Henry Wilson:

Henry is a cantankerous housepainter/novelist in his late twenties to early thirties. He's a binge drinker, a hard worker, and an angry sonofagun. After four years of working on an unpublished literary novel, his live-in fiancé, Clair, leaves him -- pennyless -- for a more successful writer. This starts Henry's self-destructive spiral that leads to an adulterous affair with the unhappy wife of a housepainting client. This tightly-wound housewife seems to hate him -- inexplicably. But he's drawn to her because he's down on himself. They are each going down their own respective whirlpools and their angry coupling is like the clawing and clutching of two drowning swimmers. But underneath his rough exterior, Henry is a good man. He will finally do what he must to save her. But will he kill her husband?

Arleen Terwilliger:

Arleen is a frustrated writer in her late-twenties to early-thirties. She was compelled by an unwanted pregnancy, to leave the university and marry an unattractive retired army colonel (not the father) who could pay for an illegal abortion. Four years later, the colonel has become abusive, overbearing and obsessed with having his own children. Arleen is secretly using birth control while her husband is overdosing her with fertility drugs -- thinking she's infertile. Between the drug-induced hormonal mood swings and her suffocating marriage, she finds it hard to control her lust and her temper around a painter who looks and talks like the man who knocked her up four years ago.

Philip Terwilliger:

Fully absorbed with military life, Philip never thought much about marriage. He found himself at fifty three, knowing little about women, rescuing a beautiful young college girl in a delicate situation. Against his own law-abiding nature, he arranged an illegal abortion for her, on the condition that she marry him and bear HIS children. Today, well accustomed to military discipline and the routine suppression of his subordinates, Philip has long-since broken his wife of her literary aspirations and turned her study into a nursery. But what cruel fate would turn his pretty young gutter-pup infertile now? The question sets this seemingly jolly colonel into rages of cruel spousal abuse.