Stuart Finley lives in a pristine world of scholarship and refinement: at twenty-eight, he is the youngest assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specializing in Old Master drawings, and the proud occupant of his family's rent-controlled Gramercy Park apartment.

Stuart feels safe and a bit smug amid the chaos of New York City until he meets Claire, a denizen of the SoHo art scene, who lures Stuart into her world - where "art" is a matter of opinion, and creative geniuses are as likely to be publicists as painters.

In an uncomfortable arrangement, Claire lives in a sprawling loft with her ex-lover, Miles Levy, an artist of rising, well-cultivated renown. As Stuart's relationship with Claire becomes more intimate, he gets to know this complex and eccentric creative master, and he gets to taste the delicacies of celebrity, in restaurants so of the moment that they have no telephone number and, of course, have no tables available - unless you are somebody, or about to be somebody.

When Miles "somewhat accidentally" pushes his assistant down an elevator shaft, when his dealer and publicist show up to "take care" of things, and when Stuart doesn't mention it to the police, he begins to feel his world turning irrevocably upside down and learns that nothing in life is safe, not even the standards he thought he held so dear.