The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [83]
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