After the Plague

Peep Hall

I like my privacy. My phone is unlisted, my mailbox locks with a key, and the gate across the driveway automatically shuts behind me when I pull in. I’ve got my own little half-acre plot in the heart of this sunny little university town, and it’s fenced all the way round. The house is a Craftsman-era bungalow, built in 1910, and the yard is lush with mature foliage, including the two grand old oaks that screen me from the street out front, a tsunami of Bougainvillea that long ago swallowed up the chainlink on both sides of the place, half a dozen tree ferns in the fifteen-foot range, and a whole damp, sweet-earth-smelling forest of Pittosporum, acacia, and blue gum eucalyptus crowding out what’s left of the lawn.

When I sit on the porch in the afternoon, all I see is twenty shades of green, and when someone bicycles by or the couple across the way get into one of their biweekly wrangles, I’m completely invisible, though I’m sitting right here with my feet propped up, taking it all in. I haven’t been to a concert or a sporting event for as long as I can remember, or even a play or the movies, because crowds irritate me, all that jostling and hooting, the bad breath, the evil looks, not to mention the microbes hanging over all those massed heads like bad money on a bad bet. And no, I’m not a crank. I’m not crazy. And I’m not old, or not particularly (I’ll be forty-one in November). But I do like my privacy, and I don’t think there’s any crime in that, especially when you work as hard as I do. Once I pull my car into the driveway, I just want to be left alone.

Six nights a week, and two afternoons, I stir Mojitos and shake martinis at the El Encanto Hotel, where I wear a bowtie and a frozen smile. I don’t have any pets, I don’t like walking, my parents are dead, and my wife — my ex-wife — may as well be. When I’m not at the El Encanto, I read, garden, burn things in a pan, clean spasmodically, and listen to whatever the local arts station is playing on the radio. When I feel up to it, I work on my novel (working title, Grandma Rivers) — either that or my Master’s thesis, “Claustrophobia in Franz Kafka’s Fictive Universe,” now eleven years behind schedule.

I was sitting on the porch late one afternoon — a Monday, my day off, the sun suspended just above the trees, birds slicing the air, every bud and flower entertaining its individual bee — when I heard a woman’s voice raised in exasperation from the porch next door. She was trying to reel herself in, fighting to keep her voice from getting away from her, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. The woman’s voice rose and fell, and then I recognized the voice of my next-door neighbor saying something in reply, something curt and dismissive, punctuated by the end stop of the front door slamming shut.

Next it was the sharp hammer-and-anvil ring of spike heels on pavement—toing, toing, toing—as they retreated down the Schusters’ macadam driveway, turned left on the sidewalk, and halted at my gate, which was, of course, locked. I was alert now in every fiber. I slipped a finger between the pages of the novel I’d been reading and held my breath. I heard the gate rattle, my eyes straining to see through the dense leathery mass of the oaks, and then the voice called, “Hello, hello, hello!” It was a young voice, female, a take-charge and brook-no-nonsense sort of voice, a very attractive voice, actually, but for some reason I didn’t reply. Habit, I suppose. I was on my own porch in my own yard, minding my own business, and I resented the intrusion, no matter what it turned out to be, and I had no illusions on that score either. She was selling something, circulating a petition, organizing a Neighborhood Watch group, looking for a lost cat; she was out of gas, out of money, out of luck. I experienced a brief but vivid recollection of the time the gardener had left the gate ajar and a dark little woman in a sari came rushing up the walk holding a balsawood replica of the Stars & Stripes out in front of her as if it were made of sugar-frosted air, looked me in the eye, and said, “P’raps maybe you buy for a hunnert dollah good coin monee?”

“I’m your neighbor,” the voice called, and the gate rattled again. “Come on,” she said, “I can see you, you know — I can see your feet — and I know you’re there. I just want to take a minute of your time, that’s all, just a minute—”

She could see me? Self-consciously I lifted my feet from the floorboards and propped them up on the rail. “I can’t,” I said, and my voice sounded weak and watered down, “I’m busy right now.”

The fraction of a moment passed, all the sounds of the neighborhood butting up against one another — crows cursing in the trees, a jet revealing itself overhead with the faintest distant whine of its engines, a leaf blower starting up somewhere — and then she sang out, “I like your shoes. Where’d you get them? Not in this town, right?”

