Set in 1913, 1936 and 2001. When he returns to the casino and sea-side resort of his early adolescence, Louis, a seventy-eight-year-old man encounters Olivia, a nineteen-year-old girl madly in love with a violent cad. Louis tells the story of his own mother having a passionate, driven fling with his Italian tennis instructor in 1936, and of Marie Collins Brown, the slightly older widowed woman who helped him through his confusion and pain by recounting the story of her passionate twenty-four-hour fling with a hopeless young Polish gambler in 1913.