Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller

Author:Joseph Heller [Heller, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849836517
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

A SEXUAL BIOGRAPHY OF MY WIFE

A New Novel

by

Eugene Pota

Pota remembered very little about the duke of Marlborough. That he was not the duke of Wellington was just about all. And knew nothing at all about the duchess, apart from the quote come upon more than once that her lord had come home from the wars one night and pleasured her twice with his boots on. A passing effort at finding out more about her turned up only another statement from somewhere to the effect that she knew nothing about books, only about cards and men. This was a promising start for a female character in a humorous and erotic novel to be a sexual biography of somebody’s wife. But pondering further and more deeply about her initial comment, Pota began to be puzzled more and more by that second time of her lord’s pleasuring her with the boots on. Was there not a period of repose in between? If only for the catching of breath? Why had he not taken off his boots in the interval? Unless he was one of those priapic men one hears about who are hard again before they are completely dry from the first time. Perhaps it was he, Marlborough, and not the duke of Wellington, as Pota for so many years might mistakenly have believed, who was known also as the Iron Duke. And where were his trousers both those times? Could military trousers in late eighteenth or early nineteenth century England be removed with the boots still on? Did men wear belts and suspenders then, and what were suspenders and belts called? And what about the rest of his linen, and hers? What was their linen? Could it be explained, perhaps, Pota the novelist had to wonder, that an English gentleman, especially one who’d been a victorious general, could not or would not deign to remove his boots himself, no matter the occasion, and that he was reluctant to summon his man or her maid into milady’s bedroom in those private circumstances in which his trousers were or had been down about his ankles and his boots? Would the duchess not stoop so low as to remove his boots for him? Would he permit her to?

There was much, Pota saw with a sinking heart, that he would have to find out, and Pota abhorred doing research. He was sure that Wellington—or was it Marlborough?—had a favorite mistress—maybe this was true of both—the wife of an acquiescent male who doubtless had at least one intimate lady friend of his own. After all, what else were aristocratic women in England for? No, the mistress of the male friend probably would not have been the wife of Wellington, or Marlborough. That would have been too neat, and decadent. And one of them, maybe Wellington, perhaps Marlborough, was embarrassingly involved with a second woman bent on blackmail who threatened to make things known to all with a published account of their carnal exercises. Publish and be damned, said Marlborough.

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