Author: Karl Flinders (pseud.)

About: Interesting tale about a wealthy young heiress who, no Paris Hilton, marries when still a virgin. Her husband sets off to parlay her fortune into an enormous sum, but has an affair and realizes that he'd been missing out on quite a bit in life. Divorce on the way, he leaves, and she discovers her own sexuality while losing a few pounds and teaming up with a man unlike any she'd met so far.

In many of his titles, author Flinders would work in themes of gay and biseual experience, and he does so here as well, in an interesting fashion that recalls both Tom Wolfe's essay the sad life of the NY divorcee, as well as predicting Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some years later. One of five Flinders did for Girodias in NY (published as both TC and Ophelia circa 1970).

Excerpt:

IT WAS A strange life for Patricia, being a grass widow, but no more unreal than marriage with Philip had been, she belatedly realized. She had not, to her bitter disappointment, caught fire on their wedding night. Hers had not been one of the cunts Lillian Hayworth had ever approached; in fact, Patricia had not the slightest idea that Lillian—or anyone, for that matter—ever did anything more forward with her lips than place them on the closed lips of another person—a male person, if she was lucky.

On their wedding night she had known exactly where Philip was supposed to put his cock; what she hadn't been prepared for was its size, which bore little relation to the occasional male penis she had noticed out of the corner of her fastidious eye on copies of Greek statues in the Museum of Fine Arts, those little tapering appendages that, Patricia had suspected, would have to eject a stream of semen quite some distance to reach the womb, if her notion of the womb gleaned from furtive thumbings through an antique medical book in her parents' attic, was correct. On their wedding night a fleeting glimpse of Philips penis belligerently erect, a far cry from the Greek ideal, made her wonder if the seed was supposed to be deposited directly in the womb, or maybe a little beyond it, whatever was there, to seep back by simple flow of gravity. But her faith in God and the design of His nature would not let her believe that the entry of that shaft of angry pink into what, till then, had been exclusively an exit route for unmentionables, would be uncomfortable and never, never painful. So it was a terrible shock that Philip's unyielding great penis hurt terribly as it forced its manly way to her virgin womb. The second night, to her relief, it hardly hurt at all thanks to the vaseline Philip thoughtfully applied to himself, but she couldn't honestly have said the process brought her pleasure.

It was her love of Philip that made her hide any show of reluctance. Whenever he was ready so was she. Philip did not seem overly enthralled by the process, but Patricia had heard reliably that a regular discharge of semen was necessary to maintain a man's sensual equilibrium, and she didn't want to be the only wife on the block whose husband had a faulty equilibrium. She was mildly relieved when the occasions for sexual congress began tapering off. Had they stopped abruptly she might have suspected Philip was maintaining his sensual equilibrium at the hands of some other woman, but the tapering off was so gradual she logically credited it to a completely natural decline of Philip's sensual needs with the increase of his years.

Patricia was not a complete innocent. She knew there were those women who derived considerable pleasure from the act of having a man enter them and achieve orgasm; but she believed it was not a natural faculty, that a woman must go out of her way to cultivate a taste for the pleasure perhaps in a manner similar to Pavlov's dog salivating at the sound of a bell. Just as Philip had his business to keep him occupied so thoroughly that he had no need of the trappings of sex, so Patricia was occupied in the same good works and charities that her mother had raised her on, and she believed with all her heart that she and Philip were well-matched psychologically, if not physically, and that it would be a contented marriage.

So, after things had gone on for ten years without a single quarrel, without a word of complaint from Philip, Patricia assumed all was well. She had never heard her parents quarrel, though in fact they had done so frequently, but never in front of the children so it did not occur to her that a marriage without quarrels was a marriage of indifference. The few efforts she made to improve her general appearance had no encouragement from Philip, which led her to conclude that if he had been sufficiently satisfied with her to marry her, there was really no justification to change the woman he had married.

But when he left her for another woman, for a woman who obviously went to great pains to make herself conspicuous, Patricia wondered if the time hadn't come to reassess herself. The very night she returned from Boston to the lonely mansion, she had stripped off her clothes to look at herself in a full-length mirror. What surprised her was the prominence of her breasts, even on so generous a body. They were, she could see, rather large and pointed for a woman who had adopted inconspicuousness as a way of life. True, she was addicted to sweaters, and traditionally sweaters tend to accent a woman's breasts, but she had countered this without conscious effort by bras designed to reduce what she considered an over-endowment to neutral bulges. Certain men, she had heard, judged women by the size and shape of their breasts, which made little sense to her, since some of Boston s most imposing dowagers had bosoms that could only be called monumental, and they were not noticeably hounded by men. She had, of course, seen Philip naked; he had seen her naked, but not deliberately, and only in the dimmest of lights, as if some Boston censor had inflicted shadows on what made them no better than the animals. When they had . . . when they had-she couldn't bring herself to use even in her thoughts the vulgar expression—when they had had sexual congress, he had seemed to hold himself away from her in such a way that his chest did not come in contact with her breasts.

As for the rest of her, it was clearly a body that would raise lusts only in a sex fiend, for not only was there little indentation for a waist, but at twenty-eight there was, unmistakably, what could only be called a pot belly. Her legs were fair, she would give herself that; her thighs were not yet fat and flabby; she still held her shoulders reasonably erect; but all-in-all it was a body that however drab in the clothes she wore, was still more attractive that way than stark naked. Certainly she'd never make the centerfold of Playboy. She'd have a better chance with The Farmer's Almanac.

There were, she knew, women who would consider it a point of honor to win back a straying husband; who would at this point go to some reducing salon and emerge looking like a middle-aged Twiggy, but she was already convinced there wasn't the slightest chance she could ever win Philip back, nor was she even sure she wanted him back, once he had expressed a preference for Gareth. After all, it wasn't only a matter of looks. She'd never seen Philip give a second glance to even the most beautiful women, and she had known it was not out of concern for her, or fear of her reaction. She was no believer in magic but she truly believed that Gareth had stumbled on some sexual trick which could, as surely as Circe's magic turned Greek mariners into swine, transform Philip into a dog in heat.

What Patricia didn't know was that there were many women at the Waybury Country Club who had envied her Philip, who had wondered what such a drab, uninteresting creature had done to deserve him; but once another woman snagged him—and they all knew who— they immediately closed ranks with Patricia, their hearts went out to her, they were determined somehow to make it up to her that she had lost the man they didn't think she was entitled to in the first place.

Patricia was astonished at the invitations that came pouring in. She was flattered they cared so much, and they seemed so sincerely anxious she should have far more of a social life than she ever had with Philip that she found herself dining at the Country Club almost every night. That she had little to say was not taken amiss: they felt it a duty to take the major burden of the conversation. All she regretted was that they considered mention of Philip and Gareth taboo, for quite frankly, she'd have liked to hear what they were doing, whom they were seeing.

In accepting the invitations, Patricia first feared that her well-meaning friends might try to pair her with unattached males, and she was relieved when this didn't happen, then dismayed when she realized why it wasn't happening: they didn't consider her attractive enough for any unattached male they knew.