was when they were both at the store together. I feel bad that she thought she could get his attention by pretending to love the store as much as he did.”
“You don’t think she loves the store?”
“Are you kidding? She loves the money, she loves the power, she loves getting in Uncle Jay’s face. But she doesn’t even love the food. She’s always on a diet.” Susie gave up on her elbow and propped her chin in her cupped hands. “A woman who wears a two-carat tennis bracelet doesn’t belong on the payroll of a delicatessen.”
“It’s not just a delicatessen. It’s Bloom’s.”
“You’re a Bloom. So am I. Mom’s a Feldman. It’s not the same thing.”
“Susie.” Julia felt drained, and stupid. How could her sister have psyched out their father while she herself had been clueless all these years? “If you knew Dad was having an affair, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t
know
. I just sort of sensed it. And I didn’t tell you because I figured you’d be shocked.”
Julia sighed. “What do you think I should do?”
“Keep it out of
Gotham Magazine
,” Susie suggested, then smiled gently. “Leave it alone, Julia. What
can
you do? It’s history. He’s dead.”
“But—but he betrayed Mom. He broke his wedding vows. He had sex with his assistant. In his office. I found a box of condoms.”
“Condoms? What a good boy.” Susie snorted. “Imagine if he hadn’t been careful. We might have had another baby brother.”
“One brother is enough.” Julia closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “What’ll we tell Adam?”
“Nothing. Why tell anyone anything, Julia? What’s the point?”
“The point is, our father was a shithead.”
“Like, this is news?” Susie slid off the counter and enfolded Julia in a hug. “I gotta go.” She yawned. “Juggling two jobs isn’t good for me.”
“Quit Nico’s. I’ll hire you full time.”
“I make a lot here with tips.”
“I’ll give you tips. Come work at Bloom’s, Susie. I need you.” For a lot more than what she could contribute to the store, but Julia didn’t say that.
“Yeah, right.” Susie released her and unlocked the door. “Go take that cute little reporter boy home and have your way with him.”
“I might do that,” Julia said, following her sister out of the rest room and acknowledging that while the thought of sex right now excited her about as much as the thought of eating the cooling, congealing slice of pizza she’d left on the table, she couldn’t come up with a better idea.
“I could put your cousin in touch with some people,” Joffe said.
Julia sat naked in his bed, the sheet pulled up to her waist, a box of graham crackers by her side and the rough-draft pages of his article spread across her lap. She’d had her way with her reporter boy, found the act had distracted her quite nicely, and when they were done she’d realized that she was famished. He’d offered to race over to Bloom’s to pick up a stuffed cabbage for her, but the store closed at ten. “Maybe we should stay open later,” she’d remarked, when he brought her the graham crackers. “We could attract a younger, hipper clientele. Maybe we could have singles’ nights at Bloom’s. From nine to eleven, only singles would be allowed. It would be an improvement over most singles’ bars. Better lighting, better nutrition. What do you think?”
“Great idea,” Joffe had said, sprawling across the foot of the bed. He’d donned a pair of navy-blue sweatpants, which paradoxically made him look sexier than he’d looked naked. She kept glimpsing the waistband where it clung to his abdomen just below his navel, and thinking about what was underneath that dark-blue fleece. “If you really want to institute something like that, let me know. I can put it in the article and see what kind of interest it generates.”
The article. For some odd reason, she hadn’t given it a thought while Joffe had been lying under her, his hands clamped around her hips as he guided her up and down in a devastatingly effective rhythm. Nor had it entered her mind after she collapsed sweaty and panting on him and assured herself that she was nothing like her father, even though she’d discovered, to her amazement, that she liked sex. But once she’d regained a degree of lucidity that enabled her to nibble on graham crackers and shape coherent sentences, his comment had reminded her that the tear sheet was still in her bag, awaiting her attention.
It was wonderful. Not a puff piece but close, with lots of juicy descriptions of the different departments, the cluttered counters and packed shelves, the blended aromas of cheese and coffee, warm bread and hot entrées, the clatter of voices and footsteps and churning cash registers. In the article, Uncle Jay was depicted as rather lightweight, Deirdre as rather grim, Sondra as a yenta and Myron as having the personality of library paste, although Joffe put it a bit more tactfully. Julia herself came across as overwhelmed but learning on the job, which was true. At least he hadn’t made her sound like a ditz.
