“Has it?” Her eyebrows arched. “That’s what all the white explorers say. They stumble over some supposedly ‘lost’ city and then claim to have discovered it, when the natives have known about it for centuries.”

“How many explorers know about this treasure?” he asked, rubbing her steadily.

She lay back on her elbows. “Mmm … let me see. There’s you … and my husband … and a very pretty boy I went to school with … and—”

“That’s two too many,” Tom said.

Viola pretended to pout. “What do you expect, when you took so long to show up? What was I supposed to do all that time?”

“You’re only twenty-eight.”

“That’s ancient in my country.”

This kind of playfulness, Tom reflected, was entirely absent from his marriage. He didn’t blame Peggy for their rather perfunctory sex life. He blamed her parents, and the long line of ancestors who had blindly embraced repressive strains of Christianity, with their puritanical separation of body and spirit, the equation of pleasure with shame, and the near deification of guilt. All that had led to generations of frustrated, lying men and guilt-ridden women. Tom knew those women well. He’d been reared by one, and he’d married another. Even when almost every fiber of Peggy’s being cried out for release, her relentlessly conditioned mind short-circuited her desire, burying the ancient urge with destructive consequences that no one had yet evolved a system to calculate. Tom had heard countless similar stories in his medical practice, and he saw the pernicious results. He sometimes wondered whether the myriad of vague female complaints he encountered—“nerves,” “vapors,” “hysteria”—might not be cured by a few nights of guilt-free sex. But for many of those women, that cure could not be accomplished without a pharmacological guillotine that would sever the body from the cerebral cortex. Until that existed, true sexual fulfillment for those patients would remain unattainable.