Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage Read Online Free Page B

Instinctively, I glanced at the third finger of his left hand. No wedding ring. From that bare left hand and from his reflexive reaction of tired commiseration I made a quick diagnosis: divorced.
    It was here that our interview turned surreal.
    "Well, you could always sign a prenuptial agreement," Officer Tom suggested. "I mean, if you're worried about going through all the financial mess of a divorce again. Or if it's the relationship issues that scare you, maybe some counseling would be a good idea."
    I listened in wonder. Was a deputy of the United States Department of Homeland Security giving us marital advice ? In an interrogation room? In the bowels of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport?
    Finding my voice, I offered this brilliant solution: "Officer Tom, what if I just found a way to somehow hire Felipe, instead of marrying him? Couldn't I bring him to America as my employee, instead of my husband?"
    Felipe sat up straight and exclaimed, "Darling! What a terrific idea!"
    Officer Tom gave us each an odd look. He asked Felipe, "You would honestly rather have this woman as your boss than your wife?"
    "Dear God, yes!"
    I could sense Officer Tom almost physically restraining himself from asking, "What the hell kind of people are you?" But he was far too professional for anything like that. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, "Unfortunately, what you have just proposed here is not legal in this country."
    Felipe and I both slumped again, once more in complete tandem, into a depressed silence.
    After a long spell of this, I spoke again. "All right," I said, defeated. "Let's get this over with. If I marry Felipe right now, right here in your office, will you let him into the country today? Maybe you have a chaplain here at the airport who could do that?"
    There are moments in life when the face of an ordinary man can take on a quality of near-divinity, and this is just what happened now. Tom--a weary, badge-wearing, Texan Homeland Security officer with a paunch--smiled at me with a sadness, a kindness, a luminous compassion that was utterly out of place in this stale, dehumanizing room. Suddenly, he looked like a chaplain himself.
    "Oh no-o-o . . . ," he said gently. "I'm afraid things don't work that way."
    Looking back on it all now, of course I realize that Officer Tom already knew what was facing Felipe and me, far better than we ourselves could have known. He well knew that securing an official United States fiance visa, particularly after a "border incident" such as this one, would be no small feat. Officer Tom could foresee all the trouble that was now coming to us: from the lawyers in three countries--on three continents, no less--who would have to secure all the necessary legal documents; to the federal police reports that would be required from every country in which Felipe had ever lived; to the stacks of personal letters, photos, and other intimate ephemera which we would now have to compile to prove that our relationship was real (including, with maddening irony, such evidence as shared bank accounts--details we'd specifically gone through an awful lot of trouble in our lives to keep separated ); to the fingerprinting; to the inoculations; to the requisite tuberculosis-screening chest X-rays; to the interviews at the American embassies abroad; to the military records that we would somehow have to recover of Felipe's Brazilian army service thirty-five years earlier; to the sheer expanse and expense of time that Felipe now would have to spend out of the country while this process played itself out; to--worst of all--the horrible uncertainty of not knowing whether any of this effort would be enough, which is to say, not knowing whether the United States government (behaving, in this regard, rather much like a stern, old-fashioned father) would ever even accept this man as a husband for me, its jealously guarded natural-born daughter.
    So Officer Tom already knew all that, and the fact that he expressed