Coffee, Cigarettes, and Crucifixes

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

At thirty-three, he really did look a lot like Jesus. That beard, that hair, those eyes- pale, searching, as he lifted to his lips a hand-rolled cigarette. His chest, which was often bare, was as luminous as death, holy death, made earthly by the two pink coins of his nipples. His ribs showed slightly, like charcoal thumbprints, walking open-shirted to the fridge. When, yawning, he stretched his arms above his head, his armpits peeked darkly through his sleeves. The hair on his torso was scant, however: just a few straggled strands between the pectorals, and a snail trail down the abdomen.

It was my sister who encountered him first, in the hallway. She had thought he was a burglar and, accordingly, sent a shrill scream through the house. It was not her screaming that awoke me, however, but my mother, who shook me awake, gently, and led my sister and I to the lounge.

I can still see us, as we must have appeared to him: two identical, black-haired, black-eyed children, blinking brightly through the darkness. The curtains, I remember distinctly, were drawn. The dimness was velvety, almost touchable, blurring the boundaries between objects. A mantle clock. A television, turned off, reflecting the adults’ standing forms in miniature. Our old black sofa with the geometric designs, smelling of stale cornflakes. The whole scene suffused with a deep crimson light.

“This is Peter,” she told us, as if that explained everything.

*

Peter was one of seven brothers, all with names like ‘Matthew’, ‘Paul’, ‘Phillip’, and ‘John’. The family was dirt poor, of Irish extraction, and with a strange, schizophrenic strain. Some brothers turned out better than others. There were normal ones with families, who we picnicked with on occasion at the estuary. Another, severely afflicted, turned up on our doorstep one day with his minder. He was not introduced to us, but simply led through to the study room, which was separated from the lounge where my sister and I were by a glass partition. In silence we sat, slitting our eyes and hating from a distance the fat shirted back, the poverty and strangeness that had been brought into our proximity. Many of the brothers were estranged.

In the beginning, we shied away from Peter, as if sensing his polluted lineage. As his presence became more fixed, however, we were steadily drawn in, captivated by his strangeness. He had the tastes of a child, but was indifferent to children: meaning, that when he bought sweets or switched on cartoons, it was not for our sake. He was also impressively knowledgeable. He could take apart clocks and put them back together. He knew the scientific names of tropical fish. He was always bringing my mother books- thick, hardback books with dust-laden covers and nicotine-yellow pages.

And then there was his resemblance to Jesus. Jesus, who my sister and I knew only as a bearded, barely clothed fellow with a tortured look, from the somber Baroque paintings that adorned the walls of our household. The walls of my mother’s bedchamber were especially adorned, a fact that we interpreted with much amusement. “She loves him because he looks like Jesus,” we whispered behind our hands, and giggled. “Like her paintings!”

My mother was a bad Catholic, if she could be called one at all. She did not go to church. She smoked, she cursed- especially on wintry mornings, when the red Corolla refused to start before school. She had, for as long as I could remember, always kept a roundlet of birth-control pills in the bathroom cabinet. Most telling of all, she had never been married to my father, despite sharing a house with him for thirteen years. All the same, she liked the art. She liked the male saints, especially Sebastian. She always wore crosses, silver crosses, about her neck. Her first name was ‘Mary’.

Mary and Jesus. She was thirty-five, older than him by two years. It was her house that she opened up to him, her bed that he shared. In return, he graced us with his presence, leaving behind as relics his spilled tobacco, chocolate bar wrappers, and empty cartons of Masters mocha milk.

Ours was a household that invited clutter, a place where disarray took on romantic associations. My mother would emerge from the bedroom, as late as noon on some weekends, still dressed in the deep crimson kimono with the black lapels. She would emerge from the bedroom and, lighting a cigarette, would smile upon the spilled tobacco, the chocolate wrappers and empty milk cartons. Peter would emerge minutes later, sometimes showered, sometimes not, and would reach for his own cigarette box, spilling more tobacco in the process.

I was part of the same romance, drunk on the same dark air. Waking earlier than everyone else, my sister included, I would wander the house in silence, taking in every detail of their depravity. I saw wine glasses, left on the coffee table from the night before; burnt-out candles, dirty ashtrays, wadded newspapers and half-read books of verse. I checked the chocolate wrappers for remnants and ate whatever was there. I shook out the empty milk cartons and, tilting my head back, drank in the dregs.

*

Sometimes, late in the morning, I would hear them stirring; hear the tuning of a radio and, beneath it, the gentle murmurings of conversation. Peeking through a crack in the door, I would deem it safe to enter. They would be sitting up in bed, smoking usually, their bodies draped in dark red velvet sheets. Though I knew they were naked, or nearly so, beneath the sheets, at seven I was too young for it to bother me. Likewise, I was too young to be bothered by my mother’s lacy white undergarments hanging about the canopy bed, or by the staleness of the air.

