FOUR

FOOS WAS up shortly after dawn on the following day, preparing to operate the morning shift in the office. He later telephoned me asking if I would like to join him for a take-out breakfast at his desk, speaking in a voice devoid of residual pique from our previous evening. When I arrived we shook hands, but he did not comment on the fact that I was not wearing a necktie. Not wearing a tie is, for me, a major concession because, as the son of a prideful tailor, I have enjoyed dressing up in suits and neckties since grade school, and being without a tie induced symptoms of being shorn of my pretense to ele­gance. Nevertheless, after my blunder last night, I reminded myself that I was not on home territory. I was merely a nonpaying guest in a voyeur’s motel.

“Since we have some privacy here in the office,” Foos said, “I’d like to give you a quick look at my manuscript.” He inserted a key in the lower drawer of his desk and removed a cardboard box containing a four-inch-thick stack of handwritten pages. The yellow-lined pages had been torn out of eight-by-thirteen-inch legal pads, and, although the writing was single-spaced, it was easy to read because of Foos’s excellent penmanship. I leaned across the desk to get a look at the manuscript, and saw its title on the cover page: The Voyeur’s Journal.

“You probably didn’t notice it last night,” Foos went on, “but there’s a place in the attic where I hide some small-sized pads along with pencils and two flashlights. And when I see or hear something that interests me, I’ll scribble it down, and later, when I’m alone down here in the office, I’ll expand on it. I usually remember things here that I’d forgotten to write when I was up there. As I said, I’ve been working on this journal for almost fifteen years, and as long as nobody knows that I wrote it, I’d be happy for you to read it, and I’ll soon mail you the first section.”

“Thank you,” I said, but I wondered: Why has he put all of this in writing? Isn’t it enough for a voyeur to experience pleasure and a sense of power without having to write about it? Do voyeurs sometimes need escape from prolonged solitude by exposing themselves to other people (as Foos had done first with his wife, and later me), and then seek a larger audience as an anonymous scrivener of what they’ve witnessed?

Professor Marcus posed similar questions in his analysis of the Victorian gentleman who wrote My Secret Life.

“Though the author frequently states that he is writing only for himself and expresses doubts and hesitations about showing his work to anyone . . . it is clear that none of these protestations is to be taken at face value,” Marcus wrote, adding, “Had he really wanted to keep his secret life a secret he would not have put pen to paper.” The author of My Secret Life, however, might have had other influences.

“A second reason which he occasionally brings forward is that his work is a cry in the dark,” Marcus wrote, and being “aware of his isolation and of his ignorance of the sexual ideas and behavior of others, he desires to learn about them and to communicate something of himself. . . . He asks whether all men feel and behave as he does, and concludes: ‘I can never know this; my experience if printed may enable others to compare as I cannot.’”

Professor Marcus went on, “We must grant a certain degree of validity to this assertion, reminding ourselves that in the nineteenth century the novel served just such a function.”

During the rest of my visit to Aurora, I accompanied Foos into the attic observatory a number of additional times. As I looked through the slats, I saw mostly unhappy people watching television, complaining about minor physical ailments to one ­another, making unhappy references to the jobs they had, and constant complaints about money and the lack of it, the usual stuff that people say every day to one another, if they’re married or otherwise in cohabitation, but is never reported upon or thought about much beyond the one-on-one relationship. To me, without the Voyeur’s charged anticipation of erotic activity, it was tedium without end, the kind acted out in a motel room by normal couples every day of the year, for eternity.

When I left Denver to return home, I didn’t think I’d ever see the Voyeur again, and certainly had no hope of writing about him. I knew that what he was doing was very illegal (I also wondered how legal my behavior was in doing the same thing under his roof), and I insisted I would not write about him without using his name. He knew this was impossible. We both agreed it was impossible. So I returned to New York. I had a big book to promote.