Benna Carpenter is a jack of all trades, but she's something like a poet musician mostly. She has an imaginary friend named Eleanor and they like to get together an whine. They call it "The Great White Wine." Gerard Maines is a musician and he's Benna's best friend. They're apartment neighbors with walls so thin they can hear each other's plumbing.
One night Gerard sits fully dressed, ready to go next door when Benna comes home and to finally act on his attraction to her. He sits in his bathtub (dry of course) until he hears Benna flush her toilet, then he goes over and they have what Benna describes as deeply existential and perplexing sex. They get on well though, and she often sits around in the club where he plays piano. She gets pregnant.
Then again one night, it's Eleanor, not Benna, in bed with Gerard. After the imaginary role play, she decides to abort the child. They decide to stay friends. Benna is clever and resilient, and she often amuses herself to deal with her emotional challenges.
In her poetry class, Benna meets Darrel and decides she loves him. Darrel is a Vietnam veteran, and he's black. This is ethnically very interesting because Benna doesn't like to think about race very often, preferring a more "colorblind" approach. Benna has an imaginary daughter of 6 named Georgianne Michelle Carpenter. Benna finds deep, transcendental joy in raising her imaginary daughter.
Then randomly, Gerard dies. Benna is worried she might be wearing thin, so she tries to think of someone who might be able to keep her a little bit of company. She goes to her brother Louis, a wayward guy and a little bit of a bore. One boring day, Benna finds herself in hysterical thought experiments and she wonders what dog suicide notes would be like.
