Over the Christmas holidays in a small New England college town, a man and a woman share a brief interlude. He is there to visit his wife, who is a mental patient at the university, and she is there visiting her son, who is a student, after discovering her husband's infidelity.
A number of business people, keeping the Christmas Eve office party going longer than was originally intended, are beset by a fire that starts in the basement of their office building and creeps up at them from floor to floor.
The believable, fresh-faced characters are young naives from American colleges spending their French-English dictionaries, they compulsively seek out hundreds of monuments, romanticize the nomadic artist's life, and look for grown-up love.