I said nothing, but I was listening.

“Come on, just a minute, that’s all I ask.”

I may live alone, by preference, but don’t get me wrong, I’m no eunuch. I have the same needs and urges as other men, which I’ve been able to satisfy sporadically with Stefania Porovka, the assistant pastry chef at the hotel. Stefania is thirty-two, with a smoky deep Russian voice that falls somewhere in the range between magnetic and aphrodisiacal and two children in elementary school. The children are all right, as children go, aside from a little caterwauling when they don’t get their way (which seems to be about a hundred percent of the time), but I can’t manage to picture them in my house, and by the same token, I can’t picture myself in Stefania’s psychotically disordered two-bedroom walk-up. So what I’m saying is that I got up from the porch and ambled down the walk to the gate and the girl of twenty or so standing there in blue jeans, heels and a V-neck top.

She was leaning over the gate, her arms crossed at the wrists, rings glinting from her fingers. Her eyes and hair were the exact same shade of brown, as if the colors had been mixed in the same vat, which in a sense I guess they were, and she had unusually thick and expressive eyebrows of the same color. From where I was standing, five feet back from the locked gate, I could see down the front of her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. “Hello,” I said, regaling her with a cautious nod and the same approximation of a smile I put on for my customers at the bar.

“Oh, hi,” she returned, giving it the sort of emphasis that said she was surprised and impressed and very, very friendly. “I’m Samantha. I live up at the end of the block — the big white house with the red trim?”

I nodded. At this point I was noncommittal. She was attractive — pretty and beyond, actually — but too young for me to be interested in anything more than a neighborly way, and as I say, I wasn’t especially neighborly to begin with.

“And you are—?”

“Hart,” I said, “Hart Simpson,” and I put my hands on my hips, wondering if she could translate body language.

She never moved, but for a slight readjustment of her hands that set her bracelets ajingle. She was smiling now, her eyebrows arching up and away from the sudden display of her teeth. “Hart,” she repeated, as if my name were a curious stone she’d found in the street and was busy polishing on the sleeve of her blouse. And then: “Hart, are we bothering you? I mean, are we really bothering you all that much?”

I have to admit the question took me by surprise. Bothering me? I never even knew she existed until thirty seconds ago — and who was this we she was referring to? “We?” I said.

The smile faded, and she gave me a long, slow look. “So you’re not the one who complained — or one of the ones?”

“You must have me confused with somebody else. I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Peep Hall—” she said, “you know, like peephall.com?”

It was warm, midsummer, the air charged with the scent of rosemary and lavender and the desiccated menthol of the eucalyptus trees. I felt the sun on my face. I slowly shook my head.

She rubbed the palms of her hands together as if she were washing with soap and water, shifted her eyes away, and then came back to me again. “It’s nothing dirty,” she said. “It’s not like it’s some sleazoid club with a bunch of Taiwanese businessmen shoving dollar bills up our crotches or we’re lap-dancing or anything like that — we don’t even take our clothes off that much, because that totally gets old—”

I still had no idea what she was talking about, but I was beginning to warm to the general drift of it. “Listen,” I said, trying to unhinge my smile a bit, “do you want to come in for a beer or maybe a glass of wine or something?”

My house — not the one I grew up in, but this one, the one I inherited from my grandmother — is a shrine to her conventional, turn-of-the-last-century taste, as well as a kind of museum of what my parents left behind when they died. There isn’t too much of me in it, but I’m not one for radical change, and the Stickley furniture, the mica lamps, and even the ashtrays and bric-a-brac are wearing well, as eternal as the king’s ankus or the treasure buried with Tutankhamen. I keep the place neat — my parents’ books commingled with my own on the built-in bookshelves, rugs squared off against the couches and chairs, cups and dishes neatly aligned in the glass-front cabinets — but it’s not particularly clean, I’m afraid. I’m not much for dusting. Or vacuuming. The toilets could use a little more attention. And the walls on either side of the fireplace feature long, striated, urine-colored stains where the water got in around the chimney flashing last winter.

“Nice place,” Samantha breathed as I handed her a beer and led her into the living room, the house as dark and cool as a wine cellar though it must have been ninety out there in the sun. She settled into the big oak chair by the window, kicked off her heels and took first one foot, then the other, into her hands and slowly rubbed it. “I hate heels,” she said, “especially these. But that’s what they want us to wear.”

