innocence unprotected
A scholar lost in chivalric dreams
falls for a "knight" who is anything but noble.
Pia is a
professor of medieval literature--brilliant, plain and lonely. Determined to avoid the fate of an unlived
life, she can never quite find love. The
guy in the next office, bookish mousy Ron, is in love with her but afraid of
his rich wife. On holiday in Mexico she
finds a bed partner but is unsatisfied.
Her mentor Allan, a senior T.S. Eliot scholar, is gay and, since the
death of his lover, in somewhat the same predicament.
She is seen
as naive by her older colleagues, and in class she gets so wrapped up in
knightly romances that her students--those who don't adore her--ridicule
her. Even her daydreams have a King
Arthur/green England feel, though she does show a certain self-mocking
detachment from them. In fact her
innocence is wearing a little thin: she
could easily turn tough and bitter. As
fall term begins, her life has reached a precarious point.
A new
professor is given an office by hers--Graham, a rogue who can't keep a
job. Because his salary is diverted into
support payments he lives in his
office, showers at the gym and borrows money from Pia. Though he owns no books he is a commanding if
somewhat cynical teacher, easily dominating large audiences and fending off
flirtatious students: such involvements
have cost him jobs before. But when he
meets Cathy, the gorgeous bored young wife of Vic, an alcoholic senior
professor, he wastes no time, nailing her in the library, in his office, in
Vic's office, in Vic's car--carrying on their affair even as he moves in with
Pia. In her love for Graham Pia shows an
unsuspected talent for beauty, but she is no match for Cathy; and she wavers, as she's always wavered,
between wilful innocence and cold disillusionment, keeping faith with the
former--as do we.
Meanwhile
Allan, who has been resisting the advances of his student Sandy, relents and
sleeps with him. Like everyone in
Allan's course Sandy is under the gray spell of T.S. Eliot; and in Pia's classes he has absorbed the
ethic of dying for love. When Allan
breaks off the affair Sandy commits a theatrical suicide at the class Christmas
party and enters the world of T.S. Eliot, invisibly visiting painful scenes in
the lives of those he has left behind.
Allan falls into depression and is fired.
Pia's
attempts to save his career are sabotaged by Ron. A mature student, orphan and part-time
stripper, Jo-Ella, having slept with both Graham and Ron, is now pregnant. She tells each of them, devastating their
lives, but tells neither about the other.
Desperate to defend his job and marriage, Ron makes a deal to side
against Allan, fooling everyone but Pia, whose innocence is getting ragged.
When Vic
comes home and finds Graham having Cathy on the floor, he hangs himself. Graham, sick with guilt and afraid for his job, must nevertheless go to the
funeral home where Cathy, booze-and pills blurry, tries to seduce him in the
bathroom as Vic's ghost looks on. In the
viewing room Graham confronts a crowd of students and colleagues, but manages
an arrogant speech.
Pia saves
his job, even as she's leaving him. She
is visited by Sandy's ghost a la Four
Quartets and, inspired by what he says, and in protest against Allan's
firing and her own prostration before Graham, leaves her position and goes to
teach in Mexico. Now Graham has her
apartment, tenure and a woman he no longer loves.
Allan gets
over T.S. Eliot and begins anew, teaching night school. Ron, shaken by his divorce, finds renewal in
marrying Jo-Ella. Graham goes after Pia
who, with a new life and a new lover, rejects him. She has
turned tough. But in a boating accident
he risks his life to save her and her
lover, and rescues their innocence.
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