"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: To all who've had recent graduations, Nico's offers congratulations!

As you travel along life's many stations, May we be a part of your celebrations.

Now's the time for some taste sensations, Some shrimp or crab or other crustaceans.

We prepare our dishes with care and patience.

So come and try our tasty creations!

Shielding his eyes with his hand, he peered through the window into the cafe. 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.

He spotted Susie at another table, near the counter. She was busy doing something; he couldn't tell what, but whatever it was, it couldn't be that important. He pushed open the door and she looked toward him and smiled. The geezer with the overpriced espresso didn't even glance up from his newspaper.

Rick crossed the dining room to Susie's table. As he got closer he could see she was refilling table dispensers of grated Parmesan cheese. The dispensers stood in a row like large glass onions, their chrome lids unscrewed while Susie spooned the powdered cheese into them from a large plastic vat. The cheese was the same dingy color as Susie's complexion. Her eyes were outlined in black, her lips tinted a ruby hue, but her cheeks were awfully pale. Give her a striped shirt, white gloves and a top hat, and she could pass as a street mime.

"Hey, cous'," he greeted her.

She forced a vague smile. "What's up? You hungry?"

"Always, Susie. Hunger is my middle name."

"Richard Hunger Bloom. Yeah, I could see your mother saddling you with a name like that." She screwed the cap onto one of the table shakers and pulled another closer to her for filling. "We might have an old slice of pizza destined for the trash. You want it?"

Jeez. She didn't have to make it sound as though he was picking food out of a Dumpster. The old slices were perfectly edible leftovers from lunch, a slice here and there that didn't get bought. "If you've got one of those extra slices, I'll take it," he said, refusing to let her undermine his pride. "No need to heat it up. I'll eat it cold." He said that to spare her from reminding him that she couldn't stick it in the oven without attracting Nico's attention. Her boss was in the kitchen, doing setups for the dinner rush. It wasn't as if he'd fire her for feeding the leftovers to her perpetually starving relative, but why get him involved in the transaction? Life was simpler if Nico remained in blissful ignorance.

Susie stood and walked around the counter. She had on khaki shorts and a black T-shirt under her apron. He had never seen her in khaki before. Maybe that was why she seemed so wan; her face reflected the gray-tan of her shorts.

He watched her slide a limp slice of pizza onto a paper plate and carry it back to the table. Her movements were sluggish. Maybe the lunch hour had been more hectic than usual, or maybe juggling this job and her responsibilities at Bloom's demanded too much of her. Or maybe that drive all the way up to the hinterlands of Ithaca last weekend had wiped her out.

And here he was, ready to ask her to drive to the hinterlands with him. Different hinterlands, though-and Grandma Ida wouldn't be part of the deal.

He accepted the pizza from her and tried not to wince at the congealed cheese and glistening oil coating the wedge. As she resumed her seat, he took a bite, chewed and smiled. Not great, but it was edible and hunger was his middle name. "Thanks."

"I live to serve."

"So...how's it going?"

She eyed him sharply. "Why are you asking?"

Because you look like shit, he almost said, but he didn't think she'd appreciate his honesty. "I've got this gig and I need your help."

She pursed her lips and screwed a lid onto the jar she'd just filled. "Why is it that I only see you when you want my help? Or food," she added, cutting him off before he could defend himself.

He tried to muster some indignation, but there was too much truth in what she'd said. "Food is always helpful," he said, hoping to finagle a smile out of her. She glowered and started in on another empty Parmesan dispenser. He consumed a little more of the cold, rubbery pizza, giving her a chance to forget how often he came to her looking for aid. "So listen," he said. "The help I need from you is going to be fun. I've been hired to make a documentary."

"Really?" Her face brightened at that. "Who hired you?"

"Bloom's. And it's not exactly a documentary," he continued when her expression changed from excited to skeptical. "It's kind of an infomercial."

"An infomercial for Bloom's?"

"Yeah-but calling it a documentary sounds so much cooler, don't you think?"

"Well, which is it?" she pressed him. "An infomercial or a documentary?"

He used his thumbnail to pick a twiggy piece of oregano out of a hardened bulge of cheese. After scraping the oregano onto the pleated edge of the plate, he took another bite. "Okay, here's the deal. My dad convinced your sister to cough up twenty-five thousand dollars to make a video promoting Bloom's. He's thinking infomercial. That's the way I pitched it to him. But I'm thinking, why aim low? If we can get some time on local-cable access, why fill that time with some schlemiel standing behind a counter and demonstrating how to slice bialys? I'm thinking, why do something boring when I could do something with vision? Something artistic?"

"Maybe because something with vision and artistic isn't going to promote Bloom's," she pointed out.

"But it is!" He was awash in enthusiasm, and aimed the overflow at her. Susie had always been the only Bloom who understood him, who thought like him, who didn't consider him a complete loser-although maybe she was just good at pretending she didn't consider him one. Maybe she truly believed he was interested only in getting her to give him help and food.

No, she knew he was interested in other things. Film, for instance. And her poetic window displays. And her roommate Anna.

"I had this idea," he explained. "I wanted to bounce it off you. Tell me honestly what you think." Not too honestly, he wanted to add. Just be honest if you absolutely love the idea.

She lowered the spoon she was using to scoop Parmesan with and stared expectantly at him.

"Bloom's Soup," he said.

"Bloom's soup? What, like the chicken soup with matzo balls?"

"No. Like 'Stone Soup.' Remember that old children's folk tale?"