On a summer weekend, John and Marian Kerr, a wealthy couple in their forties, invite Lyle, a gay art critic and former lover of John's half-brother Tony--who died of AIDS exactly a year before--to their country house in upstate New York. Lyle invites his new lover Robert, a poor landscape painter, along for the weekend. The addition of Robert and a visiting neighbor, Laura, disrupts the balance and creates tension between all of them by exposing their common fears. They are each in their own way trying to recapture something that is lost.