The Voyeur’s Motel
Often on foot, although sometimes in a car, he would cruise through neighborhoods and spy on people who were casual about lowering their window shades. He made no secret of his voyeurism to Donna. “Even before our marriage I told her that this gave me a feeling of power,” he said. She seemed to understand. “Donna and most nurses are very open-minded,” he said. “They’ve seen it all—death, disease, pain, disorders of every kind—and it takes a lot to shock a nurse.” She even accompanied him sometimes on his voyeuristic excursions, and it was Donna, he said, who first encouraged him to make notes about what he saw.
.. I knew that he viewed himself as a sex researcher along the lines of Alfred Kinsey, and I assumed that his account centered on what excited him sexually, but it was possible that he noted things that existed beyond his desires. A voyeur is motivated by anticipation; he invests endless hours in the hope of seeing what he wishes to see.
.. because his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. He reasoned, “There’s no invasion of privacy if no one complains.”
.. Donna always registered the more youthful and attractive guests in one of the “viewing rooms.” The nine non-viewing rooms were saved for families or individuals or couples who were elderly or less physically appealing.
.. My observations indicate that the majority of vacationers spend their time in misery. They fight about money; where to visit. . . . All their aggressions somehow are immeasurably increased, and this is the time they discover they are not properly matched. Women especially have a difficult time adjusting to both the new surroundings and their husbands. Vacations produce all the anxieties within mankind to come forward during this time, and to perpetuate the worst of emotions. . . .
.. The more I read, the more convinced I became that Foos’s stilted metaphysics were his way of attempting to elevate his disturbing pastime into something of value.
.. As the years passed, he became more preoccupied with receiving recognition for what he viewed as his pioneering research. By necessity, he existed in the shadows, running his laboratory for the study of human behavior. He considered his work to be superior to that of the sexologists at the Kinsey Institute and the Masters & Johnson clinic.
.. He grew jaded about what he was seeing through the vents, and he began to realize that it was impossible for him to get the scientific credit he felt he deserved.
.. These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside.
.. Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact.
.. But, as I thought about it, his response—the observation that he “really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned”—was consistent with his sense of himself as a fractured individual.
..I also thought of John Cheever’s 1947 story “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s marriage slowly suffers as their new radio mysteriously allows them to overhear the conversations and secrets of their neighbors; and of Nathanael West’s 1933 novel, “Miss Lonelyhearts,” in which an advice columnist’s life deteriorates as a result of his ongoing exposure to his readers’ sad and empty lives.
.. although he took comfort in the belief that the business was in decline. When he began, in the sixties, motels thrived because of the “tryst trade”; guests could walk directly from their cars to their rooms without having to interact with anyone in a lobby or elevator. Couples today, he said, seem less concerned with that kind of secrecy and discretion.
.. Because it is possible that someday the F.B.I. will show up and say, ‘Gerald Foos, we have evidence that you’ve been watching people from your observation platform. What are you, some kind of pervert?’ And then Gerald Foos will respond: ‘And what about you, Big Brother? For years you’ve been watching me everywhere I go.’ ”