“Given the intensity of her attack, you might not be surprised to learn that it succeeded. It’s laughable, now that I can look back on it, to consider how mismatched we were. I had virtually no experience ‘with women and didn’t know the first thing about how devious and selfish they can be. I was twenty-one, the same age as Ellen, but she was about four hundred years ahead of me when it came to experience and knowledge of the world. I never did find out how many men she’d had before me. Once she said it was twenty-nine and other time she said it was thirty-four. But, by that time, I knew enough about her that I didn’t put any stock in anything she said.
“She got herself a painter for a husband, all right. Her old man was giving her plenty- probably so she’d stay away from him, if I know the old boy very well.
Also, she had a trust fund of her own besides that we had a great time of it on the honeymoon, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta-all the places up and down Mexico’s Pacific coast. We spent a lot of time in bed, naturally, and it was then ‘that I began to get an inkling of what kind of evil was inside her.
“There were times, you see, when Ellen would really let go inside and she’d come on as something that was pretty close to her ‘natural self.’ I say “pretty close’ to it because I think she’d been deceiving herself and everybody else for so long that she’d forgotten what she really was, deep down inside. “But these times, when she forgot about keeping up her front, she could be just frightening in her intense concern for herself. That self seemed to come out most clearly in her sex life, which is perhaps one reason she didn’t really like sex. It threatened to get the best of her and it was something she wasn’t always able to ‘control to her own satisfaction. I don’t mean to say that there were ever times when Ellen was bursting with compassion for other people. There was never any danger of that. She was concerned only for herself. But at times the depth of that concern was simply frightening. Let me give you an example.
“When she came closest to losing control, she could be overwhelmingly domineering. You might recall that D. H. Lawrence has one of his characters speak of a certain type of woman, the type who ‘claws’ or ‘digs’ at a man, like an eagle tearing flesh out of an animal he’s just killed? I never understood the meaning of that phrase until one afternoon in Acapulco. It was about a week after the wedding, I suppose, and I’d dropped off to sleep after lunch. I woke up to find Ellen kneeling over me. She had my cock in her mouth and she was trying to suck me up to an erection. She succeeded in that, naturally, and as soon as I was hard enough for her purposes she rolled over onto her back and told me to get on her.
“Come on, hurry up and get that cock into me!” she snapped, just as if she were talking to one of the hotel’s servants. “I saw you lying there asleep and I decided that I had to have it again!”
“I couldn’t say anything I was so overpowered by her lust. She was like a wild animal, panting and staring until I began to wonder if perhaps she might be ill. She wouldn’t have anything but my prick, however, and I couldn’t do anything but give it to her. She’d already gotten me pretty well in the mood for another round. But when I got on her and had my prick in place, it was a lot different from what it had ever been before.
“Ellen had this peculiar habit when she was fucking. She didn’t like to hold a fellow with her feet. You know how most girls will hook their heels into your legs or lock them together around your back? She would never do that. She just hel4 me with her knees. She had a tremendous amount of power in her thighs, especially when you consider that she never did anything in the way of exercise, and she could clamp a grip on you that just about paralyzed you.
“This time she clamped her knees together and started working her hips up and down. Somehow she’d gotten hold of me different and her pubic hair was rubbing into the base of my belly. Between that hair and her pubic bones she was really digging into me, up and’ down in a steady beat. After a little while it got to be painful, she was rubbing so hard, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it-I was pinned there between her knees and just locked into place.
“You might think it absurd that a grown man like myself-and I’m not exactly a weakling either! — couldn’t begin to move out of her grasp but it’s a fact. At first I didn’t want to move but later, when it got tube so tiresome and painful, I couldn’t get away from her for anything! And’ she kept rubbing, scratching, digging at me with that voracious cunt of hers! That’s when I understood what Lawrence meant. It flashed into my mind that she was devouring my prick with that cunt of hers and just almost eating my flesh. More and more, that image came to be in my mind, until I couldn’t look at her without thinking about a vulture, or a hawk, or an eagle tearing great hunks of flesh out of its prey…
“Ellen helped with that realization, I firmly believe. As soon as we got back from the honey moon and I’d settled back down to trying to paint, she immediately leaped into a social whirl of art life, and my own life became a living hell. I’ve never been especially fond of parties and gadding about from this townhouse to that penthouse, the way some people do, though for a few weeks it was an amusing change of pace. It didn’t take long, however, for me to see that most of these people were not interested in art. They were only interested in being seen in company with each other. They didn’t care about each other, only in being seen with each other. That’s an important distinction, I believe.
“I remember one evening, as we were dressing to go out to some place where Ellen had wangled us an invitation I became very tired and disillusioned with the whole business. I was tying my tie and suddenly I just stopped and looked at her in the mirror.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked. “Why must we go out tonight and meet these people?” "Darling, it’s necessary if you’re to become a famous artist,” she told me.
“Some of the people there are very important in the art world and we must cultivate them.’ “I happened to know that the people we were going to meet that night were the same people we’d been seeing almost constantly. I also knew that none of them knew anything about painting, except what they told each other and that was only a half-understood mishmash of something they’d read in a newspaper. I said as much and Ellen just blew up! She ranted and raved, accused me of trying to short change her, of trying to disrupt her life and upset all her plans. She was really ticked off in a way that I’d never seen her before, never even suspected her of being capable of. That gave me something to think about, and I began doing some heavy thinking from that night onward.
“You know, Ellen, really believed that she could do it. I mean, that she could make me into a famous painter just by hanging around that kind of people, going along with them and catering to them. I tried to suggest to her a few ‘times that it might help if I were to be left alone long enough to do some painting, but she wouldn’t hear of that.
“‘Look at — ,” she’d say. “He’s the talk of the town and does he matter? Does he know anything about color or space?”
“She had me there. The guy she named, along with three or four others were indeed famous- well, talked about a lot-and none of them knew very much about what they were doing. Of course they weren’t talked about by people who knew anything about painting but, when I pointed this out to Ellen, she just got madder.