Alice Tate daydreams about Joe Ruffalo, a man she sees at her children’s pre-school in New York City. At breakfast, Alice's husband Doug interrupts her reverie of kissing Joe at the zoo’s penguin house, but otherwise pays little attention to her. At a salon, she confides her infatuation and attendant guilt to her friend, Nina. Alice has always been a practicing Catholic, and her wealthy husband has provided her with a pampered life for the past sixteen years, yet she yearns for Joe. Her back aches constantly, and she suffers faint maladies. News that her old friend, Nancy Brill, is a successful television producer makes her envious. That afternoon, when Alice picks up her children, Kate and Dennis, she sees Joe again, but remains silent. Throughout the day, Alice’s workout trainer and her friends, Nina and Lila, mention a Chinatown herbalist-acupuncturist named Dr. Yang who might be able to cure her backaches. However, when Alice visits Dr. Yang’s office, he tells her the problem is her heart, not her back. He asks Alice to gaze into a spinning pinwheel, and she slips into a trance. She sees penguins at the zoo. Joe kisses her, and she confesses having feelings she has not had since before she met her husband. She also resents having given up her aspiration to be a costume designer when she married. At Dr. Yang’s suggestion, Alice remembers nothing when she awakens. He gives her a packet of herbal powder, and later, while shopping, Alice mixes the powder with water and drinks it. When she sees Joe, she becomes uncharacteristically seductive and learns that he is a divorcee who plays tenor saxophone for a living. They make a date to meet the following afternoon in the zoo’s penguin house. However, the next day, Alice becomes anxious outside the penguin house and goes directly to Chinatown to tell Dr. Yang she cannot commit adultery. He gives her a different potion, saying it will make her invisible, so that she can secretly observe Joe. Suddenly Alice disappears. She follows Joe to the office of his ex-wife, Vicki, an advertising executive. Alice watches Joe and Vicki make love, and they are too involved to notice when the herbs wear off and Alice materializes next to them. That night, Alice tells Doug she is convinced she can write a teleplay for Nancy Brill. After all, she introduced Nancy to the man who made her a producer. When Joe calls Alice to ask why she stood him up, she becomes evasive because Doug is in the room. Afterward, she hears a ghost whispering her name. She returns to Dr. Yang to report the voices, and he gives her special herbs to be burned in a teacup at midnight. On the way home, Alice visits Nancy Brill’s office to pitch several ideas, but Nancy says her stories are prosaic and lack “blood and guts.” That night, after Alice burns the herbs and goes to bed, she awakens to find the ghost of Eddie, the only man she ever truly loved, who was an irresponsible artist whose recklessness led to his early death in a car wreck. As they talk, Doug asks who Alice is talking to, and she tells her husband she is acting out a script idea for Nancy. The next day, Eddie’s ghost accompanies Alice to the pre-school, and when Joe asks her to attend a circus the next day with him and his daughter, Eddie encourages her to go. That night, Eddie takes Alice’s hand and flies with her over the city to the beach casino where they said good-bye many years earlier. As they dance in the empty club, Alice hears their voices from the past, reminding her of their turbulent romance. Suddenly Eddie fades away, leaving her alone. At the circus with their children, Alice explains to Joe that despite the provocative way she introduced herself, she is very shy. Joe lies when Alice asks if he still makes love with Vicki. Later, without the children, Joe and Alice walk through Central Park and stroll the city, hand in hand. Joe confesses that he and Vicki made love the first day they met, while he was playing saxophone in one of her commercials. When Alice returns to Nancy’s office with a vague new story idea about an affair, Nancy suggests that Alice is too straitlaced to be anything but a wife and should forget writing. The next night, Alice tells Doug she has to visit her sister, Dorothy, but when she meets Joe, she is angry that he charmed her into being deceitful with her husband. She returns to Dr. Yang’s office. Despite the late hour, the door is open, and inside, Dr. Yang presides over several Chinese men smoking opium. Alice joins them, lies down, and goes into a pipedream of her childhood in a crumbling Victorian house. Though her sister, Dorothy, is there as a child, the grown-up Dorothy, an activist lawyer, also arrives and chastises Alice for spending her days at lunches and spas, gossiping with other wealthy, bored wives, and spoiling her children. Alice walks to a confessional booth in the front yard and tells the priest she always wanted to be like Mother Teresa and help people. Later, at the pre-school, Alice apologizes to Joe for her behavior. He decides to stop seeing her, but she draws him back with a kiss. When Alice and Doug attend a film documentary about Mother Teresa, she cries. Later, she goes to Joe’s apartment and agrees to have sex, which is mutually satisfying. When Alice attends a film writing class, Dr. Yang gives her an herbal tea to increase her creative thinking. As she types her script, her Muse appears, but is not encouraging. Alice’s late mother, an actress, also appears and defends her own decision to give up her career to marry a wealthy man, just as Alice did. Alice maintains her affair, and one day she shares her invisibility potion with Joe, so that they can walk the streets together, observing people. Seeing her friends Nina and Jean going into a store, Alice eavesdrops on their gossip about her. Neither woman can picture such a “mouse” as Alice having an affair, and both speculate about the rumors that Doug has had a succession of mistresses. Shaken by the idea of Doug’s infidelity, Alice invisibly visits his office during a Christmas party and catches him making love with a co-worker. She materializes, shocking them, then leaves without waiting for explanations. When she goes to Joe’s band rehearsal to tell him she is leaving Doug, he tells her he is going back to Vicki. Joe explains that after their invisible walk together, he eavesdropped on Vicki as she told her psychiatrist she still loved him, and now he realizes he cares for her, too. Alice hurries to see Dr. Yang, but he is leaving for Tibet. He explains that love, with all its joys, comes with suffering, but pain is better than the illusion of happiness she had with Doug. As a parting gift, he gives her a potion that will make a man fall in love with her, but the decision is hers whether that man will be Doug or Joe. For advice, Alice visits her sister, but Dorothy is having a Christmas party and invites her to join. When Alice lays her herbs on a kitchen counter, the cook mistakes them for nutmeg and puts them in eggnog. Soon, half a dozen men express their devoted love for Alice. She hurries out, and as she walks the streets she realizes the emptiness of her life. She leaves Doug to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India, then returns to New York, moves into a cheap apartment with her children, and devotes herself to instilling them with traditional values.