Once I was in, I was presented with an array of choices. There were forty cameras in all, and I could choose among the two bathrooms, three bedrooms, the pool, kitchen, living room and deck. I was working on my third beer — on an empty stomach, no less — and I wasn’t really thinking, just moving instinctively toward something I couldn’t have defined. My pulse was racing. I felt guilty, paranoiac, consumed with sadness and lust. The phrase dirty old man shot through my head, and I clicked on “The Kitchen” because I couldn’t go to “Upstairs Bath,” not yet anyway.
The room that came into view was neat, preternaturally neat, like the set for a cooking show, saucepans suspended from hooks, ceramic containers of flour, sugar, tea and coffee lined up along a tile counter, matching dishtowels hanging from two silver loops affixed to the cabinet beneath the sink. But of course it was a set, the whole house was a set, because that was what this was all about: seeing through walls like Superman, like God. I clicked on Camera 2, and suddenly a pair of shoulders appeared on the screen, female shoulders, clad in gray and with a blond ponytail centered in the frame. The shoulders ducked out of view, came back again, working vigorously, furiously, over something, and now the back of a blond head was visible, a young face in profile, and I experienced my first little frisson of discovery: she was beating eggs in a bowl. The sexy young teen college vixens were having omelets for dinner, just like me … but no, another girl was there now, short hair, almost boyish, definitely not Samantha, and she had a cardboard box in her hand, and they were — what were they doing? — they were making brownies. Brownies. I could have cried for the simple sweet irreducible beauty of it.
That night — and it was a long night, a night that stretched on past the declining hours and into the building ones — I never got out of the kitchen. Samantha appeared at twenty past six, just as the blonde (Traci) pulled the brownies from the oven, and in the next five minutes the entire cast appeared, fourteen hands hovering over the hot pan, fingers to mouths, fat dark crumbs on their lips, on the front of their T-shirts and clingy tops, on the unblemished tiles of the counter and floor. They poured milk, juice, iced tea, Coke, and they flowed in and out of chairs, propped themselves up against the counter, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, every movement and gesture a revelation. And more: they chattered, giggled, made speeches, talked right through one another, their faces animated with the power and fluency of their silent words. What were they saying? What were they thinking? Already I was spinning off the dialogue (“Come on, don’t be such a pig, leave some for somebody else!”; “Yeah, and who you think went and dragged her ass down to the store to pick up the mix in the first place?”), and it was like no novel, no film, no experience I’d ever had. Understand me: I’d seen girls together before, seen them talk, overheard them, and men and women and children too, but this was different. This was for me. My private performance. And Samantha, the girl who’d come up my walk in a pair of too-tight heels, was the star of it.
The next morning I was up at first light, and I went straight to the computer. I needed to shave, comb my hair, dress, eat, micturate; I needed to work on my novel, jog up and down the steps at the university stadium, pay bills, read the paper, take the car in for an oil change. The globe was spinning. People were up, alert, ready for the day. But I was sitting in a cold dark house, wrapped in a blanket, checking in on Peep Hall.
Nobody was stirring. I’d watched Samantha and the short-haired girl (Gina) clean up the kitchen the night before, sweeping up the crumbs, stacking plates and glasses in the dishwasher, setting the brownie pan out on the counter to soak, and then I’d watched the two of them sit at the kitchen table with their books and a boombox, turning pages, taking notes, rocking to the beat of the unheard music. Now I saw the pan sitting on the counter, a peach-colored band of sunlight on the wall behind it, plates stacked in the drainboard, the silver gleam of the microwave — and the colors weren’t really true, I was thinking, not true at all. I studied the empty kitchen in a kind of trance, and then, without ceremony, I clicked on “Upstairs Bath.” There were two cameras, a shower cam and a toilet cam, and both gazed bleakly out on nothing. I went to “Downstairs Bath” then, and was rewarded by a blur of motion as the stone-faced figure of one of the girls — it was Cyndi, or no, Candi — slouched into the room in a flannel nightdress, hiked it up in back, and sat heavily on the toilet. Her eyes were closed — she was still dreaming. There was the sleepy slow operation with the toilet paper, a perfunctory rinsing of the fingertips, and then she was gone. I clicked on the bedrooms then, all three of them in succession, until I found Samantha, a gently respiring presence beneath a quilt in a single bed against the far wall. She was curled away from me, her hair spilled out over the pillow. I don’t know what I was feeling as I watched her there, asleep and oblivious, every creep, sadist, pervert and masturbator with thirty-six dollars in his pocket leering at her, but it wasn’t even remotely sexual. It went far beyond that, far beyond. I just watched her, like some sort of tutelary spirit, watched her till she turned over and I could see the dreams invade her eyelids.
I was late for work that day — I work lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then come back in at five for my regular shift — but it was slow and nobody seemed to notice. A word on the hoteclass="underline" it’s a pretty little place on the European model, perched at the top of the tallest hill around, and it has small but elegant rooms, and a cultivated — or at least educated — staff. It features a restaurant with pretensions to three-star status, a cozy bar and a patio with a ten-million-dollar view of the city and the harbor spread out beneath it. The real drinkers — university wives, rich widows, department heads entertaining visiting lecturers — don’t come in for lunch till one o’clock or later, so in my absence the cocktail waitress was able to cover for me, pouring two glasses of sauvignon blanc and uncapping a bottle of non-alcoholic beer all on her own. Not that I didn’t apologize profusely — I might have been eleven years late with my thesis, but work I took seriously.
It was a typical day on the South Coast, seventy-two at the beach, eighty or so on the restaurant patio, and we did get busy for a while there. I found myself shaking martinis and Manhattans, uncorking bottles of merlot and viognier, cutting up whole baskets of fruit for the sweet rum drinks that seemed to be in vogue again. It was work — simple, repetitive, nonintellectual — and I lost myself in it. When I looked up again, it was ten of three and the lunch crowd was dispersing. Suddenly I felt exhausted, as if I’d been out on some careening debauch the night before instead of sitting in front of my computer till my eyes began to sag. I punched out, drove home and fell into bed as if I’d been hit in the back of the head with a board.
I’d set the alarm for four-thirty, to give myself time to run the electric razor over my face, change my shirt and get back to work, and that would have been fine, but for the computer. I checked the walnut clock on the mantel as I was knotting my tie — I had ten minutes to spare — and sat down at my desk to have a quick look at Peep Hall. For some reason — variety’s sake, I guess — I clicked on “Living Room Cam 1,” and saw that two of the girls, Mandy and Traci, were exercising to a program on TV. In the nude. They were doing jumping jacks when the image first appeared on the screen, hands clapping over their heads, breasts flouncing, and then they switched, in perfect unison, to squat thrusts, their faces staring into the camera, their arms flexed, legs kicking out behind. It was a riveting performance. I watched, in awe, as they went on to aerobics, some light lifting with three-pound dumbbells and what looked to be a lead-weighted cane, and finally concluded by toweling each other off. I was twenty minutes late for work.