I was having a beer too, and I cradled it in my lap and watched her.

“No running shoes — they hate running shoes — and no sweats. It’s in our contract.” She laughed. “But you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

I was thinking about Stefania and how long it had been since I’d had her over, how long it had been since she’d sat in that chair and done something as unselfconscious as rubbing her bare white feet and laughing over a beer. “Tell me,” I said.

It was a long story, involving so many digressions that the digressions became stories in themselves, but finally I began to gather that the big white house on the corner, where she lived with six other girls, was meant to represent a college dorm — that’s where the “Peep Hall” designation came in — and that the business of the place was to sell subscriptions on the Internet to over-lathered voyeurs who could click on any time of day or night to watch the girls going about their business in living color. “So you’ve got all these video cameras around,” I said, trying to picture it. “Like at the bank or the 7-Eleven — that sort of thing?”

“Yeah, but much better quality, and instead of just like two of them or whatever, you’ve got cameras all over the place.”

“Even in the bathroom?”

Another laugh. “Especially the bathroom, what do you think?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I guess I was shocked. I was shocked. I definitely was. But why not admit it? I was titillated too. Women in the shower, I was thinking, women in the tub. I drained my beer, held the bottle up to the light, and asked her if she’d like another one.

She was already slipping her feet back into the shoes. “No, no thanks — I’ve got to go,” she said, rising to her feet. “But thanks for the beer and all — and if they do come around with a petition, you tell them we’re not doing anything wrong, okay?” She was smiling, swaying slightly over her heels. “And I don’t know if you’re into it — you’re on-line, right? — but you should check us out, see for yourself.”

We were at the door. She handed me the empty beer bottle, still warm from the embrace of her hand. “You really should,” she said.

After she left, I opened another beer and wandered through the downstairs rooms, picking up magazines and tossing them back down again, opening and shutting doors for no good reason, until I found myself in the kitchen. There were dishes in the sink, pans encrusted with one thing or another on the stove. The drainboard looked like an artifact, the one incomprehensible object left behind by a vanished civilization, and was it merely decorative or was it meant for some utilitarian purpose? The windows were a smudge of light. The plants needed water. I’d been planning to make myself an omelet and then go up to the university for the Monday Night Film Society’s showing of The Seventh Seal, a film so bleak it always brought tears of hysterical laughter to my eyes, but instead, on an impulse, I dialed Stefania’s number. When she answered, there was an edge to her voice, all the Russian smoke blown right out of it by the winds of complexity and turmoil, and in the background I could hear the children shrieking as if the skin were being peeled from their bodies in long, tapering strips. “Hello?” Stefania demanded. “Who is it? Is anybody there? Hello?” Very carefully, though my hand was trembling, I replaced the receiver in its cradle.

And this was strange: it was my day off, the only day of the week when I could really relax, and yet I was all worked up, as if I’d had one too many cups of coffee. I found myself drifting through the house again, thoughtfully pulling at my beer, studying a lamp or a painting or an old family photo as if I’d never seen it before, all the while making a wide circuit around the little room off the front hall where the computer sat on my desk like a graven idol. I resisted it for half an hour or more, until I realized I was resisting it, and then I sat down, booted it up and clicked on www.peephall.com.

A Web page gradually took shape on the screen. I saw the house on the corner, a big shapeless stucco box against a neutral background, and in front of it, as the image filled in from top to bottom, the girls began to materialize. There were seven of them, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder to fit in the frame, and they were dressed in low-cut tops and smiling as if they were selling lip gloss or plaque remover. Samantha was second from the left, staring right at me. “Twenty-four hours a day!” screamed the teaser. “Watch our young sexy College Girls take bubble baths, throw sexy Lingerie parties and sunbathe Nude poolside! You’ll never miss an Intimate Moment!” To the left, in a neat pulsating sidebar, were come-ons for related sites, like See Me Pee and Hot Sexy Teen Vixens. The subscription fee was $36 a month. I never hesitated.

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 hotel: 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.

