Parker Rydell's art has turned as dark as his constant black eyes. The wife he loved left him because she mistakenly thought he cheated with her best friend. Parker's systematic form of self-punishment, usually a brawl in a bar's gravel parking lot with his face on the losing end of a cue stick, is only slightly softened by the myriad of one-night stands he brings back to his two-story Federal in East Haddam, Connecticut. Complicating matters, his downstairs tenant, Camille, a single mom with a ten-month-old baby, is broke and six months behind on her rent. Things go from bad to worse when Parker takes in Ira, an old musician friend whose wife leaves him when he develops a severe case of agoraphobia-an unnatural fear of people and open spaces-the opposite of Parker's self-destructive lifestyle. Enter Rio Santiago, an S and M-oriented rich girl who drives a hearse with a big happy face on the door, and a casket in back for her la petite mort. Parker rejects her, and she sics her sociopath boyfriend, Sully, on him. When Sully comes after Parker, Ira, Camille, and her baby are endangered, igniting in Parker a desire to protect them with a purpose and passion his life has been lacking.