Voyeur

I had the lights off and one hand down the front of my own underwear, a pair of the hotel’s brass binoculars propped on the glass in front of me, and my best friend on speaker on the carpet beside my knee, which is a sentence I would not say out loud to anybody else alive.

“Describe the woman,” Ren said.

“She just took the dress off again.”

“Again? Maya, it is a quarter to eleven on a Friday and you are givin’ me a count.”

“Second time tonight, and she took her time doin’ it both times.”

“Ma’am.” Ren let that sit there a whole second before she picked it back up. “You are a whole entire mess, and I want you to understand that I say that with love, seeing as I have known you since Hunter and I have never once called you a mess for free.”

My name is Amaya Lauron, I am twenty-nine years old, and I run the floor at a thirty-eight seat restaurant on Sullivan Street where I can tell you what a table wants before the table has worked it out for itself, which is a real skill and the only one anybody has ever paid me for having. Nobody has ever once asked me to turn it around and point it at myself. What it cost me is a dark room on a Friday night with my hand between my legs and nobody in the bed behind me, and if you want to know how long I have been paying it, I have been paying it since I was eleven.

My sister put me in that suite because it was Cherie’s birthday and because Zaira has never once been able to help herself, so there I was on the twenty-seventh floor of a brand new glass hotel on the Brooklyn waterfront, two towers facing each other across a gap narrow enough to throw a shoe over, with Manhattan standing up out of the black water behind all of it and every window in it lit and nobody home in a single one. There was a cold bottle waiting when I walked in, and a robe the color of a plum, and a card in Elise’s handwriting that said breakfast is at nine.

Nobody asked me what I wanted.

And bolted to a little brass arm on the sill, where a guest could not walk off with them, a pair of binoculars for looking at the bridge.

For looking at the bridge.

“You wearin’ the good robe?” Ren asked.

“I got the good robe open and the lights off and a glass poured, so do not come for me.”

“Nasty. You are nasty and you have been nasty since two thousand and seventeen, and I am the only person who knows it, which makes me an accessory.”

“You called me, Ren. I was sittin’ here mindin’ my own business in the dark.”

“I called you at a decent hour like a decent person,” she countered, and I could hear her nails starting up on something hard on her end, which is what she does while she decides how filthy she is about to get. “You the one picked up breathin’ like a woman with a job to finish. I said hello and you said mm. A grown woman answered her own telephone and said mm to me.”

I poured a glass and killed every light in the suite so the window would quit handing me my own reflection, and then I sat down on the carpet with my back against the foot of the bed and went looking for somebody, which is what I came up there to do and there is no point being cute about it in a room with nobody in it but me.

Renee Bishop runs identity and access for a hospital system out in Queens, which is a job title that means she decides who gets to be who, and she is the only person alive who knows what is in my head. She knows because I told her once, drunk, years back, and she laughed at me for a solid hour and then asked follow-up questions, and in years she has never once made me say it twice.

“Tell me what you see,” she said. “Properly. Not the little version you give me.”

So I told Ren the whole thing.

Floors up and three windows over, a man old enough to be somebody’s grandfather sat in an armchair with his shirt open on a heavy stomach and his good shoes off and set side by side on the carpet, turning his watch around and around on his wrist. Standing in front of him was a woman young enough to be his daughter and then some, in nothing but what she had on under the dress, and she was running that entire room.

“Runnin’ it how? Give me the whole thing, I am not in the mood for headlines.”

“She put her hand flat on his chest and walked him backwards into that chair without once lookin’ behind her to find the chair.”

“Oh, she a professional,” Ren said. “That woman has had a dick in her mouth before and she is not in a hurry about any of it, and I want you to notice that she knew where that chair sat the same way you know where they put table six. That is a trained woman. That is somebody who has done a shift.”

“Or she might just be good at it, and you might be the one who cannot imagine a woman doin’ that for free.”

“She might be both, baby.”

The only part of my character that has not moved since I was eleven old is that one, and it started on a radiator on Hancock Street watching Mrs. Ferrell do her face in the same order every single time for a man who was not her husband. My mother caught me at that window and told me that is not yours to have, Amaya, and she meant the looking, and I heard it the other way around. I heard that life is not mine to have, and I have spent a long time proving her right about a thing she never actually said.

I do not even like the act, which is the one thing Ren has never forgiven. I can watch the act until I start wondering whether they remembered to hang the Do Not Disturb. What I like is the minutes before anybody admits to anything, the hand that goes somewhere and comes back, the laugh that lands one note too loud, the exact second a person quits pretending, and I liked all of that so much that I built an entire life out of seeing it and never once standing in the room.

