Gerald and Anita began to see one another frequently, and in letters to me he described her as a welcomed source of support and reassurance. “She is calm, gentle and very easy-going,” he wrote. “She has also promised to keep my voyeuristic life a secret.”
In a later note he characterized himself as a changed man, one of less bereavement and more bravado, “If Anita ever would consider marriage, it will not be from gratitude or devotion but because she has learned to love again, almost against her will. She will need some strong, vigorous thinker, some great man whose will and intellect compels her heart’s homage and without whose company she cannot persuade herself to live. She has now met that person in Gerald L. Foos.”
On April 20, 1984, Gerald Foos and Anita Clark were married in Las Vegas. After they returned to Aurora she began helping him at the motel and sharing his residence on the municipal golf course. At the motel’s reservation desk she extended equal amounts of courtesy to each arriving guest, but, following Donna’s policy, was selective in assigning the more attractive arrivals to rooms providing viewing opportunities for Gerald.
She had seen pornographic films before meeting Gerald, but after marrying him she became accustomed to witnessing live performances while reclining with him in the attic, sometimes simultaneously having oral sex or intercourse. She easily adapted to the pleasurable routines that he had practiced in earlier and better times with Donna, and, because Anita had no outside employment, she worked full time at the motel and soon was largely responsible for its daily maintenance and bookkeeping.
In the absence of Donna and Viola, Anita hired two replacements in the office and also welcomed part-time assistance behind the desk from Gerald’s daughter, Dianne, whenever the latter’s health permitted. In addition, Gerald recruited the services of his estranged son, Mark, wanting him to gain managerial experience at a time when Gerald was thinking of expanding the business—which, in fact, he did in 1987 with the purchase of a second motel for approximately $200,000.
TWENTY-NINE
GERALD’S NEXT motel was called the Riviera, and it was located at 9100 East Colfax Avenue, about a ten-minute drive from the Manor House. The Riviera was a two-story building with seventy-two rooms. Gerald installed no more than four faux ventilators in the bedroom ceilings because the motel’s relatively flat roof provided only tight crawling space within the attic; and so the Manor House remained his observational headquarters.
“Voyeurs are cripples . . . whom God has not blessed,” he wrote. “God said to us, ‘You get to observe at your own risk.’” In another letter, drawn from his memories at sea, he wrote, “The Voyeur is likened to a ship’s chronometer, a continuous unbroken vigilance or sentinel in a state of alert . . . The Voyeur is one that sits up at night, and continually awake at night or day, waiting for the next observation.”
During the Christmas holiday season of 1991, Gerald and Anita visited New York City, staying at a hotel not far from my home. But I did not see them. I had just finished one book and was busy with another, this one a memoir called A Writer’s Life that took me to Alabama to revisit my student days at the University of Alabama in the early 1950s, and also back to my reporting days in the 1960s when I worked at the New York Times helping to cover such civil rights confrontations as the “Bloody Sunday” incident that occurred in the old Alabama plantation town of Selma, on March 7, 1965.
In 1993 I was invited to write for the New Yorker by Tina Brown as a writer at large, and one of the many subjects I discussed with the magazine’s newly appointed editor was the story of the Voyeur and his motel. Tina was amazed and interested in the story, but I couldn’t get Gerald to commit to going public, so it was a nonstarter. It had been over a decade since he had first reached out to me; since I don’t keep secrets from my readers, and because I doubted Gerald would ever agree to using his name in print, I didn’t think the story would ever be published.
It was while I was in Alabama in 1996, doing follow-up research for A Writer’s Life, that I received word from Gerald Foos saying that his motel-owning days were over. He was now in his early sixties, and his knees and back were so afflicted with arthritis that it was exceedingly painful for him to climb the ladder and crawl around the attic prior to positioning himself over the louvered apertures.
Anita and I retired on November 1, 1996, selling our last motel, the Riviera Motel, and previously selling the Manor House Motel in August, 1996.