She’d just finished reading the article, when Joffe mentioned her cousin. “I know lots of people looking for projects to invest in.”
“If they’re your enemies, send them to Rick,” Julia suggested.
“You don’t like him?”
“I love him. But I don’t think he’s ever going to make a movie.”
“Probably not. The thing is, I know investors who’ve got money to burn and like to think of themselves as artistic. They buy paintings that are never going to appreciate. They invest in Broadway shows—which is about as sound an investment as buying lottery tickets. Some of them might like to get in on the ground floor of an independent movie—even if it never leaves the ground floor.”
“How do you know people like that?” she asked.
He grinned. “I’m a financial writer, remember? I hobnob with Wall Street types.”
“You’ve got an MBA.”
“That, too.”
She stacked the pages of his article and set them aside, then helped herself to another cracker and munched on it thoughtfully. “Joffe, I need your help.”
She must have sounded pretty somber, because he straightened up and stared at her. “With what?”
Everyone she’d discussed the bagel situation with at Bloom’s had laughed at her, and perhaps he would, too. But after reading his article, she felt she could trust him. He respected Bloom’s, and she couldn’t figure out the damn bagel problem on her own. Maybe he could help. “It’s such a small thing, it probably isn’t worth thinking about,” she admitted. “The store is losing nearly a hundred and fifty bagels a week.”
“Losing them?” He frowned.
“They just disappear. There’s no record of them. They aren’t bought. They aren’t thrown out at the end of the day. They just disappear.”
“You’ve talked to the bagel department?”
“Susie talked to one of the guys in the department. He didn’t know anything—although she’s hot for him, so who knows how the conversation went.”
“You’re hot for me, and this conversation is going fine,” Joffe said with just enough arrogance to make her want to throw a pillow at his head. “Maybe I should talk to the guys in the department.”
“No,” she said hastily. “We need to keep it in the family. Anyway, it’s not just bagels. There are other unaccountable losses. Cream cheese. Sometimes a little lox or smoked whitefish. A pound of coffee here and there, or tea.”
“Shoplifting,” Joffe told her. “Every store has problems with it, Julia. The losses are built into the pricing structure. If these thefts are causing Bloom’s to falter—”
“It’s not shoplifting,” she explained. “This is organized. There’s a consistency in the amount of stuff vanishing each week. I can’t go around accusing my employees of stealing stuff, but something’s going on. I don’t know how to investigate it.”
He ruminated. “My specialty is finance, not retail,” he conceded. “But maybe if I inspected your books—”
“I’ve inspected the books. Myron has inspected the books. You’re not going to find anything in them that we haven’t already found.”
“Then you’re going to have to start talking to your employees. You don’t have to accuse them, just question them.”
“Oh God.” She shuddered. She was still so new at running the store. To rage at the personnel, giving them the fifth degree over missing bagels…It would resemble that awful scene from
The Caine Mutiny
, when Humphrey Bogart accused the crew of stealing his strawberries and everyone realized he was crazy. If she started interrogating people at Bloom’s about the missing bagels, they’d think she was crazy, too.
“Your other option is to write off the loss and forget about it,” Joffe said.
“That’s what my mother and Uncle Jay want me to do.” She sighed, tossed the box of crackers onto the night table and sank into the pillows. Tears of dejection and fatigue threatened her eyes. “I wonder if it was going on while my father was still alive. I wonder what he would have done about it. Screwed Deirdre, probably.”
“I guess you don’t want to discuss this bagel problem with her,” Joffe surmised.
“I don’t want to discuss anything with her ever.” She sighed. “Do you think I should discuss it with her?”
“She seems to know what’s going on, a lot more than other people who work at Bloom’s do. And if you want to keep working with her, Julia, you’re going to have to talk to her.”
“I doubt I can even look her in the face.”
“So talk to her over the phone. Or else forget about the
whole thing. It doesn’t sound like something that’s going to drive the store into bankruptcy.”
“I can’t forget about it. Bloom’s should be doing better than it is. It’s like a tire with a slow leak in it—it’s holding up okay, and you can drive on it as long as you remember to add a little air once a week. But you know in your heart that leak is there, and sooner or later you’re going to have to patch the damn tire.”
“Then patch it. You’re the boss. If you want to fix the tire instead of refilling it with air all the time, you’re the one who’s going to have to patch it.”