A famous psychologist, Margaret Ford, decides to try to help one of her patients get out of a gambling debt. She visits the bar where Mike, to whom the debt is owed, runs poker games. He convinces her to help him in a game: her assignment is to look for "tells", or give-away body language. What seems easy to her becomes much more complex.

Gabriel is a man who on the surface has it all-successful professional life as an architect, a beautiful wife, Annie, and a devoted young daughter, Elizabeth. But slowly it dawns on him that he is not really happy. Gabriel decides that he wants to write a play about the sorry state of his life. He quits his job, gets a pushy literary agent friend to represent him and starts writing. Although his marriage ends in a divorce, the play is success and although his life is different than it was, he is happier.

Four couples reunite for their annual vacation in order to socialize and to spend time analyzing their marriages. Their intimate week in the Bahamas is disrupted by the arrival of an ex-husband determined to win back his recently remarried wife.

28-year-old Kansas University doctoral student Omar Razaghi wins a grant to write a biography of Latin American writer Jules Gund. Omar must get through to three people who were close to Gund--his brother, widow, and younger mistress--so he can get authorization to write the biography.