Martina Shriano, an Italian professor of cultural history at New York University, observes the great American city with admiration and gratitude, but from an outsider's perspective. She is a sublime cook, she loves her job, she has occasional erotic adventures, but Martina is a lonely woman whose real passion is a "machine" that she has built to assist in her cultural research and which she uses to record her dreams. These recordings, infused with the memories of her childhood and early career, begin to reveal a tangle of second guesses and insecurities about the path she has chosen. Then, when she returns briefly to Italy to attend her mother's funeral, Martina discovers that she may have been born left-handed but was trained to be right-handed. Back in New York, struggling with this new revelation, this possible suppression of an identity, she meets a high-culture Italian official who tempts her to return to Italy with a prestigious job offer. While weighing her options, she quite unexpectedly meets up again with her first great love, a man she has not seen in more than twenty years.