Foos slowed down on East Colfax Avenue, made a right turn onto Scranton Street, and then a left into the parking area of the Manor House Motel, a brick building neatly painted green that had orange doors leading into each of its twenty-one guest rooms.
“Looks like we’re pretty booked up,” he said, looking through the windshield and noticing that nearly all the white-lined spaces in front of the orange doors were occupied by vehicles. He then parked next to a smaller adjacent building, one consisting of a two-room office, the family quarters, and, farther back, three separate rooms with orange doors numbered “22,” “23,” and “24,” each having a sitting area and a small kitchen.
As I followed behind Foos, who was carrying my luggage, we were greeted in the office by his wife Donna, a petite, blue-eyed blonde dressed in her nurse’s uniform. After shaking hands, she explained that she was on her way to the hospital, working the night shift, but she looked forward to seeing me in the morning. Her mother, Viola, a gray-haired, bespectacled woman who was at a desk speaking on a telephone, waved and smiled in my direction, and waved again as I headed out the door with Foos, walking along a narrow stone pathway in the direction of where I would be staying, Room 24, at the far end of the smaller building.
“This place is quieter than usual,” Foos said. “Neither of our children is living here now. Our son, Mark, is a freshman at the Colorado School of Mines, and Dianne, who was born with a respiratory ailment, had to drop out of high school to be treated at a clinic in the hospital. Donna visits her all the time between rounds, and I also get over there regularly, usually in the mornings.”
Foos dropped my luggage in front of Room 24 and, after opening the door with the key, switched on the air conditioner and placed my luggage near the closet.
“Why don’t you unpack and make yourself comfortable for a while,” he said, “and in an hour I’ll call and we’ll go out to this great new restaurant, the Black Angus. After that, we can come back and take a little tour of the attic.”
TWO
AFTER HE had handed me the room key and left, and I had finished unpacking, I began making notes of my impressions of Gerald Foos and what he had told me in the car. Even when I’m not planning to publish anything, I usually keep a written account of my daily travels and encounters with people, together with expense receipts and other documents that may be needed later for tax purposes. In what was once a wine cellar in my New York brownstone, but now serves as my workspace and storage area, there are dozens of cardboard boxes and metal cabinets filled with folders containing such material, all of it arranged in chronological order from recent days back to the mid-1950s, when I started working for the Times. It was the paper of record and I was a man of record. Sometimes I go back and review old records merely to refresh my memory on minor personal matters, and sometimes the material will prove to be professionally useful—as I suspected my information about Gerald Foos would be if he allowed me to publicly identify him.
Meanwhile, my main interest in him was not really dependent on having access to his attic. What could I see in his attic that I had not already seen as the researching writer of Thy Neighbor’s Wife and a frequenter of Sandstone’s swinging couples’ ballroom? But what I hoped to gain during this visit to Colorado was his permission to read the hundreds of pages that he claimed to have written during the last fifteen years as a clandestine chronicler.
While I assumed that his account centered on what brought him sexual excitement, it was also possible that he observed and noted things that existed beyond, or in addition to, his anticipated desires. A voyeur is motivated by anticipation; he quietly invests endless hours in the hope of seeing what he hopes to see. And yet for every erotic episode he witnesses, he might be privy to multitudes of mundane and, at times, stupendously boring moments representing the daily human routine of ordinariness—of people defecating, channel surfing, snoring, primping in front of a mirror, and doing other things too tediously real for today’s reality television. No one is more underpaid on an hourly basis than a voyeur.