Simon is alone in his apartment, keeping watch over his wife Anna's corpse. She has just committed suicide. In his grief, he recalls the first time they met, a year ago: Simon leads a rigid and solitary life as a pawnbroker in Spanish Harlem. One day, Anna enters his shop to sell some of her jewellery. She is a beautiful, mysterious, thirty year-old woman. She seems to come from nowhere, and knows not really where to go. Touched by her beauty, Simon asks her out to dinner one night, and suddenly asks her to marry him.