The Last Chance Read Free

into a taxi, drive around the block, and go into a side entrance and upstairs to their wedding suite to be officially deflowered. Everybody who mattered knew what they were going to do. Her mother, his mother, her father … oh, God, how humiliating. Ellen wondered if her father was blocking it all out of his mind the way he did everything that bothered him. She was tired and embarrassed and hot and Hank was too. She wished they could run away, or put on jeans and go to P. J. Clarke’s and get drunk, or just go to sleep. But not have to go into that huge white marble bathroom and change to her white satin nightgown with the matching peignoir and go out to the living room to face this stranger she was welded to now, who was in his bathrobe too and even had the mandatory bottle of champagne waiting in a cooler, just like in a bad movie.
    She couldn’t tell him how she felt. Girls didn’t tell men how they felt about things. She had to let him undress her like in that same bad movie and try to pretend she didn’t notice how scared he was. This time they wouldn’t be necking and touching and doing all those wonderful sensual things that drove her crazy. They were Married now and they had to Do It. He even had a condom ready on the night table. She had never felt less like Doing It in her life.
    She knew he didn’t feel like it either. She had never been close to Hank without his getting an erection, but this time it just lay there, and she pretended not to look. She had never seen him fully naked before. Not even in a bathing suit, because they had met in the winter. She had never seen any man naked.
    He took her hand and put it on his penis. He couldn’t even speak to her, ask her, tell her what to do, and his embarrassment compounded hers until she felt nauseated. She began to stroke it with the hand that had the wedding ring on it. She was so used to the boys doing everything to her, trying to go as far as they could, that she had never done anything to them. But it didn’t bother her. She had been curious to know what a bare penis felt like. It just lay there in her hand.
    Then she felt his hand on the back of her neck, pushing her head down. She knew what he wanted her to do but she wasn’t going to do it. How dare he? Why didn’t he ask her instead of shoving her? If he’d only said something, if he’d been a person instead of this frantic frightened animal, she would have done it for him. She didn’t know what to do, but she let him put it into her mouth and she felt it finally grow big, no, enormous, and she wanted to gag. I hate you, Ellen thought. I hate you, you make me sick, and I will hate you for the rest of my life.
    She lay passively while he consummated their marriage, and she wondered if her mother knew what a hoax it all was and why she had never told her.
    The next morning they went to Bermuda and the weather was perfect. They swam, sunned until they were mahogany color, snorkeled, rented bicycles, ate lobster, drank champagne, and took “a nap” every afternoon. Hank never had any more trouble and Ellen never had to do that thing again, but she was determined never to do it even if he begged her. He became aware after a while that she remained totally unmoved, and finally he even asked her timidly what she would like, and she told him, but nothing he did made her feel anything but cold and dead. Anger burned inside of her for having been cheated. She felt as if they were mirror skaters, doing everything perfectly in synchronization but never touching.
    When they came back from their honeymoon she met his brother, who had been in the Army overseas and had just been released. Tony was short and lively, not much like Hank at all, and Ellen fell madly in love with him. They had a brief, passionate affair, heightened by the knowledge that they were doing a terrible thing to Hank and there was no way they could keep on doing it. The day they finally decided was the last time they would ever sleep