A family of five sits by the fireplace, eating a dinner of burgers and fries. The married couple has been wed for seven years, a stretch of time that yielded their three children.

The husband reflects on his still-strong attraction to his wife, whose skirt slips down to reveal her pale legs. The man dwells on her "smackable warm woman's thigh," and his train of thought devolves into lyrical, alliterative reflections on "the magical life language leads within itself": "I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end the wooing. To my wonderment."

Indeed, the husband still struggles to seduce his wife. He reveals that he procured dinner in an attempt to win her over this evening, describing his foray to the burger joint as a heroic, primal endeavor: "I wrested warm from the raw hands of the hamburger girl in the diner a mile away, a ferocious place, slick with savagery, wild with chrome...I wielded my wallet and won my way back."

He reflects on her lack of praise for his "heroism": "Cunning, you sense, and sense that I sense your knowledge, that I had hoped to hoard your energy toward a later spending...Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl."

Sitting before the fire, the husband tries another tack, invoking their honeymoon. This strategy fails to move his wife, who picks up the crying baby. The husband petulantly reflects, "You love the baby more than me."

The pair puts their three children to bed while the husband reflects, "I am limitlessly patient, paternal, good." The couple moves through the motions of finishing the evening and preparing for bed. As the wife undresses, she stands in her underwear for a "tingling moment." She then proceeds to put on her nightie, settle into bed, and read a book about Richard Nixon.

The husband pleads with his wife to put down the book, but to no avail. An eloquent quip does nothing, though his "ornate words" once wooed her. He lies against her back as she reads sideways: "a sleepy trick." Suddenly, the book falls from the wife's hands. "You are asleep. Oh cunning trick, cunning," the husband muses.

The next morning he looks upon his wife and thinks, "to my relief, you are ugly...I feast with the coffee on your drabness. Every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge."

The husband leaves for work and returns home with his "head meshed in a machine," puzzling out a technicality that he alleges would take weeks to explain to his wife. She serves him dinner — "as a waitress," he thinks, "as less than a waitress, for I have known you."

In bed, the husband continues puzzling out his work problem while his wife showers. She returns from the bathroom at "the meaningful hour of ten" and delivers him a "moist and girlish and quick" kiss — one that takes the husband by surprise. He pronounces the "momentous moral of the story": "An unexpected gift is not worth giving."