A woman stands alone in a kitchen, ruminating on the extent to which comings and goings have defined her life. Suddenly, Angelo, a grizzled Italian immigrant wearing a suit, comes in the door, and her heart stops. While he cleans up from a long day on the road, she finishes cooking dinner for the two of them, but when he returns and tucks into his food, she merely stands next to the stove and watches. Angelo's curiosity on that account soon becomes anger when his repeated attempts to make conversation are met with enigmatic silence. After throwing her aside, he storms upstairs to his room and finds solace in a bottle of whiskey. That night, in a half-drunken stupor, Angelo explores the rest of the house, finding dilapidation everywhere he looks. In the meantime, his host wakes up in a cold sweat from a dream, in which she had been spending a night with Cy Grinder, a love interest of hers from years earlier. Next to her snores Sunder, her husband and an invalid. For hours, her thoughts ping-pong between the man sleeping next to her, the man in her dream, and the man rummaging around upstairs. She loves, or at least has loved, them all. The next morning, Angelo wonders why, when he had taken his host's car before coming home to dinner the previous day, she did not call the police. Angelo is, after all, an ex-convict. Seeing her asleep next to him renews his romantic torment, so he throws himself into his work, spending days fixing her home's plumbing and repainting its walls. During the next several days, their romance deepens, but so does Angelo's lonely anger. He takes to reading, hunting, and verbally abusing his wife, even threatening to confront Sunder. Seeing the car of the latter's friend, who is also interested in the unnamed woman, pull into her driveway only makes him angrier.