He'd called Elyse that morning to see if she wanted to grab a movie with him. "I've got a class," she'd said.

"What class? It's summer. Doesn't Juilliard close in the summer?"

"Dancers don't get summer vacations, Adam. It's like a sport. If you don't work out every day, you lose everything."

He'd wondered what exactly she would lose if she took a day off. Her flexibility? That delicate way she had of holding her hands, her slender fingers slightly arched and her knuckles arranged at precise angles? If she went a week without a workout, would her head hang, her chin sag, her neck shrink?

He could think of no one else to go to the movies with. Everyone in the world had something to do during the day, except for him.

"I've got tickets to a free dress rehearsal at the New York State Theater this evening," Elyse had told him. "The ballet troupe is from Brazil. They're really good."

A really good ballet troupe equated with a really sweet lemon in Adam's mind-intriguing, if you happened to like sucking on lemons. But he'd agreed to meet her outside the theater at Lincoln Center at six-thirty so they could catch the dress rehearsal. She could watch the dancers prancing and mincing. He'd watch her.

Which brought him to the second thing that should have made him miserable: Tash. They e-mailed back and forth, but as soon as he turned off his laptop, she vanished along with the icons on his monitor screen. According to her e-mails, she'd participated in three protests since arriving in Seattle; one against the World Trade Organization, one against loggers and one against manufacturers of stuffed animals, which, according to Tash, objectified and anthropomorphized animals, enabling people to forget that animals were in fact feral and not adorable beings who existed solely to amuse and comfort humans. Adam had spent the first six years of his life intensely attached to a certain stuffed koala named Koko, and he'd considered this new cause of Tash's less than compelling.

He'd expected to be spending the summer pining for his pine-tree lover. Sure, he was horny, but when he thought about sex, he thought about a sylphlike woman with blond hair that he'd never even seen loose-she always wore it twisted into a little knot at her nape-and limbs like willow branches and her toes always pointing due east and due west when she faced north. Maybe he was unfaithful, maybe he was disloyal, maybe he was just a shallow piece of shit, but Tash just wasn't front and center for him in his fantasies anymore.

He climbed the steps to the plaza at the heart of Lincoln Center, thinking he ought to be pissed as all get-out not only because he would have to sit through this ballet dress rehearsal but because her inability to go to a movie with him, combined with his abject boredom, had convinced him to ride the elevator from his mother's apartment down to the third floor of the Bloom Building to talk to his sister Julia that morning. "I really don't want to work at Bloom's," he'd said, not the best way to begin an employment interview.

"So get a job somewhere else, Adam," Julia had advised him. "I'm sure other places are hiring."

"What's the point of working other places? It would be the same kind of work-stocking shelves, running a register, whatever. No one's going to give me a real job knowing I'll be leaving for Purdue at the end of August."

"Well, summer jobs are what they are," Julia had said. "You don't get to run Citicorp for ten weeks and then skip off to grad school."

He still couldn't quite get past seeing his sister sitting at their father's desk, doing their father's job. She was Julia. He'd grown up with her. He'd chipped at the dried blobs of toothpaste she left in the sink. He'd heard her ear-shattering shrieks when some boy did or didn't call her in high school. He'd shared whispered jokes with her during seders, and he'd once caused her to choke on matzo from laughing too hard. She'd tattled on him for getting green ink on the living-room rug and for stealing and eating all the Hanukkah gelt-three mesh bags filled with gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins that their parents had given, one apiece, to each child. She'd also covered for him when he was sixteen and had gotten shit-face drunk at a classmate's Christmas party while she was on her winter break from law school. She'd kept him from waking their parents-he'd been blitzed enough to see nothing wrong with bellowing "Joy to the World" at two in the morning, but Julia had muzzled him, gotten him washed and out of his clothes, cleaned up the kitchen sink when he'd barfed into it, helped him brush his teeth and tucked him into bed, all without their parents ever finding out.

So it had been unsettling to see her, dressed neatly if not too formally, enthroned in their father's big leather swivel chair, running Bloom's. Even more unsettling to ask her for a job after he'd adamantly insisted he would not be working at Bloom's this summer.

"Do you need money?" she'd asked.

