"Joe Jones"

Jessie's Cafe begins to fill up with favorite regulars, strangers, and extras sent over by central casting. Louise greets them all from the grill, berates and cajoles and insults them while she shakes a corn dog in the deep-fat fryer, ladles out soup or cassoulet, flips burgers, and rubs rosemary between her fingers that she then massages into lamb chops.

"Thanks a lot, Lou."

"Hey, thank you. Take it easy -- Keep 'em in the boat."

"Yeah, okay, see ya later."

"Club 'em if you have to, okay? But keep 'em in the boat."

"Hi, Jessie. Gee, you look so pretty today."

"Hi, Dana! Hi, Sam. Hi, Booney."

Jessie beams at the new arrivals, Sam and Dana Waters, classically mellow California couple with their two-year-old son in a stroller, which they carry up the stairs of the porch, the baby prince in his litter.

"Hello, Gristdancers," Louise calls from the grill. Joe nicknamed them four years ago, when they first started coming in. They had both been reading books by Ram Dass -- Sam was reading "Grist for the Mill" and Dana was reading "The Only Dance There Is."

Sam is a fine painter, a Marin County local colorist -- landscapes and seascapes. Dana quit her job as a graphic designer when Boone was born. Louise loves them, like she used to love the fellow members of her high school basketball team -- camaraderie within a prescribed arena.

"Hi, Willie," they say as Willie comes in from the back.

"Hi." Willie smiles. He bends down to look into Boone's serious face. The child looks like a large howler monkey, his hairline beginning only an inch above his forehead, his lower face and jaw canted forward so it occurs to you you could almost fit a muzzle on him. Boone studies Willie as if a message is appearing on Willie's face.

"You gotta get Boone a bigger stroller," says Louise. "He's too big for that one. It makes him look like an outpatient."

Serving these people fills her account. Thinking of Joe drains her just as living with him used to. But no matter how much she cooks and serves, chants and prays, his presence in her head is a sickness that gives her fever dreams: Happy and bad memories agonize her. She so vividly remembers his devotion to everyone at Jessie's, his eagerness to please, how sweet and funny and bashful he could be, how much Willie loved to tease him.

Joe took Jessie out on a date the year before, dinner and a movie on her birthday, and while driving her home he smashed into a deer that jumped out in front of the car. He was distraught when he told Louise about it in bed that night. The next morning at the cafe, Willie came over and punched him in the arm, shaking his head with admiration. "Heard you bagged a buck," he enthused. Joe smiled sheepishly.

Don't think about that now. Think about his self-centeredness. Think about his unfaithfulness. No, don't think of him at all. But it is as if there is a picture of Louise's skeleton, and over it is a transparency showing her muscular system, and over that there's a transparency of her organs, and over that is a transparency of her cardiovascular system, and over that is a transparency of Joe Jones. It is dark gray with regret, depression, anger, and what the poet Lermontov called the bitter record of the heart. God, she prays, take away the obsession, take away the hate. Let what I have here now be enough.

Yearning, said another poet, is blindness.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Jessie's best friend Georgia Malone arrives at three by taxi. An empress dowager, Isak Dinesen in an aqua double-knit pantsuit, she shuffles in wearing surgical paper slippers and a white beaded turban.

"Why, Georgia!" Jessie cries, with delight.

"Pffffttttttt."

"Sit down! Yoo-hoo, Louise, Georgia's here."

"Hi, Georgia." When Louise turns around from the grill, Georgia has sat down next to Jessie and is glaring out the window. Louise studies them. Jessie, a one-woman aviary, runs through her repertoire of bird-sounds, coos, clucks, peeps, cheeps, and occasional whistles of inhalation. Georgia periodically makes the only sound anyone in the cafe has ever heard her make, an abrupt spluttery raspberry. Joe called it Georgia's fark. Sometimes hours pass between the two old women in their seats by the window and the only noises are the birdsong and the Bronx cheer, unless, like elephants, they communicate by tummy rumbles, too low to be heard by other human ears. It is one of the goddamnedest things Louise has ever witnessed, this particular best-friendship. When Jessie chatters, Georgia glowers -- when Jessie reads, Georgia appears snubbed.