The woman knelt down in front of the chair.

“She on her knees now, Ren, and she went down slow enough that she meant every bit of the kneelin’,” I said.

“Lord have mercy on that old man and on you too, seeing as one of you is about to have a night and the other one is on my phone.”

“She got his belt open and she is still talkin’.”

“Talkin’ about what? What is there to say at that particular juncture?”

“Ren, I cannot hear through two walls of glass and sixty feet of June air.”

“Read her mouth. You be readin’ mouths. You read my mouth through a Zoom with the camera off.”

“Her mouth is full, Ren, which you knew before you asked me, and you asked me anyway.”

Ren hollered so loud I had to turn the phone face down on the carpet and leave it there until she got herself together.

He put his hand in her hair, not pushing, just resting it there the way a man sets a glass down on a table he does not own, and she took his dick in her mouth with her eyes up on his face the entire time and did not rush one single second of the whole business. That is the part that gets me, and it is always the part that gets me, and here is the whole of it: at some point in the last hour that woman looked at that old soft man in that chair and thought yes, and not one person on this earth put her there.

I would like, once, to be a woman who thinks yes.

My robe was open and the glass in those buildings runs cold no matter what the thermostat tells you, so I had gooseflesh coming up both thighs and my nipples hard against the pane and my heels braced on the carpet, and I had two fingers in my pussy and my thumb on my clit before I made any kind of decision about having them there. The thing doing it to me was not his dick in her mouth. It was the kneeling, and it was the deciding, and it was a stranger choosing out loud in a lit room with the curtains wide open where anybody at all could stand at a window and watch.

“You still there?” Ren asked.

“Mm.”

“Mm meanin’ what.”

“Mm meanin’ don’t, because I know exactly where you are about to take this and I am busy.”

“Girl, I have got a whole entire freak on this telephone and she goes home at ten-thirty every damn night of her life,” she said, and her nails went three taps and stopped. “You know what you are, Maya? You a freak with a bedtime.”

“I am not home. I am a full borough from home with a bottle my sister put on her own card.”

“You in a hotel by yourself watchin’ somebody else get fucked, which is home with a better view and a worse bill.”

That is Ren all the way down. She can put a knife in you sideways and have you laughing while she is doing it, and then text you at seven the next morning to make sure the knife came back out clean.

“Say somethin’ nasty,” she said. “You never say the nasty part. Say pussy, say dick, say anything at all. I have been waitin’ nine years.”

“I want somebody to look at me the way she lookin’ at him.”

“Like what? Like you a sandwich? Baby, a man has looked at me like a sandwich and I will tell you right now it did not fix one thing.”

“Like he is not going to look away first.”

Ren went quiet and the nails stopped, and I sat there in the dark listening to a hospital administrator in Queens decide she was not going to make a joke.

“That ain’t nasty,” she said. “Maya, that is sad as hell. That is not nasty, that is a Hallmark card with a dick drawn on the front. Call me back when you get nasty.”

“Tell me about the room,” Ren said.

“What room. There is a whole city full of rooms out this window.”

“Theirs. You always tell me the room, and do not act like you don’t, when you have described a man’s curtains to me at two in the morning.”

So I told her the room, on account of her being right that I always tell her the room, and because by then I had been looking into it long enough to have the whole thing committed.

There were two chairs in there and neither one of them was a hotel chair, which matters, seeing as a hotel puts one armchair in a room and upholsters it in something no living person would have chosen, and those two matched each other and did not match the carpet. A jacket hung over the back of the second chair with the lining showing and the shoulders turned the wrong way round, which is a man who took his jacket off in a hurry and did not care where it landed. There was a bag open on the luggage rack with not one single thing lifted out of the bag. The shoes sat side by side by the chair, squared up neat, which did not go with that jacket at all.

And there was no shopping anywhere. No bags, no boxes, no bottle on the side table with the paper still around the neck. Nobody in that suite had been out of it all evening.

“So? Give me the so, Maya, I am sittin’ here with my own ceiling.”

“So he came to that hotel for one thing and he is leavin’ again,” I said, leaning in until my breath went on the glass and then wiping it clear with the heel of my hand. “He did not unpack a thing, he did not go out, and he took his jacket off like a man who was already tired when he got there.”

“And the woman?”

“She came with nothin’.”

“Nothin’ at all? No bag, no little purse, no nothin’?”