"Money's nice," he'd conceded, then shrugged. "I'm bored. I need to do something." While Elyse is in her ballet classes, he'd almost added, but he hadn't been quite ready to admit to that.

"I can find something for you," Julia had promised. "You could restock shelves. Work inventory. You'll get to use the price gun."

Oh, joy. The price gun. "Sure," he'd said.

"Okay. You can start Monday. Go see Helen."

"Who's Helen?"

"Our Human Resources person."

"I didn't know we had a Human Resources person."

"I've made some changes," Julia had said.

Making some changes wasn't always a bad thing, he reminded himself. If Julia could hire a Human Resources person for Bloom's, surely Adam could renege on his pledge not to work there this summer. And surely he could spend an evening watching people in leotards, tripping around a stage on their tiptoes and fluttering their hands. It wasn't as if there were any movies he was dying to see, anyway.

He spotted Elyse standing near the doors to the State Theater, on the southern edge of the plaza. The horizon still held a few traces of waning light, and the fountain spewed arcs of silver water into the air. If he were a romantic type, he'd consider the setting very romantic-the fountain, the first few evening stars poking through the sky and a graceful babe with outstanding posture and pretty blue eyes watching for him. He quickened his pace; she spotted him and smiled.

He smiled back.

Bloom's Bulletin

Written and edited by

Susie Bloom

A fellow in need of a treat Came to Bloom's to pick up something sweet.

He ate like a slob 'cause He loved those Bloom's babkas And the rugelach couldn't be beat!

Welcome to the June 3 edition of the Bloom's Bulletin. Mother Nature is turning up the heat-and Bloom's is ready! Browse through our frozen-foods departments. You'll find delicious, nutritious fruit pops (made of 100% fruit juice, no sugar added), frozen yogurt, and yes-rich, creamy ice cream with a high enough butterfat content to send your cardiologist screaming into the night. Go ahead-eat, bubbela! Enjoy! Also make sure to check out our delicious summery salads, prepared fresh every day: fruit salads, mixed-greens salads, potato salads, pasta salads, all guaranteed to bring your cardiologist back home again.

Fill your belly and feed your head!

Thanks to the success of our first "Booking the Cooks" program, Bloom's will be instituting a variety of lectures and classes. Coming up over the next two months: Glynnis Montebello will speak on "Napkin Origami" and teach attendees how to fold napkins into boats, flowers, swans and crowns, the perfect way to dress up a table for a festive dinner party. Nutritionist Larry Schwartz will present "What Color Is Your Brunch?" He will explain what the colors of foods indicate about their nutritional value. Sami Gorshan will repeat his fascinating talk on Middle Eastern cuisine and politics, "Couscous and Kiss-Kiss-Breaking Bread as a Path to Peace." Child psychologist Jana Popowitz will give a talk called "Eat Your Peas-Healthful and Hug-ful Strategies for Feeding Your Child." Check page four for times and dates.

In the spring, a woman's fancy...turns to chocolate. Specials on imported chocolates this week. Perugina, Lindt, Toblerone, all at prices guaranteed to start your cardiologist screaming again. Indulge!

Did you know...

We often use the word lox in reference to smoked salmon. However, lox isn't smoked salmon at all. It's salmon that has been cured in salt brine. In the nineteenth century, curing salmon from the Pacific Northwest in salt helped to preserve it for the long cross-country railroad trip to New York. In the early years of the twentieth century, immigrant Jews loved lox because it was inexpensive and kosher whether served with dairy or meat. Smoked salmon offered a less salty alternative to lox. Smoking techniques developed in Europe for Atlantic salmon were imported to New York, also in the early twentieth century, and the milder smoked salmon eventually eclipsed the heavily salty lox in popularity. No one knows who invented the combination of a bagel, cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon-but whoever it was should have won the Nobel Prize!

Employee Profile: You may never have seen Myron Finkel, but he's as much a Bloom's fixture as the cash registers, the cold-cuts counter and the showcase windows. Myron has served three generations of the Bloom family as the store's in-house accountant. He started his career here as a fresh-scrubbed graduate of City College when deli founders Ida and Isaac Bloom ran this place and remained when Isaac and Ida handed over the reins to their son Ben. After Ben's death two years ago, Myron was on hand to help the store transition to new leadership under Ben's daughter Julia.