This time it wasn’t all right. Jason, the manager, was behind the bar when I came in, and the look on his face told me he wasn’t especially thrilled at having this unlooked-for opportunity to dole out cocktail onions and bar mix to a roomful of sunburned hotel guests, enchanted tourists and golfers warming up for dinner. He didn’t say a word. Just dropped what he was doing (frothing a mango margarita in the blender), brushed past me and hurried down the corridor to his office as if the work of the world awaited him there. He was six years younger than I, he had a Ph.D. in history from a university far more prestigious than the one that ruled our little burg, and he wielded a first-rate vocabulary. I could have lived without him. At any rate, I went around to each customer with a smile on my face — even the lunatic in tam-o’-shanter and plus fours drinking rum and Red Bull at the far end of the bar — and refreshed drinks, bar napkins and the bowls of pretzels and bar mix. I poured with a heavy hand.

Around seven, the dining room began to fill up. This was my favorite hour of the day, the air fragrant and still, the sun picking out individual palms and banks of flowers to illuminate as it sank into the ocean, people bending to their hors d’oeuvres with a kind of quiet reverence, as if for once they really were thankful for the bounty spread out before them. Muted snatches of conversation drifted in from the patio. Canned piano music — something very familiar — seeped out of the speakers. All was well, and I poured myself a little Irish whiskey to take some of the tightness out of my neck and shoulders.

That was when Samantha walked in.

She was with two other girls — Gina, I recognized; the other one, tall, athletic, with a nervous, rapid-blinking gaze that seemed to reduce the whole place and everything in it to a series of snapshots, was unfamiliar. All three were wearing sleek ankle-length dresses that left their shoulders bare, and as they leaned into the hostess’ stand there was the glint of jewelry at their ears and throats. My mouth went dry. I felt as if I’d been caught out at something desperate, something furtive and humiliating, though they were all the way across the room and Samantha hadn’t even so much as glanced in my direction. I fidgeted with the wine key and tried not to stare, and then Frankie, the hostess, was leading them to a table out on the patio.

I realized I was breathing hard, and my pulse must have shot up like a rocket, and for what? She probably wouldn’t even recognize me. We’d shared a beer for twenty minutes. I was old enough to be her — her what? Her uncle. I needed to get a grip. She wasn’t the one watching me through a hidden lens. “Hart? Hart, are you there?” a voice was saying, and I looked up to see Megan, the cocktail waitress, hovering over her station with a drink order on her lips.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, and I took the order and started in on the drinks. “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “you know that table of three — the girls who just came in? Tell me when you take their order, okay? Their drinks are on me.”

As it turned out, they weren’t having any of the sweet rum drinks garnished with fruit and a single orange nasturtium flower or one of our half dozen margaritas or even the house chardonnay by the glass. “I carded them,” Megan said, “and they’re all legal, but what they want is three sloe gin fizzes. Do we even have sloe gin?”

In the eight years I’d been at the El Encanto, I doubt if I’d mixed more than three or four sloe gin fizzes, and those were for people whose recollections of the Eisenhower administration were still vivid. But we did have a vestigial bottle of sloe gin in the back room, wedged between the peppermint schnapps and the Benedictine, and I made them their drinks. Frankie had seated them around the corner on the patio, so I couldn’t see how the fizzes went over, and then a series of orders came leapfrogging in, and I started pouring and mixing and forgot all about it. The next time I looked up, Samantha was coming across the room to me, her eyebrows dancing over an incipient smile. I could see she was having trouble with her heels and the constriction of the dress — or gown, I suppose you’d call it — and I couldn’t help thinking how young she looked, almost like a little girl playing dress-up. “Hart,” she said, resting her hands on the bar so that I could admire her sculpted fingers and her collection of rings — rings even on her thumbs—“I didn’t know you worked here. This place is really nice.”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning back at her while holding the picture of her in my head, asleep, with her hair splayed out over the pillow. “It’s first-rate. Top-notch. Really fantastic. It’s a great place to work.”

“You know, that was really sweet of you,” she said.

I wanted to say something like “Aw, shucks” or “No problem,” but instead I heard myself say, “The gesture or the drink?”

She looked at me quizzically a moment, and then let out a single soft flutter of a laugh. “Oh, you mean the gin fizzes?” And she laughed again — or giggled, actually. “I’m legal today, did you know that? And my gramma made me promise to have a sloe gin fizz so she could be here tonight in spirit — she passed last winter? — but I think we’re having like a bottle of white wine or something with dinner. That’s my sister I’m with — she’s taking me out for my birthday, along with Gina — she’s one of my roommates? But you probably already know that, right?”

