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.”
TWENTY-EIGHT