Andreas, an immigrant from Germany, is a graduate student at the University of Toronto. These are the 1960s and Andreas loves to listen to jazz. He lives in a rooming house and is in love with Gerlinde, like him a German immigrant but she is rejecting him. Under the influence of laughing gas in his dentist's chair, and jazz from a cassette in his earphones, he muses about his unhappy affair and fantasizes erotic encounters with Gerlinde. Flashbacks to his youth in former East Germany also appear in his mind. When he meets Raya who is from a Jewish home, he finds solace in her. Both build a relationship with the enigmatic Gerlinde, probing into her past. She reveals that she had been an anorexic nervosa patient at a pyschiatric clinic in Germany where she fell in love with Tania, her room mate, who committed suicide. The story ends without a final outcome.