Impending fatherhood had turned Adam into a stomach feeler. “Let’s go to the Common and watch the people,” he said to his wife one Sunday morning as he stroked her belly. Gaby was only three months along, and her small pod scarcely showed; she said it was gas but he knew. Pregnancy had turned her into a miniature Rubens woman, lending for the first time in her life a hint of heaviness to the small breasts, giving a prominence to her hips and buttocks, and causing in her gut where the payload was carried a definite outward ellipse, far too beautiful to be gas. There was nothing for his worshiping palm to feel but the smooth skin of his wife’s immature flesh-bud, broken by the inward plunge of her umbilicus, but in his mind he could see down through the layers to the tiny living thing floating in the amniotic fluid, now a little fish but soon to develop her features, his features, arms, legs, sexual accessories.

“I don’t want to go to the Common,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You go. Take a walk and look at the girls and while you’re gone I’ll make breakfast,” she said.

So he left their bed and washed and dressed and on a lovely summer’s morning ambled over the hill. San Francisco was history. This year it was the Boston Common, and some of the people were Haight-Ashbury veterans and some were newcomers and some were fake hippies who put on the costume occasionally, but they were all fun to watch. The men were far less interesting than the women, and the reasons were not all physical, he told himself virtuously; the males tended to be slavish conformists in their non-conformity, bunching together under a limited variety of hirsute tribal markings. The women showed more imagination, he thought, trying not to stare at a bongo-smacking redhead wrapped Indian-fashion in a gray blanket despite the heat; she sported a feather in her beaded hairband and as she walked by him on marvelous bare feet, on the back of the blanket the letters U.S. NAVY moved up and down to the rhythm of the tom-tom. He made the tour of the Common but not even the most breathtaking of the juicy female hippies made him regret his wife.

Nowadays he spent a lot of time being silently grateful for what they had. With each passing day, her chances were better.