An unnamed housewife goes out to the galleries, but ends up spending the afternoon in a hotel room with a handsome man she meets at the train station.

She returns home where her son Oliver is back from college. At the dinner table, Oliver speaks dramatically. He is the handsome child of successful parents and likes to be the center of attention. Animated by all-encompassing guilt at his privilege, Oliver gets into an argument with his father about a family friend who is now being tried in the court for corporate malpractice.

Later in the bedroom, John asks his wife if Oliver should be seeing a psychiatrist. He is concerned about the grandiosity and the constant raving of his son. They discuss Oliver's various girlfriends, always wounded women who are prone to self-harm.

They try to understand how they produced a child like him, one so exceptionally handsome and prone to drama when they themselves have taken many pains to be normal.

Next day, the mother eavesdrops on Oliver while he is with his girlfriend. Oliver is telling a story his mother has never heard before. The mother determines that a hired nurse in one of the countries they lived in must have told him.

She thinks back to the time they spent in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, places where her husband John worked as an energy consultant, and where she allowed Oliver to play with the natives under supervision.

She is afraid that Oliver's early years in these far out places have hampered the development of his feelings for his native USA. Whereas John feels like he struggles to earn the respect of his son.

The story ends when John notices that they are running low on coffee, the housewife feels chastised, but then attempts to explain her betrayal as one of a series of compromises required to build a decent life.