After the Plague (23 page)

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.