Cream in My Coffee studies the deterioration in therelationship of an elderly couple as they revisit the grand hotel wherethey had their first premarital adventure. The bickering and regrets ofthe present are intercut with the youthful escapades of forty yearsearlier. These parallel stories reveal the fundamental betrayals thatwould forever haunt the unhappy couple. For Potter, this betrayal can betraced to the first waning of innocence. "Perhaps we all live in asort of exile from the lost land of our childhood," he has said."Not in the futile second-order emotion of mere nostalgia, nor withthe lacerations of an even worse and even more futile remorse, andcertainly with no heedless sentimentality. But simply, and impossibly,with the desire that we could stand where the earth once sang withmagic, and look at ourselves as we are now. Cream in My Coffee tries toshow, among other things, how dangerous and corrosive it can be not tohave some sense of the shape of your own life..."