“No bag anywhere in that whole room, Ren. Not on the bed, not on the floor, not on the rack, and a woman does not cross this city at night carryin’ absolutely nothing unless somebody else is carryin’ the bag on her behalf.”

Ren went quiet for a second, which from Ren is a whole paragraph.

“That’s a workin’ girl, baby.”

“Maybe. I am not willin’ to say it out loud about a woman I have never met.”

“That is a workin’ girl and you know good and well that is a workin’ girl, and I want to say for the record that I am not in any way lookin’ down on the woman, I am sayin’ she is at work and you are at leisure.”

“I know,” I said. “And I do not care, and I am not stoppin’ lookin’, and I would like a medal for sayin’ all three of those things out loud to another grown woman.”

“You get no medal. You get a phone call and a friend who picks up at a quarter to eleven.”

Then I saw the camera.

It sat on a tripod in the corner by the credenza, set back far enough to take in the chair and the bed both at once, with the little light on the front of it burning a steady red that I had been looking straight past for the better part of an hour.

“Ren, there is a camera in that room and it has been on the whole time I been talkin’ to you,” I said.

“Freaky old man. He out here payin’ for a woman and a souvenir, which is tacky, and I want that on the record.”

“No.”

“No what? Maya, do not do that thing where you go quiet on me and leave me out here with my own imagination.”

I lifted the binoculars off the brass arm and set them on that tripod instead, and the view came in close and ugly, on account of the lens sitting wide and low and square on the chair, and because the woman had already moved herself out to the side of it twice, stepping out of the frame the way a server steps around a table that is already set.

“Ren, that camera ain’t pointed at the woman.”

“What?”

“It is on him. Only him. She keep steppin’ out the frame and she keep doin’ it on purpose.”

Ren’s voice came back in the one I know from years of hospital logins, which is the voice she keeps for the part of her job where somebody is about to lose a password and a career on the same afternoon. “Okay, so that is not a sex tape,” she said. “Baby, that is evidence.”

My hand came out of my underwear and I sat up on my knees without making any decision about my knees.

The woman stood up, said one more thing to the old man, and walked out of the frame toward the left-hand wall, taking her time about it the way she had taken her time about everything else all night. She did not go to the door that leads to the hallway. She went to a door set in the side wall, and it opened in toward her, and she stepped through, and it shut at her back.

I have stayed in enough hotels on other people’s money to know a door in a side wall when I see one. That is the connecting door, and it goes into the next suite, and it does not touch the corridor, and it does not tell the front desk one single thing about anybody who walks through.

There was a man standing in that room.

I never saw him come through a door, and that bothered me worse than most of what came after, seeing as he was simply there the way a thing is there when you look back at a room you had already finished looking at. Grey suit, grey tie, a face with absolutely nothing written on it, hands loose at his sides by the credenza. The old man had gathered himself up enough to sit forward with his shirt pulled shut across his belly.

“Maya.”

“Hold on, Ren.”

They were talking and no sound reached me, and a good few feet of June air and the double glazing on both sides do not carry sound, and what they carry instead is mouths and shoulders, and I have been reading mouths and shoulders my whole life from a host stand a night a week.

The old man did all of the talking, both hands going, palms turned out, the way a man talks when he is explaining a thing he has already explained once before to somebody else.

The grey man never moved at all. He let the old man run himself all the way out, and nobody does that without being taught to do it, and the ordinary human animal fills a silence, and filling silences is how I make my rent.

Then the old man reached into the trouser pocket of the pants folded over the chair arm, took something out, and held it up into the light.

It was small, and it was dark, and it was not a phone.

The grey man looked at the thing in his fingers for a moment. Then he came around the side of the chair and put one hand on the old man’s shoulder almost kindly, the way you steady somebody getting up out of a low seat, and whatever was in his other hand I never saw, and that is the piece I cannot put back.

The old man went down.

It was not dramatic and nobody would believe how undramatic it was, with no clutching and no stagger and no hand flying up to the chest. He leaned, and his weight found the arm of the chair, and the chair kept going, and then he was on the carpet on his side with one shoe off and one arm folded up under him. His legs did one small thing. Then they did not do anything else.

“Amaya.”

“He killed him, Ren. That man just put his hand on him and he killed him.”

“What?”

“Ren, he just fuckin’ killed him.”

“Say that again, because I need to hear you say it again.”

I could not say it again. The binoculars were shaking hard enough that the whole view swam in front of me, so I jammed both elbows down on the window ledge to hold the picture still and felt the cold of the glass come up through the backs of my wrists.

The grey man stood over the body and looked at his own watch.

