Unexpectedly, Emilio's face lit up and he seemed about to say something, but then the fingers combed through the dark hair again and his eyes slid away. 'Even priests have private lives,' was all he said.
That night, as Jimmy lay in his bunk, he remembered a conversation with Anne one evening, back in Puerto Rico. He'd been over at their place for dinner, and George, who always seemed to know when somebody needed to talk to Anne alone, went to bed early. It was three weeks after the first ET radio signal and Jimmy was depressed because everyone thought he'd screwed up, or that Elaine Stefansky was right and he had been the victim of a hoax after all or, worse yet, was responsible for the hoax himself. He still saw Sofia quite often at work and he found himself uncomfortable with Emilio, wondering if they were lovers. He felt jealous and judgmental. And he was troubled by the mixture.
He beat around the bush for a while, but Anne knew what he was getting at. 'No, I don't think there's anything going on,' she told him plainly. 'Not that I'd disapprove, you understand. I think it would do him good to love her and I think it would do her good to be loved, if you want my opinion.'
'But he's a priest!' Jimmy protested, as though that settled something. 'He's taken vows!'
'Oh, God, Jimmy! Why are we so damned hard on priests when they find someone to love? What exactly is the crime here?' she demanded. 'What is so terrible about loving a woman! Or even just needing to get laid once in a while, for crying out loud.'
He'd been speechless at that. Anne had a directness that shocked him sometimes. She reached out for her glass of wine but only twirled the stem in her fingers, rotating it slowly, watching the burgundy glow in the low light. 'We all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever,' she said. 'Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we really truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement.'
'You and George didn't go back on your promises.'
She laughed. 'Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.' She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, 'They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and—well, the rest is none of your business.'
'But people change,' he said quietly.
'Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people.' She flopped back against her chair. 'Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I'm figuring something out now.' She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn't have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he'd learned in a long time or the most discouraging. 'Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest's vows by jeering at him when he can't live up to them, always and forever.' She shivered and slumped suddenly. 'But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.'
He had been taken aback by her vehemence. He thought that because she and George had been married so long, she'd have high standards for everyone. A promise is a promise, he wanted her to say, so he could be angry with Emilio and hate his father for leaving his mother and believe that it would be different for him, that he'd never lie or cheat or run out on his wife or have an affair. He wanted to believe that love, when it came to him,
'Until you get the measure of your own soul, Jim, don't be quick to condemn a priest, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not scolding you, sweetheart,' she said hurriedly. 'It's just that, until you've been there, you can't know what it's like to hold yourself to promises you made in good faith a long time ago. Do you hang in there, or cut your losses? Soldier on, or admit defeat and try to make the best of things?' She'd looked a little sheepish then and admitted, 'You know, I used to be a real hardass about stuff like this. No retreat, no surrender! But now? Jimmy, I honestly don't know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.'
He tried to think about all that, lying in his bunk. The divorce had been awful but then his mother found Nick, who loved her something fierce, and she was surrounded now by Nick's kids, who thought the world of her. Things had worked out okay.
And he thought about Emilio and Sofia. He knew very little about Sofia, only that she had lost her family in Istanbul during the U.N. quarantine and that she'd gotten out by contracting to a broker. And, of course, that she was Jewish, which had thoroughly surprised him when he first found out. It didn't seem to bother her to be the only non-Catholic in the crew and she was respectful of the priests' commitments, even if she had picked up a healthy dose of irreverence from Anne. Sofia, he realized then, had almost apprenticed herself to Anne during these long months, studying the nuances of affection: the quick hugs, the way to cup a chin in the hand or brush back the hair while making some acerbic, narrow-eyed, comic comment. And if Sofia was still pretty formal, it was clear that she was trying to recapture something that might have been hers by right if her life had been different. There was a promising warmth in her, which Jimmy had misinterpreted as an invitation. And now understood to be a simple offer of friendship.
Well, he'd blown that by looking for more than she was willing to give. So he adjusted his sights. If Sofia ever felt safe enough to offer friendship again, he decided, friendship would be enough for him. It could happen. When you live in close quarters for months, a certain amount of familiarity is unavoidable. And he wondered then how hard that was on Emilio.
After that first real dinner onboard the
Even so, Jimmy was convinced, the sexual tension was still there. Where two people working together might have brushed hands during a task or stood closely, Emilio took pains to prevent contact: an awkwardly held wrist, a slight movement away. By chance alone, they might have sat together sometimes, and so it was significant that they never did. And for all the music and singing that went on in the
Emilio could be so casual and funny that you forgot sometimes that he was a priest and it came as a surprise when you saw his face during the Mass, or watched him doing something ordinary extraordinarily well, in that Jesuit way of making everyday labor a form of prayer. But even Jimmy could see that Emilio and Sofia would be good for each other and that their children would be beautiful and bright and beloved. And, following in the footsteps of centuries of compassionate Catholics before him, Jimmy now wondered why guys like Emilio had to make a choice between loving God and loving a woman like Sofia Mendes.
He asked himself how he'd feel if he found out someday that Emilio had kept his vow, always and forever. To his surprise, he leaned toward sad. And he knew that Anne, who used to be such a hardass about stuff like this, would approve.
It would not have surprised Emilio Sandoz that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.
One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. 'What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE,' Sam told him. 'It's not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself. It's got to be something like that for you guys.'
