Hell's Gate

before.”
        Perhaps, Salsbury thought, that was because he had recently gone through hell and come back alive. Trials made any man a more solid individual.
        They looked at each other, felt their gazes click and mesh. They each held a new understanding of their friendship, one that either would make it strained or help it grow into more than friendship. Slowly, haltingly, she told him about Henry.
        
        Henry March was brutishly handsome, rugged, with a muscular body he preened as a cat preened. Dimples in his cheeks. Slightly conceited, not boringly so. From a well-to-do family. Himself a graduate of Princeton. A social figure. To an eighteen-year-old girl who had been reading Hemingway since she was thirteen, he seemed almost perfect. At first, the marriage was good: the joy of taking meals together, of finding his dark hairs on the brush, the smell of his cologne, the sound of electric razors at early hours, the touch of warm flesh in the middle of the night, both waking with surprise at their separate but similar needs… Then something happened.
        At first, he began complaining of her coffee. Then her meals. Then the acts of their most private sanctums. She began to wonder why she was no good in bed. Or at anything else. Under his tongue, she lost weight, began mixing herself extra drinks to be able to face him when he came home from his graduate classes.
        There is a sort of man who can never face his own inadequacies, who must find a scapegoat. In America, where success is considered the only essential commodity of life, this man abounds. He drives his women to despair, eventually breaks them. The woman is his child-raiser, his maid, cook, and sex machine. No thought is given to her, for she is merely a thing, a necessary acquisition on the road to success. These are the most despicable criminals of contemporary society. They kill human dignity. But first they torture it.
        Henry was one of these.
        Relatively few women escape them. The ones who do are usually shocked into awareness when they take an outside job out of desperation to prove they are worth something. They find they are good workers, earn promotions and praise. Suddenly they see through their
        Henry and seek a quick divorce or enter into a knock-down, drag-out, teeth and nail, fist and feet fight to bring reality back into their marriage. Or maybe they have an affair and find out they are good in bed. Or finally something happens to show that hubby isn't perfect either.
        She came home from work early because the Dean of Instruction (her boss) was ill and closed his office. She found Henry in bed with the girl. A student. Sophomore. In Henry's class. Buying her grade, apparently. When Henry, confused, almost incoherent, took the girl away, Lynda went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.
        “God, Vic,” Lynda said, taking a sip of his coffee, replacing the cup on his bed tray, “what was so bad was that when he returned he tried to act like he was still on top. He bullied me, told me she was better in bed than me. And she was a scrawny nothing! Her face wasn't even pretty. Tiny eyes, close-set. No chin. And he was trying to make me think she was more desirable than me. He almost succeeded. He almost really did. He had me so twisted up that-”
        Still sitting yoga fashion, she lowered her head onto her breasts, balled her fists at her side, and cried softly. He sat the tray aside, brought her to him, stroked her yellow hair, murmured comforting things to her. She had bottled this up, thinking it was over. She had only wanted out of the marriage, time to find herself as a human being. The quickest way to do that was to deny that she had been-almost-turned into an egoless, self-pitying wretch by a man unworthy of her pity, unworthy of her. Now she had been forced to pull the cork and taste what was in the bottle. The fumes had made her nauseous.
        He caressed her, trying to think how to calm a woman. When her crying softened, he raised her head and kissed her. He found her lips were parted. There was a moment when the world was nothing more than a tongue. Then they pulled apart, breathless, and engaged their eyes again. She came back after a moment, more demanding now. His hand found the light, flicked it off. Somehow, he had a strength he was unaware of.

CHAPTER 8
        
        “Was it all very sordid?” she asked.
        “If you want to