Marcello, a Moravian womanizer, has recently been sexually reactivated by his wife but his puissance does not extend to his writing -- he needs a ""faction"" (an actual happening) to inspire a new novel. Thus he arranges that Dusty, an alluring American girl, and Liz, an epicene young Englishwoman (she has an inert relationship with Henry in the silver picture frame) work on each other so that it all becomes a neonaughty question of who does what to whom how and, more academically, why?