An actor and a divorcee meet in a deserted New York City afterhours bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story. The fragility and fear that drive their experiment from moment to moment, bedroom to bedroom, transform this boy-meets-girl into a literary potboiler in which risk becomes salvation. Georges Simenon — supreme master of the modern psychological story — has been praised by writers from Ernest Hemingway to André Gide.