The unnamed narrator reflects on the marriage between his mother (aloof, stoic, saintly, & stubborn) & his father (a vain, promiscuous scoundrel). He is fixated on eight mysterious months his mother spent in Paris after they split up, when the narrator was a boy: Did she clandestinely reunite with the father? Did she live out a perennial ambition carefully kept secret? Or did she attempt to sort out another matter entirely, of which the narrator hasn`t the least indication? If he discovers what happened in Paris he might make sense of his parents` relationship, &, in the process, end the nightmares that still recur twenty-plus years after his parents split up.