Known for his bow ties and his passion for Bloom's cranberry bagels with strawberry-flavored cream cheese-"All that pink, it's so pink!" he enthuses-Myron is a native New Yorker who currently makes his home with his wife, Muriel, in Co-op City. "It's a long subway ride," he says, "but not so long that a Heat'n'Eat dinner goes kaput on the ride home."

Myron was ignorant about the food industry when he first started working at Bloom's. He considers himself a modest expert now. He's learned why some cheddar cheeses are more expensive than others-"It has to do with the age of the cheese, mostly. Plus the kind of milk used, and where it was made," he explains. To be sure, he knows more about cheddar cheese than computers. "I got my start on adding machines and that's what I like," he says. "I feel comfortable with them. Computers? They're meshugge. They freeze on you. I never once had an adding machine freeze on me. I did have one that the multiplication key sometimes got sticky, but wiggle the key a little and it always came unstuck."

Besides eating cranberry bagels, Myron's greatest joys are playing with his grandchildren, balancing his checkbook and working at Bloom's. "We're all family," he says. "I'll never retire."

Wise Words from Bloom's founder, Ida Bloom: "Horseradish is God's way of telling you he's stronger than you are."

On sale this week: cracked-wheat crackers, pimento-stuffed olives, acidophilus milk and more! See inside for details.

Ten.

Eva had a kind of Halle Berry thing going. Her hair was short, with tufts pointing in all directions like a shag rug after someone ran a vacuum cleaner over it. She had more curves than Halle Berry, which Casey didn't mind, and round eyes, and her skin was the color of lightly done toast. Mose had told Casey that LaShonna had told Mose that she thought Eva would be perfect for his newly unattached buddy.

She wore a simple dress with a scoop neck. A gold cross dangled on a slender chain just above her bosom. For that alone, Casey's mother would consider Eva an improvement over Susie. His mother seemed to think that if Casey fell for a Catholic girl, his lust would lead him back to church. Fat chance.

In any case, he doubted he would fall for Eva. Her assets notwithstanding, her voice contained an unpleasant whinnying quality, and she loved telling knock-knock jokes and laughing uproariously over them, and she was drinking one of those weird chic cocktails that bore a distant relationship to a martini but glowed a turquoise that strained his eyes and was served in an odd-shaped glass, and she'd never seen a Jackie Chan movie in her life and couldn't imagine why she should. Like LaShonna, she seemed to have set her sights on snagging a businessman on his way up. Evidently, LaShonna had told her Casey was an entrepreneur. Eva hadn't been able to hide her disappointment when Casey had explained that he was a bagel specialist hoping to open his own gourmet bread shop.

Still, she was being a good sport about this blind date, and Casey supposed he could be a good sport, too, even though a large chunk of his brain had been hijacked by Susie. He had no idea where the hell she'd gone-but wherever it was, she'd taken a significant piece of him with her, leaving him incomplete and off balance.

LaShonna had dragged Mose out to the dance floor, abandoning Casey and Eva at their dark little table against the wall. A retro spinning-mirror ball strafed them with floating dots of light, and the club smelled vaguely of beer and peppermint and assorted perfumes. Casey nursed his Killian's Red while Eva nursed her turquoise whatever, and he scrambled for something to talk about while she bounced her shoulders in time with the music.

"I'm sorry," he said, acknowledging what those shoulders were telling him. "I'd ask you to dance, but I'm really a lousy dancer."

"Nobody's a lousy dancer," she argued with a smile. "Some people are good dancers with lousy attitudes, that's all."

"My attitude has two left feet." He smiled apologetically.

She stopped twitching her shoulders, apparently resigned that he wasn't going to escort her out on the dance floor. "So tell me, Casey-is that some kind of nickname?"

"Is what some kind of nickname?"

"Casey. Is that a nickname or something?"

He took a deep breath and prayed for patience. He'd never had to suffer through small talk with Susie. From the first, their talk had been-well, not necessarily big, but interesting. Never this getting-to-know-you crap, this poking and probing on issues that were ultimately irrelevant.

His name, for example. "My name is Keenan Christopher," he told Eva, then added, "Junior."

