Having lived for his pleasure most of his life, floor polisher Ivan Karetnikov, on the threshold of his 60th birthday, did not for the first time leave his next wife himself, but she abandoned him, moreover, in public. In addition to these troubles, he was fired from his job, replaced by a mechanical polisher. In this difficult moment, Karetnikov remembered the first wife, and then the second and third.

But turning to each of them, he seems to begin to lose hope of seeing compassion for himself.