We done it that time, he said.

We did it. I could feel it. Now we’re really in the animal soup.

Henry pulled up his jeans as he struggled from beneath her relaxed weight. It’s raining, he mentioned, tugging her to her feet. Hand in hand they ran for the lookout cabin. Ribbons of pink lightning skittered across the black sky—an insane scribbling, a blind demented fury. They laughed and slammed the door, stripped off their soaked clothes and tumbled into bed and slept for ten hours. Blue light flashed and vanished beyond the windowpanes. Thunder echoed thunderblast as the rain came down in advancing then retreating waves.

Henry dreamed of woodsmoke. He awoke at sunrise to see two pine snags flaring like torches a mile below. Naked as a jaybird he switched on the forest radio to report the fires while Claire, wearing nothing but her pink ruffled apron, made coffee, folded an omelet of eggs, peppers and tomatoes in the skillet and quartered two fat oranges into eight golden sections. Facing each other across the tiny foldout table they drank the coffee, ate the omelet, sucked on the oranges and strove but failed to contain their idiotic smiles. Henry stuck a section of orange over his gums and offered her his patent golden grin.

Henry, Henry….

He removed the orange. I know, he said.

I can’t bear it. I’m so happy I want to weep.

I know, he said. Me too—happy as a dead pig in the sunshine, like Grandma always said.

I think I’m going to cry.

Me too.

They wept for a while together then wandered off through a mist of fog and the tang of smoke to hunt for mushrooms.

IN AUGUST she announced that she was pregnant. I’m preggers, she said, the rabbit never lies.

That night on the rimrock? When it rained? That was the night. I hope it’s twins, he said. Might as well have an instant family, get this thing going whole hog. How nicely you put it. He embraced and kissed her, letting his hands slip down to her haunches. How nice it is to put. You’re so vulgar. Henry H. Lightcap here. Man of the people. Voice of the common man. L’homme sensual, as the Frogs say. That’s not quite the way the French pronounce it. What can you expect from a Frog?

Mildly panicked, he worried about money. She reminded him that she would receive an income of her own in only a few more years. That was some comfort but small consolation to Henry: assuaged his fear but provoked his pride.

Your money is your money, he said. I’ll support my family myself. Somehow. (Furthermore, he thought, there’s something tainted about trust fund money.)

I see, she said. What’s yours is mine but what’s mine is mine?

That’s right. (Would have to talk to her about that. That matter of unearned income. Someday.)

That’s not right, that’s a double standard. Well goddamnit you’re a woman I’m a man. There’s your double standard, built into biology. I’ve got a million years of mammalian tradition behind me. Some of us don’t accept that kind of thinking anymore. I’ve read about it. I’ve read Beauvoir and Friedan too and that long-nosed goon-eyed harpy Virginia Woolf. Those lilies of the valley. A room of their own? They should each have a cell in a nunnery. On Lesbos Island.