Suzanne shook her head. “Do not raise your voice to me in my own home,” she said, then turned back to me. “We are an open family, Jacob. We have no secrets. But we do have a saying, from the French: What the moon may know, the sun need not. Isn’t that a lovely sentiment? It has brought us much happiness. I would advise you not to become too concerned with the customs or morals of others. You’ll have a very long, dull journey if you do. There is my daughter. She has waited a long time to make love to you, and you have waited, too. You may acquire this experience, or you may turn away. I will wait in the hall for two minutes. If you want to return to your room, Jacob, you may do so.”

Suzanne left the room, and Dria looked at me. It was clear her mother held this power over her. She was flushed with the shame.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I wanted to do it,” she said. “I was so ready.”

“Me too,” I said.

She sighed. “Now you think I’m crazy.”

Dria was lying naked under the eiderdown, her tender chest so disappointed. I stroked her along the hip.

“You should go,” she said. “I know you want to go.”

She reached out and dragged her fingertips along my stomach. “I did want that filthy Jew horn inside me,” she said, nostalgically.

The mechanisms of desire are so strange in our species, residing half in imagination, half in our hearts. Who can say what means will light the magic wick? It must be easier for the rest of the animals, a matter of the glands.

Or maybe it was this easy for me, as I lay next to Adrianna Blacet on Christmas Eve. Her glands told her to start breathing more deeply. Her glands told her to start touching my belly. My glands, in turn, became suddenly attuned to her, stark naked at last. How long my glands had waited for this, eight months of swollen prelude.

There was so much perversity blooming in that house, Bud and Paco together in the shower, Sandro greased up and whimpering for lamb, Suzanne ready to witness our fumbling bodies. These were disturbing facts. I agreed. I agreed. But I couldn’t do anything about them, really. At best, I could run off into the world of the allegedly normal with a scandalous story to tell. But the world has enough of those.

Consider this one: a woman announces she’s been impregnated by God and gives birth to his bastard son in a donkey barn. Strange stuff.

Whereas Dria, she wasn’t strange at all. She wasn’t angry at her mother, either. Not really. She wanted, instead, a grand occasion for hope. Our skin yearned for contact. Her mouth reached for mine.