Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"So I knew. Out loud to myself, I knew. And people who're straight, I listen to them talk, and sometimes they seem to think that knowing is the only hard part. As if straight people have an easy time hooking up with someone else and aren't miserable about the fact they can't. I tried hanging out with this woman, Teresa. Sometimes, before or after, we'd go for a drink. But she'd made up her story about me, and I'd made up my story about her. Mine was that she was soft and kind and really just wanted somebody to turn to, and that wasn't so. Her crowd was tough. They liked pain. She took me to the sex clubs. They call them clubs, but it's just somebody's loft where you pay at the door. And I didn't care for what I saw. A woman with an Idaho potato? I wanted a life. That was a freak show. At least to me it was. So," she said wearily.

"I mean, sometimes I think about it and I'm just appalled. A stripper. A strip-per, for gosh sake. It's like my life was something dreamed up by a wino in a bus station. A stripper."

That was a play, Feaver said. She stiffened, but she'd misunderstood.

"It's a rehearsal," he said. "You're not bringing a stripper home to Mom."

She laughed at the idea. She wasn't bringing anybody home to Mom. She'd never have the fortitude. But she knew what he meant.

"So where the hell does Carmody come in here?" he asked. "After this?"

"Before. That was a pretty predictable period. I mean, I knew I wasn't getting the same thing from it as other people. From the Act. I thought I was frightened. Well, I was frightened. So I thought if I could get drunk enoughAnd I was away from home. That wasn't the only time. Hardly. The mechanics, they were okay, actually. This isn't about mechanics. It's about passion. Being the kind of woman who feels passion for other women. And who wants a woman to feel passion for her."

He asked who she was feeling passion for now, who she'd left back home, and somehow she laughed again at the idea. Des Moines wasn't exactly San Francisco, and she had to be sensible, there was a lot the Bureau wasn't ready for yet. Iowa City was another story, but it was a distance, and there was an uncomfortable aspect to what she encountered there, reminiscent of what she'd seen in San Francisco. A lot of those women were on a mission and sort of demanded you be queer their way. It was fine all right to walk around in leather panties with your nipples covered in duct tape, but God forbid a girl liked Lee Greenwood or Travis Tritt. Or George Bush. Over all, though, she was still uptight. She realized that. Even now, there must have been some little part of her that was waiting for it all to go away.

About eighteen months ago something started to happen with a woman from church named Tina Criant. She was married to a trooper Evon had worked with, and Tina and she had a lot of things in common, the same funny mix of hobbies, needlepoint and pistol-shooting. They did those things together. Tina liked to give her books. They laughed. She was just a warm, special person, and Evon could see something beginning, probably the kind of thing Hilary Beacom saw in her. She never said a word, neither of them did. In retrospect, she knew she'd let it get away somehow. If she'd been bold, she might have been an example or supplied the courage for both of them. But perhaps it was just as well. Tina and Tom, her husband, had two little boys, five and seven. For about two months, Evon watched Tina work it out with herself. And decide. She quit the needlepoint circle. She stopped coming to the range. It had hurt a good deal. Evon hadn't realized until then how hard she had been hoping.

Sometimes now, she told him, in her worst moments, she would see one of those women who turn up in completely male settings-on road crews, or the lone white person among a Hispanic gardening gang-one of those bulky types with short hair and a dried-up face devoid of makeup and a bunched-up sweatshirt to hide what, for some reason, was always a humongous set of tits. She'd look at those women and think, Is that who I am? Is that who I'm going to be? Some self-declared misfit with her pistol collection and three sports channels on cable?

"Cut it out." He spoke unexpectedly, softly.

"Huh?"

"Don't do that to yourself. I mean, you can say I don't know you, but I know that's not you. Christ," he said, "you don't have it that easy."

It probably wasn't funny. But she laughed for a long time, and he laughed with her. Tonight, right now, she was ready to laugh. Because he was right. Both ways. The good news and the bad. She wasn't a type. She was herself. Square peg, all right. Cranky. Awkward. Confused, of course. But not completely ill suited to the world, not so dominated by these questions that they took over everything else. She had her secrets. Everybody did. Stuff swirled around inside her, undetermined, like the dust in the cosmos that wasn't yet a comet or a planet or a star. But who wasn't like that? Everybody. Everybody's sex life was strange. Right?

"So what else do you need to know, Robbie?" she asked after a time, in a drier tone. Across the room she heard the ice cubes rattle in his glass. Next door, a neighbor who'd played the Bodyguard sound track often enough since January to wear out the plastic was at it again.

"How'd you come up with `Evon'?"

It was the name of her first cousin, a girl about her age, an Americanized spelling meant to be pronounced the same way as Yvonne. But people got confused. The teachers. Other kids. They came to call her cousin `Even' and she got tired of correcting it. At times, it was a source of torment, kids being like they are. `Even worse.' `Even dumber.' `Even uglier.' `Even fatter.' But this girl, her cousin, she had some stuff. She wouldn't dent. `Even better,' she would answer, and meant it. She was a doctor now in Boise, divorced, two kids, pretty happy on her own. They'd seen each other only once in the last ten years, but it had been a warm occasion. `Even better.' She always wanted to be able to say that the way her cousin had.

A motorcycle gunned by in the avenue. She asked him if there was anything else.

"Once and for all," he finally said, "are you wired or not?"

She had to laugh. She'd laughed quite a bit by now.

"You think I'd have said all this to you with a tape recorder running?"

He'd considered that, though. He said he'd always figured they let her, as an agent, turn it on and off. She faced him in the dark. They'd been careful up to now not to look at one another.

"Just tell me no," he said. "I'll believe you. Just tell me no."

"I've told you no before. You want to look?"

"Huh?"

"Look." She stood up. She lifted her arms. "Go ahead and look. Go on. Frisk me. You won't believe anything else."

He was startled, but he eventually padded, shoeless and with a strangely light tread, to where she waited.

I don't have to do this."

"Yes you do. Only don't mess around," she said. "Do it the way I would. Check the purse."

He stood there for some time, embarrassed or simply unskilled in laying hands on a woman without the usual involvements. Finally, he gripped her shoulders. But he went no further. Instead he pulled her toward him slowly, until her head was directly beneath his chin, and then he bent and kissed her squarely on the crown, much as he'd done in the courthouse with Leo, his elderly cousin.

After that, he collected his coat and wiggled one of his feet awhile getting it back into his boot. A blade of light edged the door.

"You're okay," he said.

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"If they don't close us down tonight."

He shrugged. They'd done their best, he said. Both of them. He left her in the dark, feeling he was right. THE NEXT MORNING, when Evon left her apartment, she was followed. She took a taxi out to Glen Ayre, where she'd left her car overnight, and even as she was getting in, she saw the headlights come on in a car positioned in a no-parking zone across the street. Daylight Saving had recommenced, and there was little light at this hour. She used her makeup mirror to watch behind her. The car fell back on the highway, yet it appeared now and then, and soon she noticed a second auto, sometimes floating a little ahead of the taxi in the right lane. At one point, that vehicle, a jacked-up Buick, rode alongside, its occupants black guys, older fellows with a thuggish look. The passenger had a beard and prison muscles and wore a dark do rag and shades, even though the sun was not over the horizon. He turned to Evon with a quick, knowing smartass smile that froze her heart.