What must it be like, I couldn't help wondering, to be that sicko bastard snooping on unsuspecting people as they washed their crotches and wiped their asses? I found myself — I'm tempted to say watched myself — returning to the street and strolling as if casually across the Court toward that light from 1011, assuring myself that in good-neighborly fashion I was making certain that nothing was amiss over there, but at the same time realizing, with a thrill of dismay, that what I might really be about to do was…
Wearing only her underpants, slim Ethel Bailey stood at her bathroom window, facing it's curtained and unlighted counterpart across the shrubberied aisle in 1013 (it's floor plan the mirror image of 1011's). Eyes closed, thin lips mischievously smiling, head turned aside like an ancient-Egyptian profile and chin out-thrust in amused, faux-modest challenge, she cupped her small breasts in her hands as if in presentation and swiveled her upper torso slightly from side to side, the better to display them. As I watched from behind a small cypress, she then slid one hand down across her flat belly and into the front of her jay-blue undies, moved it around inside there, and twitched her pelvis as if to the beat of some silent music. Turned herself hind-to; flexed and unflexed her skinny buttocks practically on the windowsill as she worked her panties down! Hot-faced with appall at both of us, I beat as hasty a retreat as prudence allowed. Was relieved indeed to see no one else out enjoying the night air. Hoped to Christ Jim Smythe wasn't checking for prowlers from his front window.
Already in bed, sitting propped against it's king-size headboard and working her Sunday Times crossword puzzle while she waited for me to join her, "Where've you been?" Margie asked, in a tone of mock-petulant amusement, when I came in. "Out peeping on the neighbors?"
"Nobody out there worth peeping at," I declared as lightly as I could manage, and moved past her to the bathroom to hide my flushed face. "All the hot stuff's right here in Ten-Ten."
"Yes, well," she called back — playfully, to my immeasurable relief. "It is a bit sticky in here. Maybe turn the ceiling fan on when you come back in?"
I did, having undressed, washed up, brushed teeth, peed (uncomfortably conscious of the window virtually at my elbow), and donned a short-sleeved pajama top — and found that Margie had already shed hers and set aside her puzzle, expectantly. At that period of our lives, we Mannings still made love at least a couple of times a week (the so-clinical phrase "had sex" was not in as general use back then as nowadays, and never between ourselves), most often in the mornings, but also and usually more ardently at bedtime or even on a foul-weather weekend afternoon. That night, as the low-speed overhead fan moved light air over our skin and I was simultaneously stirred and shamed by the un-expungeable image of Sam Bailey's naked wife, we came together more passionately than we had done for some while. Entwined with her then in spent contentment, guilty-conscienced but enormously grateful for our happy and after-all-faithful marriage, I wondered briefly — and unjealously — whom my wife might have been fantasizing as her lover while we two went at it.
But "Wow," she murmured in drowsy languor. "That night sky of yours must've been some turn-on. You'll have to try it more often." "You're my turn-on," I assured her — dutifully, guiltily, but nonetheless sincerely as we disconnected our satisfied bodies and turned to sleep.
And there You pretty much have it, make of it what You will. Relieved both as self-appointed chronicler and as a prevailingly moral man to put that discreditable aberration behind me, I wish I could follow it now with a proper dramatic climax and denouement to this account of the Oyster Cove Peeping Tom: Some rascally local teenager, say, or migrant worker, is caught red-handed (red-eyed?) in the disgusting act and turned over to the Authorities, unless gunned down in flagrante delicto by Jim Smythe or some other Oyster Cover, several of whom had seen fit to arm themselves as the sightings multiplied. Or better yet, for dramatic effect if not for neighborhood comity, the P.T. turns out indeed to have been one of us, who then swears he was only keeping an eye out for prowlers, but fails to convince a fair number of us despite his mortified wife's indignant and increasingly desperate defense of him. More or less ostracized, the couple list their villa for sale, move somewhere down south or out west, and divorce soon after.
Et cetera. But what You're winding up here, if You happen to exist, is a history, not a Story, and it's "ending" is no duly gratifying Resolution nor even a capital-E Ending, really, just a sort of petering out, like most folks' lives. No further Oyster Cove P.T. sightings reported after July, and only one more from elsewhere in Heron Bay Estates — from an arriviste couple just settling into their brand-new Spartina Pointey mansion and, who knows, maybe wanting in on the action? The late-summer Atlantic hurricane season preempted our attention as usual; perhaps one of it's serial dock-swamping, tree-limb-cracking near misses blew or washed the creep away? Life in the community reverted to normaclass="underline" New neighbors moved in, replacing others moving up, down, sideways, or out. Kitchens and bathrooms were remodeled, whole villas renovated, older cars traded in for new. Grand children were born (never on grandparental location, and often thousands of American miles away); their parents — our grownup children — divorced or didn't, remarried or didn't, succeeded or failed in their careers or just muddled through. Old Oyster Covers got older, faltered, died — Ethel Bailey among them, rendered leaner yet in her terminal season by metastasized cervical cancer and it's vain attendant therapies; Jim Smythe too, felled by a stroke when Democrats won the White House in '92. We re-deactivated our secondary security gates, and some of us resumed our evening paseos around the Court. Already by Halloween of the year I tell of, the P.T. had become little more than a slightly nervous neighborhood joke: "Peekaboo! I see you!" By Thanksgiving, the OCNA membership bowed heads in near unison (the outspokenly atheist Sam Bailey scowling straight ahead as always) while ex-Reverend Matt Grauer gave our collective thanks that that minor menace, or peace-disturbing figment, had evidently passed.
"I can't help wondering," Mary Grauer declared just a month or so ago, when something or other reminded her and Margie of the Good Old Days, "whether that's because there's nothing in Oyster Cove these days for a self-respecting pervert to get off on. Who wants an eyeful of us?"