Today Jessie chatters. "Did you watch TV last night? Not much on, was there, Louise? What did I watch last night? Did I tell you?"

"I don't know, Jessie."

"Willie?" Willie sticks his head out from the back room. "Did I tell you what I watched last night?" Willie shakes his head. "Oh, for Pete's sake, I wanted to tell Georgia. Yes, now wait, I remember; it was that nice, thin young man from New York. Singing. What's his name, Louise?"

"Who?"

"That nice, thin young man from New York."

Louise asks, "What does he do?"

"He sings. And he plays the banjo."

Louise thinks for a moment, asks, incredulously, "Pete Seeger?" Jessie nods.

"Pfft."

"Jessie," Louise tells her, "he's no longer young, and he never lived in New York City."

"I've been thinking, Georgia," Jessie continues. "We ought to go to the zoo. Joe took me there last year. They have a new white tiger there, a boy. Maybe some day next week--"

"Pfft." Georgia is glaring.

"It was just an idea, Georgia. You don't have to get sore."

Louise is still at the grill, chanting, chanting to keep Joe at bay, the grace of God surrounds me. Her craving for him can be, and is now, a lag as jangling as the craving that hits when the last line of cocaine has been snorted. It's like a mosquito bite, late at night, on the fingertip.

Joe Jones is such a mix. Self-centered and giving, devoted, unfaithful, sad and funny, needy, tough, arrogant, and shy. Stricken by fears of death, given to flights of whimsy. So loyal and committed to all of them, and then he'd go and sleep with someone who meant nothing to him, destroying his life in the process -- his home, with Louise, and the one real family he's ever had, the people at Jessie's cafe.

He was out of a job when they first met. The high school at which he coached basketball had been closed down because of state budget cuts. Joe was broke, and so, for her thirty-eighth birthday, he gave her a beautifully wrapped library book. It was a collection of photographs by Imogen Cunningham of people over ninety. One was a gnarled old woman wearing a bookie's visor. There was a quote at the top of the page. "When we were young," she said, "we were all puritans and all we talked about was whether it was right or it was wrong. And then I married a man from Sardinia."

"I'll take it back for you in a month," Joe said.

It became her favorite book in the world. Jessie and Georgia went through it almost every day. By the end of the month Joe had landed a job as a security guard, guarding things no one would want to steal.

Please, God, she prays, send me someone else to love.

"Pfft."

Louise smiles at the grill. Okay, I get it, she says silently. She brings the two old women a lovely pot of tea and a plate of Willie's lemon cookies, hot from the oven. Georgia beams mischievously, almost evilly, at the cookies, as if she is getting away with something.

Remember what Jessie said last year, Louise: You have no new ideas on how to make it work. You have tried everything with Joe. You have been trying so hard to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- maybe you two should just be friends. But you can't save yourself, Louise. Because we are addicted to our allergies, and you are allergic to Joe. But stop trying to be your own savior. Give it up to God. Let God be your savior. It gets you off the hook, and it puts God on the hook, where He belongs.

Louise looks over at Jessie's frail, stooped back. Thank You for Jessie, she prays, thank You for Willie, for people to serve. I'm doing the best I can. It's just that -- I've been sick, You know? Do you remember that old joke, where the lion is dangling the mouse by the tail, swinging it back and forth before his eyes and sneering? He says to the mouse, "You are the weakest, most pitiful creature I've ever seen in my entire life," and the mouse says, "I've been sick."

She sits down on the porch with a cup of tea and reads Joe's letter again. It doesn't really sound like him at all. There is a reason for this, which Louise will never know.

While Joe was lunching with his mother at the yacht club, a funny old guy wearing black socks with sandals, Bermuda shorts, and a porkpie hat sat down at their table and started to talk, and this is what he said: It's probably good to remember that Hawaii for a couple hundred years experienced the same measure of white domination that India, Africa, South America, and other places did...."

Joe Jones is not well educated, but his memory serves him well.

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