Instead, I would climb into the bed and into her arms, inhaling the warm, ashy smell of her olive skin. Peter would register my intrusion with a slight sneer, but would go on talking- perhaps glad to have an audience. He was given to grand statements about life, art, and pleasure: statements that I took as creed, considering him an oracle of good taste and knowledge. One morning, sighing after his first death-stick, he proclaimed that cigarettes, along with freshly brewed coffee, were two of the three greatest pleasures in the world.

“What is the third?” I wanted to know.

He exchanged a glance with my sheet-clad mother, and the pair laughed.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“How old?” I persisted. “Fourteen?”

“Fourteen. Fine. Yes.”

I accepted this answer, and grew pensive, thinking of what life would be like for me at fourteen; of the secrets I would be let in on, the adult pleasures I would know, the body I would have (little did I know that at fourteen, I would still be among the uninitiated, the formless, pasty bodies and limp late blooms). My mother might have suggested making some coffee, a proposal to which Peter agreed. In any case, I was always booted out of the bedroom when it was time for them to dress: Peter in his faded vintage shirts and slacks, my mother- if not in her kimono- in one of her white singlets and a pair of bootleg jeans.

I did not mind waiting for them to dress: always anticipating happily the payoffs of his sweet tooth. On the weekends I could expect, almost without fail, a trip to the nearby bakery or, at the very least, to the corner shop for chocolate bars, flavored milk, and soft drink. Best of all, however, was when I saw him putting on his boots and taking the keys from his pocket. He would announce that he was going back to his flat for a while to feed the fish, to collect his papers and attend to other business- that he would stop by the patisserie on the way home. He would slam the screen door behind him and, unasked, I would rush out after him, buckling myself into the passenger seat before he had even reached the driveway.

*

It was not only the pastries that made these drives exciting for me- though, I confess, the choice between vanilla slice or éclair, tart, gateau, or doughnut, was never far from my mind. Yet the thrill of being in a bachelor’s car, of riding upfront with a man who I was not related to, was equal to- if not greater than- that of my impending sugar-fix. For it was a bachelor’s car, there was no mistaking it: no mistaking what those empty cans, cartons, loose coins, old newspapers, and unlaundered shirts signified. It was a thrill to have to move all the clutter, just to get to my seat; to sit with my knees up and my feet on the dashboard, for fear of them being nibbled by rats or roaches if I let them touch the floor.

I was, though uninvited, not an unwelcome companion to Peter. He was an unscrupulous adult, idle and impractical; I was a fanciful, pagan child with bare feet and no notion of hard work. We were kindred spirits. I knew, without asking, that he favored me to my elder sister. I was the wild one, the ravenous one, the one with the imagination.

I was also, at the age of seven, perhaps a little bit in love with him. Perhaps- looking at his profile as he drove, the fine, straight Irish nose and changeable pale eyes, whose color I could never quite determine. During these drives, he listened to my childish prattle, sometimes even indulging me with stories of the supernatural: omens, exorcisms, vampires, and headless horsemen. Once, passing a park where three crows were gathered in a circle, obviously plotting some evil, he described the scene as being, “like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Edgar Allan Crow!” I corrected him, and laughed at my own wit.

I did not know who Poe was, or Pushkin, or Polidori—only Peter, who was utterly original in my eyes. He called himself a writer and, though he had never published a thing, I believed him: because he carried crusty, leather-bound notebooks; because he owned inkwells; because he wrote in a spidery, illegible hand with a real quill. Visiting his flat, there was even more evidence of his occupation, in the form of loose leafs of paper, scribblings that, try as I might, I was unable to decipher.

The inside of the flat was much the same as his car, only on a slightly larger scale. One bedroom. A dingy bathroom, with copies of Mad magazine and Vampirella comics strewn over the tiles. There were posters on the walls from old movies, film noir mostly, as well as a sultry shot from the French film Betty Blue.

The lounge was lacking in essentials- I had to sit on a milk crate-, nevertheless, there were clock parts everywhere, waist-high piles of books, and, at the forefront of the room, the greenish glow of the tropical fish tank, water rippling, filter humming in the dim.

I would drag my milk crate up to the tank, and watch the flashing forms and colors. I would identify the species as they passed—discus, angelfish, neon tetra, and gypsy-skirted guppies, while Peter moved from room to room, as slippery as one of his coolie loaches. He would appear again, in a different shirt, defrosting bloodworms for the fish or searching for his special cigarette box, the one where he kept the green tobacco. The green tobacco, I sensed, was more valuable than the standard brown stuff, since it came out less frequently and always with deeper sighs of satisfaction.

The tablet of bloodworms would go in the tank, clotted and dark as menstrual blood. The largest fish, discus and angelfish, would usually be the first to swim up. They would pick at the threads until the whole cube had disintegrated, worms dashing downward to be caught by the smaller fish. We would watch this scene together. When his voice told me it was time to go, I would tear my eyes from the tank that contained universe of Technicolor fins and swaying plants, with difficulty. Outside, the sunlight was always too harsh on the asphalt, blinding me on the path back to the car.