I shot my eyes left, then right, up and down the bar. All the drinks were fresh, and no one was paying us the least attention. “What do you mean?”

Her eyebrows lifted, the silky thick eyebrows that were like two strips of mink pasted to her forehead, and her hair was like some exotic fur too, rich and shining and dark. “You didn’t check out the Web site?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well, you ought to,” she said. The air was a stew of smells — a couple at the end of the bar were sharing the warm spinach and scallop salad, there was the sweet burnt odor of the Irish whiskey I was sipping from a mug, Samantha’s perfume (or was it Megan’s?) and a medley of mesquite-grilled chops and braised fish and Peter Oxendine’s famous sauces wafting in from the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, shaking out her hair with a flick of her head and running a quick look around the place before bringing her eyes back to me. “Okay, well — I just wanted to say thanks.” She shrugged. “I guess I better be getting back to the girls.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice seeing you again. And hey, happy birthday.”

She’d already turned away from the bar, earrings swaying, face composed, but she stopped to give me a smile over her shoulder, and then she made her way across the room and out onto the darkened patio.

And that would have been it, at least until I could get home and watch her shimmy out of that gown and paint her toenails or gorge on cake or whatever it was she was going to do in the semi-privacy of her own room, but I couldn’t let it go and I sent over dessert too, a truly superior raspberry-kiwi tart Stefania had whipped up that afternoon. That really put them in my debt, and after dessert the three of them came to the bar to beam at me and settle in for coffee and an after-dinner drink. “You’re really just twenty-one today?” I said, grinning at Samantha till the roots of my teeth must have showed. “You’re sure I don’t have to card you, now, right?”

I watched the hair swirl round her shoulders as she braced herself against the bar and reached down to ease off her heels, and then she was fishing through her purse till she came up with her driver’s license and laid it out proudly on the bar. I picked it up and held it to the light — there she was, grinning wide out of the bottom right-hand corner, date of birth clearly delineated, and her name, Jennifer B. Knickish, spelled out in bold block letters. “Jennifer?” I said.

She took the card back with a frown, her eyebrows closing ranks. “Everybody calls me Samantha,” she said. “Really.” And to her companions: “Right, guys?” I watched them nod their glossy heads. The older one, the sister, giggled. “And besides, I don’t want any of the creeps to know my real name — even my first name — you know what I mean?”

Oh, yes, yes I did. And I smiled and bantered and called up reserves of charm I hadn’t used in years, and the drinks were on me all night long. It was Samantha’s birthday, wasn’t it? And her twenty-first, no less — a rite of passage if ever there was one. I poured Grand Marnier and Rémy till the customers disappeared and the waiters and busboys slipped out the back and the lights drew down to nothing.

I woke with a headache. I’d matched them, round for round, and, as I say, I’d started in on the Irish whiskey earlier in the night — and yes, I’m all too well aware that the concrete liver and stumbling tongue are hazards of the profession, but I’m pretty good at keeping all that in check. I do get bored, though, and wind up over-doing it from time to time, especially when the novel isn’t going well, and it hadn’t been going well in a long while. The problem was, I couldn’t get past the initial idea — the setup — which was a story I’d come across in the newspaper two or three years ago. It had to do with an old woman’s encounter with the mysterious forces of nature (I don’t recall her real name, not that it would matter, but I called her Grandma Rivers, to underscore the irony that here was a woman with eight children, thirty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and she was living alone in a trailer park in a part of the country so bleak no one who wasn’t condemned to it would ever even deign to glance down on it from the silvered window of a jetliner at thirty-five thousand feet). One night, when the wind was sweeping up out of the south with the smell of paradise on it and all her neighbors were mewed up in their aluminum boxes lulled by booze, prescription drugs and the somnolent drone of the tube, she stepped outside to take in the scent of the night and indulge in a cigarette (she always smoked outside so as not to pollute the interior of her own little aluminum box set there on the edge of the scoured prairie). No sooner had she lit up than a fox — a red fox, Vulpes fulva—shot out of the shadows and latched onto her ankle. In the shock and confusion of that moment, she lurched back, lost her balance and fell heavily on her right side, dislocating her hip. But the fox, which later proved to be rabid, came right back at her, at her face this time, and the only thing she could think to do in her panic was to seize hold of it with her trembling old arms and pin it beneath her to keep the snapping jaws away from her.