"Wow, that's a mouthful. Keenan Christopher Junior? Imagine if you were in big trouble at home and your mama had to call you on it. 'Keenan Christopher Junior, I've got a mind to thrash your butt!' Yeah, that would sure scare a naughty little boy. How'd you get from Keenan Christopher to Casey?"

"The initials," he said. At her perplexed stare, he broke it down for her. "Keenan starts with K. Christopher starts with C. KC. Casey."

"Oh. Okay. Wow. Yeah."

One of his molars began to ache-purely psychosomatic. Really, there was nothing wrong with Eva. She seemed like a nice person, and she was attractive, and...

God, he missed Susie.

"So how come Mose calls you Woody?"

"From the movie," Casey explained, willing his fingers not to drum out their tension against the tabletop.

"What movie?"

"White Men Can't Jump."

"Never saw it," Eva said.

Great. She didn't watch Asian martial arts films and she didn't watch White Men Can't Jump. "The two main characters are this white guy and a black guy who hustle folks playing basketball. Mose calls me Woody because the white guy is played by Woody Harrelson, and I call him Wesley because the black guy is played by Wesley Snipes."

"Wesley Snipes," Eva purred. "Now, that's one fine-looking man. Well, I guess I'm relieved. When Mose called you Woody, I thought maybe he was referring to your anatomy or something."

Casey swallowed, but a laugh escaped him anyway. Were all blind dates this bizarre? Was the bizarreness due to Eva or him, or the two of them together, combining in a particularly strange way?

"Knock, knock," Eva said.

Casey tried not to cringe. "Who's there?"

"Woody."

"Woody who?"

"Woody-who like to bite my ass?" Eva laughed so hard she snorted, sounding like Mr. Ed suffering an asthma attack.

Casey laughed, too, partly out of politeness and partly because Eva's laughter was so awful. "That was pretty good."

"I just made it up," she boasted. "Right on the spot. Okay, so, tell me more about this store you're opening," she demanded. "I just can't believe it's all gonna be nothing but bread."

"Well, bread, bagels, rolls-gourmet carbs," he explained. She stared blankly at him. "I think there's a market for it."

"People eat bread, I guess," she said dubiously. "A classy place, though-you should open it in Manhattan."

"I know." At last, something they agreed about. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and leaned forward. The deejay was playing loud hip-hop, and Casey had to narrow the distance between Eva and himself if he had any hope of her hearing him. "I'd love to open it in Manhattan, but the rents there are way out of my price range."

"Manhattan is the cool borough. People in Manhattan would spend money on boutique bread. In Queens, people spend money on Catholic-school tuition and Mets tickets."

True. "But people are more homebodies in Queens," he argued, trying to convince himself as much as her. "They're more likely to eat at home, and to eat well-rounded, well-prepared meals."

"That's what you want? Homebodies?" Eva sniffed contemptuously. "If I was opening a store, I wouldn't want homebodies shopping in it. Did Mose tell you I'm working toward a real-estate license?"

Casey felt his eyebrows climb toward his scalp. "No, he didn't mention that." He'd told Casey that Eva had attended Queens College with LaShonna and currently worked in a cubicle at an insurance company, and that she did flamboyant things to her fingernails-they were polished a glittery purple hue but otherwise were pretty tame, Casey thought; his sister put teeny dog decals on her nails, so it took a lot to impress Casey, manicure-wise-and that the odds of scoring with her on the first date were about thirty/seventy, maybe thirty-five/sixty-five. Mose valued precision.

Casey had no intention of scoring with Eva on the first date. For one thing, he preferred to know a woman well before he slept with her, and for another, he wasn't too thrilled about having to go back to donning the old formfitting latex sleeve. Which was actually just another way of admitting that he wasn't ready to sleep with another woman so soon after Susie had walked out on him.

Scoring, schmoring, as Susie would say. Mose had neglected to tell Casey the most important stuff about Eva: she liked to dance, she hadn't seen any Jackie Chan movies and she was studying to be a Realtor.

He sipped some beer, then leaned forward again. "Does that mean you have access to rental information for stores?"

"I've got an MLS book," she told him. He must have looked the way she'd looked when he mentioned Jackie Chan, because she elaborated. "A Multiple Listing Service book. It's this big, thick catalog that lists all the properties in an area for sale or rent. I've got software, too."

He grinned. "I bet you do."