The Sparrow

16 THE STELLA MARIS: 2031, EARTH-RELATIVE

It was five months into the voyage when Emilio heard a knock at his door after dinner one night. "Yes?" he called quietly.

Jimmy Quinn stuck his head into the room. "Got a minute?"

"Let me check my schedule." Emilio sat up cross-legged on his bed and consulted an appointment book made of air. "Tuesday? Eleven-fifteen?"

Grinning, Jimmy came all the way in, closing the door behind him. He looked around the little room, never having been inside it before. "Same as mine," he commented. A narrow bunk, a desk and chair, a terminal networked to the ship's backup computer system. One difference: a crucifix on the wall. "Jeez, you keep it bright in here! Hot, too. I feel like I'm at the beach."

The priest narrowed his eyes sensuously and shrugged. "What can I say? Latinos like it sunny and warm." But he turned down the light panels to make Jimmy more comfortable and flicked off the display on the ROM tablet he'd been reading, setting it aside. "Have a seat."

Jimmy swiveled the chair away from the desk and sat looking around for a while. "Emilio," he said, "can I ask you something? A personal question?"

"Of course, you may ask," Sandoz said a little warily. "I don't promise I will answer."

"How do you stand it?" Jimmy suddenly burst out in a strangled whisper. "I mean, I'm going crazy! Look, I hope this doesn't embarrass you, because I sure as hell am embarrassed, but even D.W. is starting to look good to me! Sofia made it real clear that she's not interested and—"

Emilio held up a hand, not wanting further details. "Jim, you knew what the crew complement was when you volunteered. And I'm sure you did not believe that Ms. Mendes was included for your convenience—"

"Of course not!" Jimmy said, indignant because he had entertained a certain low-level expectation of life's possibilities in that direction. "I just didn't know how hard it would be."

"So to speak," Sandoz murmured, eyes sliding away, a smile flickering on his lips.

"So to speak. God, this is awful!" Jimmy laughed, wrapping his long arms around his head and contracting into a coil of mortification. Then his limbs uncurled and he looked back at the priest and asked frankly, "Look, seriously, what do you do? I mean, what am I supposed to do?"

He expected something along the lines of Zenlike self-mastery and Rosaries, so he almost didn't understand when Emilio looked him in the eye and said, "Take care of yourself, Jim." At first, from the way it was said, with the intonation used to say good-bye to someone, Jimmy thought he was being dismissed. It took a moment to sink in. "Oh. Well, yeah. I do, but…"

"Then take care of yourself more often. Until it's not right in the front of your mind all the time."

"Is that what you do? I mean, maybe after a while, you don't feel the need anymore, I guess, huh?"

Emilio's face closed. "Even priests have private lives, Jim."

For the first time since meeting the man, Jimmy felt he'd crossed some line and he backpedaled as quickly as he could. "I'm sorry. Really. You're right. I shouldn't have asked that. Jesus."

Sandoz sighed, clearly uncomfortable. "I suppose, under the circumstances…All right. In answer to your first question, I can tell you that in a survey of five hundred celibates, four hundred and ninety-eight of them said that they masturbated."

"What about the other two?"

"Elementary, Watson. From their response we may deduce that they had no arms." Before Jimmy had recovered, Emilio continued dryly, "As for your second question, I can only say that after twenty-five years, the need persists."

"God! Twenty-five years."

"The first part of your exclamation explains the second part." Emilio ran his fingers through his hair, a nervous habit he had never been able to break. He let his hands fall and rested them on his knees. "You are actually in a more difficult situation than a priest or a nun is. Celibacy is not the same as deprivation. It is an active choice, not simply the absence of opportunity." Jimmy said nothing, so Emilio went on, voice quiet, face and eyes serious. "Look, I'll be honest with you. Priests differ in their ability to hold themselves to the vow. This is common knowledge, yes? If a priest goes secretly to a woman once a month, he may be stretching his self-control to its limit and he may also be having sex more often than some married men. And yet, the ideal of celibacy still exists for him. And as time goes on, such a priest may come closer and closer to consolidating his celibacy. It's not that we don't feel desire. It's that we hope to reach a point, spiritually, that makes the struggle meaningful."

Jimmy was quiet. He looked at the grave and unusual face of the man opposite him and when he spoke, he sounded older, somehow. "And you've gotten to that point?"

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, would be always and forever.

"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 Stella Maris, Emilio started calling everyone but Anne and D.W. by their last names. "Mendes," he'd call out, "did you already take care of this filter? I thought I was supposed to do that this week." Sofia had persisted in Doctoring and Mistering everyone, but shortly after Emilio made his change, she took up the practice and it was, "You have to purge some files, Sandoz. We're running low on op-RAM." It gave them a way of speaking to and about each other without first names but without unnatural formality. It was probably Emilio's way of turning the intensity down, to make the relationship more comradely.

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 Stella Maris, there had been no second song, no repetition of the heart-stopping intimacy of that evening in August.

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."

And Emilio realized that Sam was right. When wearing clericals, he did feel as though he had a sign over his head flashing NO LEGITIMATE SEX LIFE. Lay people assumed they knew something fundamental about him. They had opinions about his life. Without any understanding of what celibacy was about, they found his choice laughable, or sick.

Oddly, it was men who'd left the active priesthood to marry who were most eloquent about celibacy. It was as though, having given up the struggle themselves, they could more freely acknowledge the value of it. And it was in the words of one such priest that Emilio had found the clearest description of the Pearl of Great Price: a humaneness beyond sexuality, love beyond loneliness, sexual identity grounded in faithfulness, courage, generosity. And ultimately, a transcendent awareness of creation and Creator…

There were as many ways to lose one's balance and sense of purpose as there were people who engaged in the struggle. He had himself gone through a time when avoidance of sex became so consuming he thought of nothing else, like a starving man who dreams of food. Finally he had simply accepted masturbation as a way station, for by then he'd known men who made compromises that brought nothing but grief to the women who loved them or who dissolved loneliness in alcohol or, worst of all, who denied that they felt desire and split their lives: paragons in the light, predators in the dark.

To persist, to find a way through and beyond the rigidity, the pitfalls and the confusion, Emilio had with painful care carved out an unflinching self-awareness and honesty. He found a way to live with the aloneness, to say «Yes» when he asked himself if the Pearl would be worth the price he paid, day after day. Night after night. Year after year.

Who could speak of such things? Not Emilio Sandoz who, for all his facility with many languages, remained tongue-tied and inarticulate about the center of his soul.

For he could not feel God or approach God as a friend or speak to God with the easy familiarity of the devout or praise God with poetry. And yet, as he had grown older, the path he had started down almost in ignorance had begun to seem clearer to him. It became more apparent to him that he was truly called to walk this strange and difficult, this unnatural and unutterable path to God, which required not poetry or piety but simple endurance and patience.

No one could know what this meant to him.