TWENTY-SEVEN

ON MATTERS of personal hygiene, integrity, and honesty, the Voyeur gave high marks to few guests. Once he slipped a porno magazine into the table drawer of a room where a visiting minister and his wife were registered. Later, discovering the magazine while his wife was out of the room, the minister quickly masturbated to the centerfold photo and then tucked the magazine into his briefcase. He later complained to his wife about the “filthy” magazine that someone had left behind, vowing to return it to the office with his complaint—but he never did.

On another occasion, two presentable young women in their midtwenties arrived at the front desk asking Donna if they could have a look at a room prior to registering. Normally this was against motel policy, but Donna ignored it and handed them a key. As the Voyeur watched from above, the women hurriedly entered the room and rushed directly into the bathroom, both “desperate to relieve themselves” because of all the beer they’d admitted to having earlier at lunch.

While one woman sat on the toilet, the other squatted over a plastic wastebasket in front of the sink. As the second woman finished and stood up, she accidently knocked over the wastebasket with the heel of her shoe, sending an abundant amount of urine streaming along the bathroom floor and out onto the rug of the bedroom. At first, both women seemed too panic-stricken to move. But then, after mopping up some of the urine with towels, and tossing the towels under the bed, they made a quick exit, returning the key to Donna with the explanation that they would return later. Before they drove off, however, they were met by the Voyeur in the parking area, who politely but firmly invited them back to the room to resume the chore of cleaning up.

Although he was very unhappy whenever he saw male guests urinating into bathroom sinks, which men did routinely when they were a room’s single occupant, his anger was also directed at the toilet industry’s designers and manufacturers, who were apparently unable or unwilling to address the challenges men had in directing their urine stream accurately while standing in front of a standard household toilet, which is about shin high for most people and has an oval-shaped bowl measuring approximately ten-by-thirteen inches. Urinating into it becomes even more chancy in the morning, the Voyeur explained, because many men, and especially young men, get out of bed with erections.

“You cannot piss straight if you have an erection,” he explained, “and that’s why so many men prefer the sink, which is about waist-high and offers a wider target area. If I had my way, I’d design a household toilet that was more like the upright urinals you have in the men’s rooms of public buildings. There would still be a bowl in front to sit on, but in the back there would be a wide-sized toilet cover that, after you lifted it up and pushed it back in an upright position, men could piss against it and allow their urine to rebound off it and cascade down into the bowl.”

But he found it difficult to offer excuses to motel guests whose offensive habits consisted of eating fast food out of containers and then wiping their greasy fingers on the bed linen, and also pet owners who failed to fully wash away the room’s rug stains caused by their urinating and defecating dogs.

He faced a dilemma whenever a guest approached the registration desk accompanied by a dog. Should he falsely claim that there were no available rooms and therefore lose business to one of the competing motels, all of which were pet friendly? Should he instead assign them to one of his twelve rooms with vents, and then keep a close eye on their animal’s toilet manners?

The problem with his being a dog’s watchdog was that dogs often seemed to become aware that he was watching from the attic. Being very keen of hearing and sensitive to smell, dogs would frequently point their noses up toward the vents and begin to bark, causing the Voyeur, while leaning over a vent, to freeze in that position and try not to breathe. If a dog continued to bark, and indeed jumped up and down on the bed while balancing its body on its hind legs, the Voyeur would crawl backward as soundlessly as possible, hoping that his retreat would pacify the animal and encourage it to abide by the masters’ admonishments to stop making noise.

But aside from the presence of pets and bathroom violations, the Voyeur’s main complaint as a motel owner—a complaint he expressed in letters, journal notes, and occasional phone calls—was the conviction that most of what he saw and heard while he spied on his guests were words and phrases and personality traits that were repulsive, misrepresentative, hypocritical, falsely flattering, or completely dishonest.

“People are basically dishonest and unclean; they cheat and lie and are motivated by self-interest,” he commented, continuing, “They are part of a fantasy world of exaggerators, game players, tricksters, intriguers, thieves, and people in private who are never what they portray themselves as being in public.” The more time he spent in the attic, he insisted, the more disillusioned and misanthropic he became. As a result of his observations, he claimed to have become extremely antisocial, and when he was not in the attic he tried to avoid seeing his guests in the parking area or anywhere around the motel, and in the office he kept his conversations with them to a minimum.

As the Voyeur’s correspondence and voiced comments kept harking on the familiar theme of his alienation and agony, it occurred to me that he might be approaching something close to a mental breakdown; and I sometimes imagined him in terms of the psychotic anchorman in the 1976 film Network, who implodes: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” I was reminded as well of certain literary works from long ago: John Cheever’s 1947 story in the New Yorker “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s marriage slowly suffers as their newly purchased radio mysteriously allows them to overhear and become affected by the conversations and secrets of their neighboring tenants; and Nathanael West’s 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, in which an advice-dispensing newspaper columnist becomes an unstable, irascible alcoholic due to his frustrations and sensitivities vis-à-vis his readers’ empty lives and dubious solutions.

Except, in the Voyeur’s case, I believed his criticisms of other people were expressed without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Here was a snooper in the attic claiming the moral high ground while scrutinizing and judging his guests harshly, and, at the same time, appropriating for himself the right to pry with detachment and immunity.

And where was I in all this? I was the Voyeur’s pen pal, his confessor, perhaps, or an adjunct to a secret life he chose not to keep completely secret. Maybe he needed me as a confidant in addition to his longtime business partner and wife, Donna. He said that when he first confessed to Donna about his boyhood prowling outside the bedroom of his aunt Katheryn, Donna had been too astonished to reply. She had merely giggled.

Then she went on to ask, “You really mean you did that as a kid? And isn’t that what is called a ‘Peeping Tom?’” He replied, “No, it’s a trip in my exploration,” and later he expressed to her his desire to buy a motel and convert it into a “laboratory.”

This was early in their marriage, and, after he had found the motel he wanted, he approached her and asked, “Would you go along with me in this? We would have to keep this a secret—just you and me, and nobody else. This is how it will have to be.” Donna thought for a moment, and then answered, “Of course, and this is how it will be.”

But obviously the solo relationship with Donna was not enough for him, and in time I was invited into his privacy and through the mail I became an outlet—reading his version of what he saw and what he felt, and also sharing some of the personal grief and sadness he experienced as a family man. He wrote to me about the continuing problems of his teenage daughter, Dianne, and on more than one occasion he unburdened himself in letters and phone calls about his college-age son, Mark, who he said spent three months in jail after he and fellow students were arrested for holding up a restaurant, presumably for drug money.

“Mark never did drugs in high school, as far as I know,” he told me. “During his first year in college, he did fine. But the second year it seemed he got involved with some real jerks, smart jerks, and they performed an armed robbery. Why? Mark had a brand-new truck, he had all the clothes he wanted, he had all the money he wanted, he had his whole college paid for. And he goes out and commits robbery! Is that a reflection on his family’s values? Is that his dad’s fault? His mother’s fault? Mark had such great potential. He was studying to become a petroleum engineer, where the starting pay is about $200,000 a year. And so he and his friends rob a restaurant! They got forty-seven dollars.”