Marcus, a gay African-American man who has recently suffered a breakup with his long-term boyfriend, stays with his old college roommate and his wife. He is reading a book from the 1950s as a means of distracting himself. It is a memoir about revolutionaries and anarchists (and their sexual trysts); he believes it would make an excellent movie. The book mentions Gandhi and the possibility that he was gay, which makes Marcus recall a long-ago trip to India. His friends try to take him to the lake in an effort to make him forget his despair, and Marcus dutifully obeys, but he is still devastated by the loss of Nico, his ex-boyfriend. Marcus tries to describe the memoir to his friends; he is invested in the narrator's attempts to find out which of his friends is sleeping with his wife. He eagerly looks forward to a violet confrontation between the two of them. He continues reading and finds out that the author's wife left him for the man who ran the local speakeasy. Marcus recalls a trip he took to India one time in an attempt to escape from the pressures of work. He witnesses crippling poverty for the first time in his life. At a Gandhi museum, Marcus meets Nico for the first time--an American oncologist--and the two go out for drinks and dinner together. They end up having sex in a hotel room. Nico tells Marcus that the two can continue dating when they are back in America together. They return to the United States and date long-distance for six months before moving in together in Brooklyn. The two have minor arguments about religion, but they both agree on topics such as politics and social justice. Marcus attends the Occupy Wall Street protest. Marcus realizes that he is like the insufferable narrator of the memoir he is reading: all he can think about is his own pain. He cannot stop reflecting on that fateful trip to the Gandhi museum and everything that came after.