Jane develops her own overpowering desires that are quite independent from Griffin's escapades: when the telephone repairman, Milos Saworski, a polish immigrant with limited command of English, enters her house, she is completely overwhelmed by what she experiences as his unearthly beauty.
While sexual desires unravel families and love relationships in this novel, it is the love between fathers and sons that disrupts these momentarily beautiful but cruel and ultimately destructive desires.