Gilver Memmer is running short of time. He is an enormously gifted painter, staggeringly good-looking, and profoundly self-involved, a cross between every woman's dream and every woman's worst nightmare. Great though his creative gifts may be, they cannot save him from dissolution. No longer the London art scene's wunderkind, he is getting by on the fumes of his former luck and sliding inexorably-though with a certain self-destructive elegance-toward oblivion. Into Gilver's life come two women: one who wants to push him into the grave he has been digging for himself and another who just might save him from it.