A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes. She rents an apartment from a painter, Agnes. In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner cafe, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art. As the months pass, the student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas. What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.