Mrs. Lightcap had no desire to return to Smith College in September. One year in that place, she explained, was enough. Henry felt grateful. The prospect of eight months in a town named Northampton in a state of New England had filled him with claustrophobic angst, though he’d kept mostly silent about it.

Thoreau liked it there, she said. Thoreau was a creepy little pederast. That’s a lie. He liked to take young boys on huckleberry parties; and I mean take. You have the lowest, filthiest mind; you’re worse than any pederast; Thoreau was a flutist and a wilderness lover; he should be a hero of yours. He did have an elegant prose style. He still does. But his poems are mediocre even for a Harvard man. That’s true; get out your flute, Henry. This one? That one.

He uncased his old beaten secondhand Haines. Claire placed on the music stand some Bach gigues, gavottes and bourráes which she had transcribed for him. He attempted the first.

Too many flats, he complained. I made it as simple as I could; anyhow the notes are not your problem. What’s my problem? You have a good tone; you have clear phrasing, decent timbre, adequate fingering; but—. Yes? This is Bach, not some Irish folk tune; not a cowboy song. What do you mean? I mean that it has to be played with metrical precision; you’re not counting, Henry; you don’t seem to have any sense of measure; how could you ever play with other musicians? Well, I never tried; I’m a soloist. But this is J. S. Bach, soloist or not. Well, I’m Henry H. Lightcap and I don’t care who knows it. Sweetheart, we’re aware of that. But you don’t have to be so aggressive about it. It suggests a certain quality about you which, well, is not your best.

Claire was smiling at him as she said it, her hand on his knee. He looked away, out the open doorway of the cabin, and felt, for a moment, a sickly sadness trickle through his nerves. He waited for his inward anger to subside and said, I know what you mean.

Of course you do.

I’ve suffered from it all my life.

We all do. She watched him with her gray-blue eyes, her gaze level and sympathetic, her lips parted in a tentative smile.

What the French call ressentiment, he said. Is there such a word? A kind of sick resentment of anything—excellent. Beyond my reach. Superior. Incomprehensible. Like quadratic fucking equations. Fucking symbolic logic. Like fucking Benedict Spinoza. Like—many things.

Oh Henry….

But: I accept my limitations, he proclaimed. Proudly.

She smiled at that. By God you’d better.

And they collapsed together in a fit of laughter. To merge in heat.

Instead of New England they squandered the autumn in a tour of the hidden Southwest. He showed her his secret places, his treasured canyons, holy rivers, sacred mountains. Sleeping on a mattress in the bed of the pickup truck, they camped for a week by a cold bright creek in the San Miguel Mountains eating brook trout for breakfast, Claire’s stir-fried rice and vegetables for supper, each other for lunch. When the sun was shining. When a second motor vehicle came groaning up the dirt track and parked only half a mile below, Henry loaded his backpack with tent, fly rod, grub, sleeping bag etc.—“and soo forth,” as she said—and led her by deer path five miles farther and three thousand feet higher to a nameless small lake at timberline. He set up the tent and caught a mess of native browns. They stayed there for five days and on the fifth climbed the craggy peak above the lake, embraced in the wind at 14,211 feet above sea level, glissaded down a snowfield, inspected the ruins of an abandoned gold mine and returned to camp. Next morning they descended to the truck through the first blizzard of the mountain fall.