Me and Mrs. Jones

For a large portion of my youth, I had no ambitions. I was utterly clueless about what I wanted to do with my future, and even if I had had the slightest idea, I always figured that I would never be able to accomplish anything. Thus, as a university student on the track to nowhere, I spent long hours moping at the café on the corner by my apartment. It was an old jazz café, but a sense of relaxation and ease flooded through anybody who stepped inside, along with the soothing scent of freshly ground coffee. The jukebox in the corner was always whirring out old ballads or swing tunes, and I’d often catch couples spinning and twirling about on the dance floor. Songs like “The Peppermint Twist” always made me wish I lived in the 1960s.

My second summer of college, I began working part time at the café. I needed the money, and it was a bonus that the proprietress was rather attractive. Her name was Matsui Rena, and she had just gotten married earlier that spring. Her husband was a successful businessman who was often abroad for business trips. Rena didn’t love him. It was no secret that his travels were riddled with women and . As a result, she often spent entire days in her private room at the back of the café drawing, only emerging after a completed work.

Rena’s drawings were unique, to say in the least. If I drew something, the image always remained flat and stuck on the page. She would draw people, animals–anything and it would come to life. Rough lines on paper would bunch together to form a solid line, and carefully blended colors would solidify into textures. One by one, elements of the piece would join together and eventually peel off the page into a tangible object. The first time I saw it happen, I was wiping down tables when she had materialized a kitten.

“You don’t seem very surprised,” Rena mused. She d the kitten, adding, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen this before?”

“I haven’t. How’d you do it?”

“It’s a secret,” She smiled. “But I’ll teach you if you want.” I shrugged my shoulders and tossed the dirty table rag in my hand aside, wiping my hands on my apron. She beckoned for me to come closer and pointed at a barstool in front of her. Obliging, I plopped down on the worn leather cushion. A mischievous grin crossed her face and she grabbed my chin and jerked it up. Her lips crashed against mine, and a sudden gust of wind swept through the room, knocking down a few signs. Releasing me, she arched an eyebrow and looked at me expectantly.

“You’re married.“ 

"I know. Try drawing something.” Frowning, I snatched a pen and napkin from across the counter and doodled a rainbow. Sure enough, a small rainbow emerged from the sheet, lasting only a few seconds before disintegrating. Rena shot me a smug, triumphant look, but I ignored her and went back to cleaning table tops, pausing when I noticed that the windows and doors of the café were all closed. 

Following that incident, I went in every day at six-thirty, the start of my shift. I would serve customers until we closed up the café at twelve. From then, Rena and I would play around and experiment with various drawings. All the while, the jukebox would be playing music. The one song it always played was Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones.” It was Rena’s favorite

Most of the time, I would wait for her to conjure up random creatures and people, and then I would weave stories and lives out of her characters. Occasionally, she and I would kiss, and even though I knew it was wrong, it was too strong to stop. Unsure about the two of us, I once asked her why she kept kissing me.

“Rena, why do you do this?”

"Perhaps you could think of it as matters of the heart.”

And she was right. All my fears and concerns faded through her companionship. In this way, I spent two years with the proprietress of a obscure jazz café, and in this way, I grew to love stories.

On the day of my graduation from college, I decided to confess my feelings for Rena and ask her to move in with me. I never got the chance to. Later on, I found out that she had died in a car crash on the way to my graduation ceremony, and the café had been shut down.

It’s already been five years, but I haven’t moved on from her yet. I tried to fill the void in my heart by spinning wild tales of adventures that the two of us might have had. In the end, I wasn’t satiated, but I realized that I wanted to write. I work as a novelist now; it was a struggle just scraping by at first, but I caught my big break when I released a book inspired by Rena and her favorite song. It told of the adulterous relationship between a college girl and the proprietress of the café the girl worked at.