Free Love in Bloom's by Judith Arnold

a food expert,” he argued.
    “Obviously. If you were a food expert, you’d stay away from hot dogs. Do you have any idea what goes into them?”
    “Not knowing is part of the fun,” he said.
    “Bloom’s isn’t just a deli. It’s a huge business. One year ago, Ben Bloom, the president of the company died. I want you to get past the food and write about the business. One year after Ben Bloom’s death, how is Bloom’s doing? Are their financesshaky now that Ben Bloom is gone? There’s your story, Joffe. A business story about food. You’re just the one to write it.”
    He disagreed, but disagreeing with Kim was something a Gotham staffer—even an esteemed weekly columnist—didn’t do out loud. “Okay,” he said, realizing he wasn’t that hungry after all. Or else perhaps this assignment had taken his appetite away.
    With a forced smile, he backed out of Kim’s office. One of his colleagues had once dubbed her the Gotham Goddess, and someone else had said it was bad luck to turn one’s back on a goddess, so they all remained facing her when they left her office. Ron wasn’t particularly superstitious, but he knew better than to tempt fate.
    Oddly enough, though, as he retraced his steps to his office, contemplating his new assignment, he couldn’t shake the eerie notion that Kim had just given his fate a karmic realignment. Bloom’s. A fabulous deli, the death of the head honcho, family intrigue. Food, money, heirs, power. Tradition. Schmaltz.
    His nonexistent fancy was definitely turning.
     
    Susie sat cross-legged on a chair near the front window of Nico’s, the whiteboard on the table in front of her and a marker clenched in her hand. The last poem she’d written had been up for nearly two months. It was time for her to compose a new one.
    She stared at the streaky white surface for a moment, doodled a couple of round red tomatoes in the bottom-right corner of the board and tried not to think about the poetry-writing techniques she’d learned at Bennington. College professors knew how to coach students to write the sort of poetry that got good grades. Nico wanted the sort of poetry that would entice people into the restaurant to buy pizza and pasta and pitchers of beer.
    The window poetry had been her idea. She didn’t mind waiting on tables—she wasn’t crazy about it, but it paid her third of the rent for the crowded little walk-up on East First Street that she shared with Anna and Caitlin. However, she had artistic inclinations. After working at Nico’s for a few weeks, she’d asked Nico to let her redesign the pizzeria’s window. He’d put her off for a while, but finally he’d given her permission. She’d arranged some of her old stuffed animals around a toy table in the window and put a big fake pizza on the table. She’d tied a bib around the neck of Mr. Beanie, her stuffed elephant, taped a plastic fork to the paw of Aussie the koala and a wedged piece of a bread stick into the bill of Inga the stuffed duck, and she’d set before them glasses filled with water darkened with red food coloring to look like Chianti.
    Then she’d written a poem that would have earned her at best a C-minus in Sadie Rathbun’s advanced poetry writing seminar at Bennington:
    Pizza isn’t matzo.
    What it is is lotsa
    Crust and sauce and toppings and cheese.
    So come on in, PLEASE!
    Not only had many people come in and ordered pizza, but they’d all commented on the charming window display and the poem. Nico had decided that Susie must be some sort of genius, and he’d asked her to change the window display every few months.
    Her new display entailed a poster that showed a pizza broken up like a pie chart, with different-size wedges. A two-thirds-of-the-pie wedge was labeled “Percentage of New Yorkers who can’t resist Nico’s pizza.” A ninety-degree wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who prefer sex to Nico’s pizza.” A very narrow wedge was labeled “Percentage of people who, if