Ben and Clara Stein were made for each other. At least, the veteran who went to college with them thinks so. They met, he recalls, at a Christmas party in 1955, while he and Ben were English students at Brooklyn College and Clara was studying creative writing at Bard. Two months later, Clara was pregnant, her father was incensed, and she and Ben found themselves engaged. Despite his ambitions, Ben struggles academically and financially thereafter. He and Clara decamp to the Midwest so that Ben can pursue a literary assistantship after graduation, while the veteran breaks up with his communist girlfriend and drops out of college. Depressed, he works odd jobs and slogs through a poor novel at night, on which he gives up after a publisher criticizes it. One summer, the Steins come back to New York, and the veteran flirts with Clara as Ben carries on an affair with a flautist. Now a worker in a soap factory, he begins a new relationship with a publisher named Lynn, who eventually leaves him when he propositions her, after the day of John F. Kennedy's murder. Several years and failed relationships later, Clara calls the veteran — she is in New York, and she wants to meet. After they have drunken sex, Clara leaves for good. Finally in a stable relationship with a buyer from Saks, the veteran never sees the Steins again. He does, however, receive one letter from Ben in childlike, broken English: he and Clara are running a commune.