A man recalls his time spent at his grandmother's estate during his childhood in the 1920s. As a young boy, he had a close relationship with his Uncle Tom, who was only 14 years his senior. Tom often teased his nephew with stories of his life as a young adult, making vague references to sex and women, which the boy only slightly understood. While at his grandmother's house, the young boy would frequently fall asleep in his uncle's bed, and when Tom returned late at night he would carry his nephew—sometimes asleep and sometimes only pretending to be—back to his own room. The boy remembers attending Tom's first wedding at twelve years old, where he sat with his older cousins and listened to them gossip about his previous babysitter, Miss Charlotte, who was fired for having a relationship with Tom. The boy recalls being very fond of Miss Charlotte, who would let the children play with her hair as she read to them.

As the boy grows up, becomes an author, and eventually joins the Navy, Tom divorces and remarries several times, traveling between the U.S. and England. Finally settling down in Maryland, Tom marries a French professor, whom his nephew, the best man at their wedding, calls Nan. A few years before dying of cancer, Nan tells the nephew about her concern for Tom's innocence. Nan blames Tom's wealth lack of education, particularly the fact that he was illiterate at the time. Though she loves him, she calls it an impractical love and believes that Tom will never truly understand her. She describes a story by Jean-Paul Sartre, in which a man peers through a keyhole and soon finds a stranger's eye staring back. She expresses her fear of this one day happening to Tom, that it will be his first experience of shame.

Years later, the nephew, now a grown man married with children, reconnects with his Uncle Tom after coincidentally running into him in a public library. Tom, now close to sixty years old, is taking night classes at a university, using a fake name to disguise his wealth. Tom is in a relationship with a woman named Jo and pays for her apartment where she lives with her children. When the man joins Tom for one of his classes, where Jo is reading the part of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, he falls in love with her, infatuated by her beauty and masterful reading. At a party at Jo's apartment later that night, the man sneaks away with Jo, and the two share a passionate kiss. Afterward, he returns to the party to find Tom waiting for him, saying their car is ready for them downstairs. The two drive home, the man feeling enraged and deeply ashamed. In the car, Tom mentions that Nan eventually expressed her concerns to him and told him about the eye in the keyhole. As they drive to the country, Tom tells his nephew that he has just experienced this moment and that it was his eye, the man's, that he saw staring back.