That is the detail, and out of everything in that room that is the one I kept, and a person who has just watched a man collapse does not check the time. A person who has just watched a man collapse makes a noise, or gets down on the floor with him, or goes at the door with both arms out in front.

He checked his wrist the way I check mine when the second seating is running late.

Then he worked.

He went to the window first and pulled one curtain a third of the way across. He lifted the camera off the tripod and folded the legs down with both hands and found the catch without once hunting for it, and the whole thing went into a bag I had not noticed until it was already open. He crouched down by the old man, took the small dark thing out of his fingers, and slid it into his own jacket.

Two glasses had been sitting on the side table all night, and he carried one of them into the bathroom and came back with nothing in his hands. He crossed to the minibar and out of my sight behind the wall, came back, set a fresh glass down on the side table, and poured something into it out of a little bottle that went into his pocket afterwards. Then he picked up the glass that had been sitting there the whole time, holding it by the rim with two fingers, and set it down near the old man’s open hand, and turned it a fraction with one finger until he liked where it was sitting.

He did every piece of all of that left-handed.

He bent down, took the ankle, and straightened the near leg out. Then he stepped back with his head tipped over to one side and looked at the whole room the way a man looks at a table he has just finished laying.

He was composing the whole picture. I was kneeling in the dark watching a man compose a room with a body laid out on the carpet.

“Amaya. Talk to me.”

“He fixin’ the room, Ren, he is movin’ around in there puttin’ things where he wants them.”

“Fixing what, baby?”

“The room, Ren. He makin’ it look like the man just died in his chair by himself.”

“Then you call the front desk right now, Maya, and you do it before that man finishes whatever he is doin’ in there.”

“And say what, exactly? You want me to pick up a hotel phone and start that sentence for me.”

Ren stopped, and she heard the problem in the same second I heard myself ask the question. Say what. Say that I was on my knees in the dark in a suite my sister paid for, with a pair of borrowed binoculars and my hand in my own underwear, watching strangers for the pleasure of it, and in between all of that I happened to catch a murder.

The grey man made a phone call. He stood in the middle of that room with a dead man on the carpet at his feet and talked into a phone, and he nodded twice, and his face never changed once, and whoever was on the other end of it was not shouting either.

He put the phone away.

Then he turned around and looked at the window.

All of the light was on his side, and I had the physics straight in my head already, his room being lit and mine was black, which meant I could see him in detail and he should have been looking at a wall of mirror showing him nothing but his own carpet. I was standing behind a mirror. I knew that I was standing behind a mirror.

He crossed to the window anyway.

He came all the way up to it and put both hands flat against the pane to cut the glare and brought his face down into the space between them.

At me. In my dark suite, a few floors down and three windows over, on my knees with the brass arm of a sightseeing toy gripped in both fists and my mouth open on nothing at all.

I did not move. Not flat, not sideways, not one single sensible thing a grown woman might have done. I knelt there like something caught standing in an open field and I looked back at him, and my heart went off in my throat and in my ears and low down in my stomach where a heart has absolutely no business.

“Maya. Maya.”

He stayed there.

Then he straightened up, reached off to the side, and drew the curtain the rest of the way across, and the light went out of that room the way a hand goes over a candle.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed. My glass lay on its side on the carpet where I had put my knee into it at some point without noticing. I pulled the robe shut and tied it, and untied it, and tied it again, and a long way under me a boat went up the river with a working light burning on it, and somewhere off in Red Hook a man leaned on his horn the way people do when a horn is the only thing they have left.

“Say something,” Ren said.

“He saw me, Ren. I am tellin’ you that man saw me and I am not confused about it.”

“You were in the dark, baby.”

“He came to the glass and he put his hands up on it and he looked right at me.”

“He saw his own self, Maya. That is what glass does at night and you know that better than anybody I have ever met, seeing as you are the one who taught it to me.”

Maybe. People have told me worse things than that to make me feel better.

I sat there on that carpet until the sky over Manhattan went the cheap grey it goes before it turns into anything, and the whole time I sat there I was putting the thing together, and putting things together out of what people do with their hands is the only skill anybody ever handed me.

A man took something small out of his own pocket. A woman left through a door that nobody logs. A camera came down off a tripod by a man whose hands already knew the catch. One glass went to the bathroom and one glass came down beside an open hand. A leg got straightened out. A curtain went a third of the way, and then it went the rest.

Left hand. Every piece of it, left hand.

And for the first time in my entire watching life, the story I was putting together had me standing inside the frame.