Twelve hours. That’s how long she lay there, unable to move, the fox snarling and writhing beneath her, its heartbeat joined to hers, its breathing, the eloquent movement of its fluids and juices and the workings of its demented little vulpine brain, until somebody — a neighbor — happened to glance beyond the hedge and the hump of the blistered old Jeep Wagoneer her late husband had left behind to see her there, stretched out in the gravel drive like a strip of discarded carpet. Yes. But what then? That was what had me stumped. I thought of going back and tracing her life up to that point, her girlhood in the Depression, her husband’s overseas adventures in the war, the son killed in Vietnam … or maybe just to let her sink into the background while I focused on the story of the community, the benighted neighbors and their rat-faced children, so that the trailer park itself became a character….

But, as I say, I woke with a headache, and when I did sit down at the computer, it wasn’t to call up Grandma Rivers and the imperfect dream of her life, but to click onto peephall.com and watch another sort of novel unfold before my eyes, one in which the plot was out of control and the details were selected and shaped only by the anonymous subscriber with his anonymous mouse. I went straight to Samantha’s bedroom, but her bed was empty save for the jumbled topography of pillows and bedclothes, and I stared numbly at the shadows thickening round the walls, at the limp form of the gown tossed over a chair, and checked my watch. It was ten-thirty. Breakfast, I thought. I clicked on “Kitchen,” but that wasn’t her staring into the newspaper with a cup of coffee clenched in one hand and a Power Bar in the other, nor was that her bent at the waist and peering into the refrigerator as if for enlightenment. I went to the living room, but it was empty, a dully flickering static space caught in the baleful gaze of my screen. Had she gone out already? To an early class maybe?

But then I remembered she was taking only one class—“Intermediate Sketching,” paid for by the Web site operators, who were encouraging the Sexy Teen College Coeds actually to enroll so that all the voyeurs out there could live the fantasy of seeing them hitting the books in their thong bikinis and lacy push-up bras — and that the class met in the afternoon. She was getting paid too, incidentally — five hundred dollars a month, plus the rent-free accommodations at Peep Hall and a food allowance — and all for allowing the world to watch her live hot sexy young life through each scintillating minute of the over-inflated day, the orotund month and the full, round year. I thought of the girls who posed naked for the art classes back when I was an undergraduate (specifically, I thought of Nancy Beckers, short, black hair, balls of muscle in her calves and upper arms and a look in her eyes that made me want to strip to my socks and join her on the dais), and then I clicked on “Downstairs Bath,” and there she was.

This wasn’t a hot sexy moment. Anything but. Samantha — my Samantha — was crouched over the toilet on her knees, the soles of her feet like single quotes around the swell of her buttocks, her hair spilling over the bright rim of the porcelain bowl. I couldn’t see her face, but I watched the back of her head jerk forward as each spasm racked her, and I couldn’t help playing the sound track in my mind, feeling sorrowful and guilty at the same time. Her feet — I felt sorry for her feet — and the long sudden shiver of her spine and even the dangling wet ends of her hair. I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t. My finger was on the mouse — I took one more look, watched one last shudder ascend her spine and fan out across her shoulder blades, watched her head snap forward and her hair slide loose, and then I clicked off and left her to suffer in private.

A week rolled by, and I hardly noticed. I wasn’t sleeping well, wasn’t exercising, wasn’t sitting on the porch with a book in my hand and the world opening up around me like a bigger book. I was living the life of the screen, my bones gone hollow, my brain dead. I ate at my desk, microwave pizza and chili-cheese burritos, nachos, whiskey in a glass like a slow, sweet promise that was never fulfilled. My scalp itched. My eyes ached. But I don’t think I spent a waking moment outside work when I wasn’t stalking the rooms of Peep Hall, clicking from camera to camera in search of a new angle, a better one, the view that would reveal all. I watched Gina floss her teeth and Candi pluck fine translucent hairs from the mole at the corner of her mouth, sat there in the upstairs bath with Traci as she bleached her roots and shaved her legs, hung electrified over the deck as Cyndi perched naked on the railing with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette lighter, breathing fire into the gloom of the gathering night. Mainly, though, I watched Samantha. When she was home, I followed her from room to room, and when she picked up her purse and went out the door, I felt as if Peep Hall had lost its focus. It hurt me, and it was almost like a physical hurt, as if I’d been dealt an invisible blow.

