Encores for a Dilettante

On the morning of his 45th birthday, a youthful-looking Prof. Of Eng. Lit. finds himself sitting cross-legged on an unfamiliar hotel bed. Once again his freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish concert-harpist wife has walked out on him. Flying faster & faster non-stop against the rising sun, he begins to perceive the imprint he has left in time: backing into his wife-less apartment the evening before into the parting scene one of his many girlfriends made him several years earlier into a brief previous life as a clammy little girl into 17th century England, where he was a printer, leveler, & ladies' man, about to be hanged into 14th century Rome, where he was a gout-ridden high priest & finally into pre-recorded history, when he was a Happy Hermaphrodite, worshipped as a living symbol of fertility. A freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish-looking chambermaid intrudes to clean the room...