Scott Turow - Personal injuries

She had a teammate at the time, she told him, a woman named Hilary Beacom, a good midfielder but not quite a star. Two years ahead of Evon, Hilary was from the Main Line near Philadelphia. Field hockey, weirdly, had a highclass heritage. There were all these women out there, running, whaling at balls, smashing each other in the legs and even, now and then, the head. Blood flowed often. It wasn't what Evon thought of as a finishing-school game. But that's where many of the girls came from. Private schools. Rich schools. Hilary Beacom had emerged from that world. Blond hair thick as velvet, pulled back in a tartan headband. Clothing by Laura Ashley. And the contented charm of someone who truly owned the world.

She looked after Evon, sat beside her on the bus, told her secrets about the coaches. Away from the field, they rode horseback together. One night in May of Evon's sophomore year, they got drunk. Drinking was forbidden in or out of season. They'd all signed pledges. But Hilary was graduating soon and they drank wildly, rolling through half a dozen frat parties before they made their way to Hilary's room. They were just silly. They were imitating people on childhood TV shows ("Oh, Mr. Grant!") and then Star Trek stuff, all the different species who were human except for a single trait that had been amplified, or mutated, or replaced. Spock, without emotion.

`I see your aura,' said Hilary across the room, pretending to be a character from the Canis galaxy, who supposedly had the ability of dogs to see the halo of emotional discharge around a human being. `I see your awe-rah,' she said and waved her hands swami-like as she approached. Evon had collapsed on Hilary's bed with her head against a bolster. They were both laughing.

`And what do you see?'

Hilary came closer, spreading her opened palms over Evon's head, as if massaging some presence in the air.

`I see,' said Hilary, whose eyes seemed to clear briefly, `I see you're drunk.'

They crumbled against each other. Hilary finally righted herself and began the same routine.

`I see you are uncertain,' she said. Her eyes lit upon Evon. `I see you are afraid.'

`Okay,' said Evon, laughing, though she realized then that the time for laughter had passed. Hilary moved her hands again, first around Evon's head, and then allowed them to drift along her entire torso, separated from contact by some barely visible micrometer.

`I feel yearning,' Hilary said.

Evon didn't answer. Hilary's face, thick with makeup to hide the blemishes on one cheek, was inches from hers. The shades on the room were drawn.

'Do you know what's happening here?' Hilary asked her.

Yes, she knew. She knew. Somehow. They watched each other, measuring the uncertainty. And then Hilary brought her face to hers. Evon lingered there, in the sweet, powerful smells of Hilary's face. Beyond the phony scents, her flesh had the vague sweetness of milk. Evon's eyes were still open when their lips met. Dry from sport and the anxiousness of the moment, they felt like the fragile crust formed on an orange section left in the air, and, like the orange, some thrilling sweetness lay below. Hilary slowly brought her full weight down upon her.

Feaver spoke: So, she knew.

"No. It was something that happened. I didn't know what it meant." She never failed to admit there was pleasure in it. But afterwards, she told herself she had not known what else to do. It was, oddly, not much different than being on that hillside with Russell. She remained aloof from Hilary, whose patrician grace-more than that, her kindness-prevented her from ever speaking a word. A month later Hilary graduated. The event receded with time, its contours lost in the murk of memory. There were lots of things about her, Evon reasoned, that weren't the same as most people she knew. She came from a tiny little town nobody'd ever heard of. She'd been selected for the national team in an Olympic sport. And she once slept with a girl. That was how she was.

But did that mean she wasn't going to get the happiness everybody else wanted? That she wasn't entitled to it? If you'd asked her, then, after Hilary, she'd still have predicted she was going to get married, have kids, the house, the husband, a good guy, quiet and sincere, the way she thought of her father and her little brothers. When that happened, Hilary wouldn't matter. None of it would. She was thirty-four years old now. Thirty-four, and the vision of that waiting serenity still swam through her as a comfort from time to time, and when she realized it was never going to occur, she was still, at thirty-four, crushed.

A little more than three years ago she had been detailed to San Francisco on an investigation of suspected bribery of Agriculture Department inspectors at the seaport. Another agent had taken her to this strip club for a laugh. One of the girls there was a source of his, she bounced around with a lot of would-be wiseguys and had some good information. But Evon wasn't laughing. He thought it was because she was uptight and they left after a drink. But what seized. up everything in her was the way one woman looked at her while she was dancing. She had her naked breasts in her hands, massaging them, drawing them together, the nipples slender, very red, and visibly erect, and she turned a yearning, willing, knowing look on Evon. It was a come-on, she realized, part of their routine, the girls played to everybody in the crowd, knowing nobody was there by accident, everybody came looking for a little thrill. And Evon got hers. She went home and did not sleep all night. When she poured a vodka for herself, her hand shook so that she could barely get the liquid in the glass. She sat in an easy chair in the little monthly studio where the Bureau'd put her and tried to calm down. And after an hour or so of drinking she finally said it to herself. So that's how I am.

"And I went back. I didn't have the remotest idea what I'd say if anybody I knew showed up there. `I expected to find you'? I guess that was what I'd worked out in my head. I went back like it was business, an investigation. I sat in the front row. I watched this woman-Teresa Galindo, it turned out, was her name-I watched Teresa, I smiled at her, she looked at me again that way, and now I just sort of gave in, succumbed. I felt my body rise to her-" Even now, the memory was stunning. Stunning.

"Anyway, they circulated, the girls, you know, they wanted you to buy drinks. And this girl, Teresa, she wasn't a special beauty. The girls in the clubs, most of them, the main attribute they brought to the job was that they were willing to take off their clothes and dance in front of people. Teresa was all kind of pockmarked. When she went walking around in this skinny bikini and this little bathing shift, you could see she was made up all the way down her chest. But I was so turned on. Because I didn't have to work for what I wanted, because Teresa just saw it and knew what was there. When she came back with the drinks, she dropped a napkin in my lap and whispered, `I do privates.'

"'Private what?' I nearly asked. `Dancing' is what she'd have said. But I didn't think she was really talking about dancing. I saw a phone number and just crumpled the napkin up in my hand. And I called. That night, so I didn't lose courage. And she came to my apartment the next morning. 11 a.m. Broad daylight, before both of us went to work. It was so weird. Not because of what we were doing-and it went past dancing in about two minutes not because it was a woman's hands on me, not because of the incredible little toys she'd brought with her-there was one she called the Magic Wand with these three little revolving balls at the end?-but because in the middle I thought, This is a dream, God, I have dreamed this, I have dreamed it a thousand times.

"I paid her. And she always took the money. She said she only did this with women and not very often, but I had no idea whether that was true. She liked me. She figured out really fast that I was law enforcement, but she never guessed it was the Bureau. She thought I was a county sheriff's deputy. She made up this whole tale about me. I worked in the jail. I hated the men in there. Just the way she and most of the other girls hated the men in the club. That's why they seemed to do it. For the chance to look down on men, who want it so badly, so openly, and who're not going to get it. She had her reasons, too. She'd been messed with for years by her grandfather, a big patron who everybody was afraid of. She'd been to college; that was a surprise. She had a degree in accounting. But she made more money doing this.