I was pulling into the drive one afternoon — it must have been a Monday or Wednesday, because I’d just worked lunch — when a rangy, tall woman in a pair of wraparound sunglasses came out of nowhere to block my way. She was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt that advertised some fund-raising event at the local elementary school, and she seemed to be out of breath or out of patience, as if she’d been chasing after me for miles. I was trying to place her as the gate slowly cranked open on its long balky chain to reveal the green depths of the yard beyond — she was someone I knew, or was expected to know. But before I could resolve the issue, she’d looped around the hood of the car and thrust her face in the open window, so close to me now I could see the fine hairs catching the light along the parabola of her jawbone and her shadowy eyes leaping at the lenses of her sunglasses. “I need you to sign this,” she said, shoving a clipboard at me.

The gate hit the end of the chain with a clank that made the posts shudder. I just stared at her. “It’s me,” she said, removing the sunglasses to reveal two angry red welts on the bridge of her nose and a pair of impatient eyes, “Sarah. Sarah Schuster — your next-door neighbor?”

I could smell the fumes of the car as it rumbled beneath me, quietly misfiring. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “sure,” and I attempted a smile.

“You need to sign this,” she repeated.

“What is it?”

“A petition. To get rid of them. Because this is a residential neighborhood — this is a family neighborhood — and frankly Steve and I are outraged, just outraged, I mean, as if there isn’t enough of this sort of thing going on in town already—”

“Get rid of who?” I said, but I already knew.

I watched her face as she filled me in, the rolling eyes, the clamp and release of the long mortal jaws, moral outrage underscored by a heavy dose of irony, because she was an educated woman, after all, a liberal and a Democrat, but this was just — well, it was just too much.

I didn’t need this. I didn’t want it. I wanted to be in my own house minding my own business. “All right, yeah,” I said, pushing the clipboard back at her, “but I’m real busy right now — can you come back later?”

And then I was rolling up the driveway, the gate already rumbling shut behind me. I was agitated and annoyed—Sarah Schuster, who did she think she was? — and the first thing I did when I got in the house was pull the shades and turn on the computer. I checked Peep Hall to be sure Samantha was there — and she was, sunk into the couch in T-shirt and jeans, watching TV with Gina — and then I smoothed back my hair in the mirror and went out the front door. I looked both ways before swinging open the gate, wary of Sarah Schuster and her ilk, but aside from two kids on bikes at the far end of the block, the street was deserted.

Still, I started off in the opposite direction from the big white house on the corner, then crossed the street and kept going — all the way up the next block over — so as to avoid any prying eyes. The sun was warm on my face, my arms were swinging, my feet knew just what to do — I was walking, actually walking through the neighborhood, and it felt good. I noticed things the view from the car window wouldn’t have revealed, little details, a tree in fruit here, a new flowerbed there, begonias blooming at the base of three pale silvery eucalypti at the side of a neighbor’s house, and all that would have been fine but for the fact that my heart seemed to be exploding in my chest. I saw myself ringing the doorbell, mounting the steps of the big white house and ringing the bell, but beyond that I couldn’t quite picture the scene. Would Samantha — or Traci or Candi or whoever — see me as just another one of the creeps she had to chat with on-line for two hours each week as part of her job description? Would she shut the door in my face? Invite me in for a beer?

As it turned out, Cyndi answered the door. She was shorter than I’d imagined, and she was dressed in a red halter top and matching shorts, her feet bare and toenails painted blue — or aquamarine, I suppose you’d call it. I couldn’t help thinking of the way she looked without her clothes on, throwing back her head and spewing flames from her lips. “Hi,” I said, “I was looking for Samantha? You know, Jennifer,” I added, by way of assuring her I was on intimate terms here and not just some psychotic who’d managed to track them all down.

She didn’t smile. Just gave me a look devoid of anything — love, hate, fear, interest, or even civility — turned her head away and shouted, “Sam! Sammy! It’s for you!”

“Tell her it’s Hart,” I said, “she’ll know who—” but I broke off because I was talking to myself: the doorway was empty. I could hear the jabber and squawk of the TV and the thump of bass-heavy music from one of the upstairs bedrooms, then a whisper of voices in the hall.

