I watched for several moments, and then Foos raised his head up from the vent and smiled at me while giving a thumbs-up sign. He then leaned closer to me and whispered that this was the couple from Chicago he had been talking about in the car on our way back from the restaurant.
Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe the slender woman performing fellatio on her partner, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my red-striped silk necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvered screen and was now dangling into the couple’s bedroom within a few yards of the young lady’s head.
The only reason I became aware of my carelessness was that Gerald Foos had crawled behind me and began grabbing me up by the neck away from the vent, and then, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats so swiftly and quietly that the couple below saw none of it, partly because the woman’s back was to us and the man was absorbed in pleasure with his eyes closed.
The wide-eyed facial expression of Gerald Foos reflected considerable anxiety and irritation, and, though he said nothing, I felt chastened and embarrassed. If my wayward necktie had betrayed his hideaway, he could have been sued and imprisoned, and the fault would have been entirely mine. My next thought was: Why was I worried about protecting Gerald Foos? What was I doing up here, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project? When he motioned that we leave the attic, I immediately obliged, following him down the ladder into the utility room, and then into the parking area.
“You must put away that tie,” he said finally, escorting me toward my room. I nodded, and then wished him a good night.
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.’”