Ted runs into Liz during a blizzard at Squaw Valley. He, with his brother Oscar, owns the York Creek Vineyard in Napa. She is a journalist who has lost seven straight jobs as her small papers and giveaways around the San Francisco Bay area, including “S.F. LustVision”, have closed. What the couple don’t know, even after assignation and admission that they’re having a fling (which is, at first, all they want) is that she’s recently pregnant, and he’s long ago married, both conditions due to extenuating circumstances suddenly to be discovered.

When they arrive back at the York homestead after their fling in Carmel, they find – as usually happens – that events have moved quickly ahead of their expectations. Not only has Liz’s four-times divorced mother, Brenda arrived, but so has Ted’s wife Madeline, returned from Borneo. She has her own demented reasons for staying married to Ted that confuse Oscar, who has suppressed love and lust for her during the eight years of his brother’s unhappy but still extant marriage. On top of all that, Ooove, Liz’s unborn child’s father arrives, a stunning Danish god with language certainty as he slaughters English. He promises a lawyer and deputy sheriff are coming the next day with a restraining order to prevent Liz from doing anything rash, like marrying anyone else but the father of the child she carries – his.

That’s the set-up. Struggles, adjustments and crises careen along precipitously.