In the next moment a shadow fell across the plane of the open door, and Samantha slid into view, her face pale and tentative. “Oh,” she said, and I could hear the relief in her voice. “Oh, hi.”

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said, coming right out with it, “—bad news, I think. This woman just stopped me when I was pulling into the driveway — my next-door neighbor — and they’re circulating a petition.” I watched her eyebrows, her eyes, saw the glint of the rings on her right hand as she swept it through her hair. “But I didn’t sign. I blew her off.”

She looked distracted, staring out over my shoulder as if she hadn’t heard me. “Louis warned us there might be trouble,” she said finally, “but it really isn’t fair. I mean, do I look like some kind of slut to you? Do I?”

I wanted to make a speech, or at least a confession, and now was the time for it, now, but the best I could do was shake my head slowly and emphatically. Louis? Who was Louis?

Her eyes were burning. I heard a blast of gunfire from the TV, and then the volume went dead. “I’m sorry, Hart,” Samantha said, lifting one bare foot from the floor to scratch the other with a long casual stroke of her instep, “but do you want to come in? You want a beer?”

And then I was in, following the sweep of Samantha’s shoulders and hair and the sweet balsam scent of her into the living room I knew so well — and that was strange, surpassing strange, to know a place in its every apparent detail and yet never to have been there in the flesh. It was like a dream made concrete, a vision come to life. I felt like a character in a play, walking onto the set for the first time — and I was, I was. Don’t look at the camera, isn’t that what they tell you on TV? I glanced up, and there it was, staring me in the face. Gina stuck her head through the swinging door to the kitchen. “Hi,” she said, for form’s sake, and then she disappeared — out onto the deck, I supposed, to tan her hot sexy young limbs. I sat in the chair facing the dead TV screen and Samantha went out of the frame and into the kitchen for the beer, and I couldn’t help wondering how many hundreds of perverts went with her.

She came back with two beers and sat opposite me, in the armchair facing “Living Room Cam 2,” and gave me a smile as she settled into the chair.

I took a sip of beer, smiled back, and said, “Who’s Louis?”

Samantha was sitting with one leg tucked under her, her back arched, the beer pinioned between her legs. “He’s one of the operators — of the site? He’s got something like thirty of them around the country, and he’s like—”

“A cyber-pimp?” It was out before I could think.

She frowned and looked down into the neck of the bottle a minute, then brought her head back up and flicked the hair out of her face. “I was going to say he’s like used to this sort of thing, people hassling him over zoning laws and sex-oriented businesses and all that, but really, I mean, what’s the big deal?”

“I watch,” I said suddenly, looking directly into her eyes. “I watch you.”

Her smile blossomed into a grin. “You do?”

I held her eyes. I nodded.

“Really? Well, that’s — that’s great. But you’ve never seen me do anything dirty, have you? Some of the girls get off on it, but I figure I’m just going to live, you know, and get my end out of it — it’s a good deal. I need the money. I like the money. And if I’m nude in the shower or when I’m changing clothes and all these guys are jerking off or whatever, I don’t care, that’s life, you know what I mean?”

“You know when I like to watch you best? When you’re asleep. You look so — I don’t want to say angelic, but that’s part of it — you just look so peaceful, I guess, and I feel like I’m right there with you, watching over you.”

She got up from the chair then and crossed the room to me. “That’s a sweet thing to say,” she said, and she set her beer down on the coffee table and settled into the couch beside me. “Really sweet,” she murmured, slipping an arm round my neck and bringing her face in for a close-up. Everything seemed transformed in that moment, every object in the room coming into sudden focus, and I saw her with a deep and revelatory clarity. I kissed her. Felt the soft flutter of her lips and tongue against mine and forgot all about Stefania, my ex-wife, Sarah Schuster and Grandma Rivers. I broke away and then kissed her again, and it was a long, slow, sweet, lingering kiss and she was rubbing my back and I had my hands on her hips, just dreaming and dreaming. “Do you want to—?” I breathed. “Can you—?”

“Not here,” she said, and she looked right into the camera. “They don’t like it. They don’t even like this.”

“All right,” I said, “all right,” and I looked up too, right into the glassy eye of Camera 1. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just hold me.”