When I got home, my mother had already been notified. She was appalled. She had raised me organically, in food and deed. She had me wear slacks instead of dresses. I owned nothing in pink. And yet I seemed to be turning out like a child dipped in marabou. Sitting me beside her in the kitchen, she tried, as she cut the ends of string beans, to explain why I could not go around thinking such things, let alone speaking them out loud. I did not understand. She did not understand why I did not understand.

In a matter of a few weeks she began to gain weight and she got her first gray hairs. By the time Liev moved in with us, she was fifty pounds overweight and her hair, once so wavy and gleaming, had become a Brillo brush of gray. As she chopped the ends off the string beans, her final word on the subject had been: “Please do not tell your father about this.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. It will make him angry at both of us.”

That was true. My father was an ugly man, scientifically so. Though originally entranced by her beauty, he became resentful of it and sought refuge in the arms of women as painted and plucked as my mother was untouched. My father, like his girlfriends, had hair appointments once a week. The foul-smelling Fabrice would come by our house and cut my father’s hair in his study. He would snip for forty-five minutes, and then my father would come downstairs looking exactly the same, although his expression was perhaps smugger even than before. My father was not a cruel man, nor a dull or stupid one. He was quite brilliant and quite foolish. As many affairs as he had, my mother put up with them all. This incensed him and led him to loathe her, for he thought she was deliberately ignoring his infidelity in order to make a fool out of him.

Liev was vain in a different way from my father. Liev’s vanity was selective and well thought out and rooted more in good sense than insecurity. He chose not to talk because his voice was such that even he could not stand the sound of it. He chose not to be upset by my dubbing him the Vampire because he recognized it immediately as the huge compliment that it was intended to be. I was saying, more eloquently than all the women in his life before, that he was mysterious, handsome, and that he haunted our dreams.

“Don’t call our house guest ‘the Vampire.’ That’s not nice,” said my father. “You know, don’t you, that the vampire myth is rooted in anti-Semitism?”

“No, I don’t know,” I spat. “I’m twelve. Anyway, Liev doesn’t mind, do you, Liev?”

Liev shook his angular head, responding, as he always did, silently to my father and physically to me.