Georgia Voyeur

We met over the phone somehow.  I told her I liked to watch.  Voyeurism or whatever they call it.  She found that interesting.  It was a relief.  Some people don’t appreciate it.  They think it’s a crime of the perverted or deranged.  Not this woman, Georgia – what a name.  Her parents probably thought it would be cute to name their daughter after a big southern city.  Maybe they wanted her to grow up to be a country singer.  Georgia isn’t what you name your daughter if you want her to be a doctor.

Her voice was nice, sometimes.  It was scratchy, like there was a hair on her tonsils.  She smoked camel cigarettes. If she laughed too hard, she’d go into a coughing fit.  When she coughed, she sounded like a rutting bull.  But otherwise she had a nice voice. 

Georgia liked men.  She really liked them.  All kinds too.  Good ones, dentist, lawyers, professors.  But she liked the bad ones too.  She liked ones with big bellies and dirty teeth.  She liked the ones who chewed tobacco and left their dirty clothes on the floor.  Some of the men she dated didn’t have cars.  They didn’t even have bicycles, so she had to drive them back and forth to work – if they had a job.

The first time I met Georgia, she had on a pair of black boots and a pink bow in her hair.  I remember that bow because I only ever saw her wear it twice, that first time, and then again the last time.  We got on fine for a while.  Sometimes we went out to eat at some no-good Italian restaurant, but most of the time she was okay with talking.  Talking, talking, always talking in that scratchy voice.  She wanted to know everything.  It was like she was writing an article on me.  Taking notes, drawing out little diagrams of me.  Maybe she was planning on putting me through some voodoo.  That’s what I thought.

She was strange in that way.  When she came over to my apartment, she never slept.  Even when we were done fooling around.  I’d lay there on my back, breathing, and she’d go on talking and talking.  Then I’d fall asleep.  Sometimes I’d wake up and she’d be talking still, telling another story or the same one again.  Other times, I’d wake up to her staring at me.  Such a soft face with porky cheeks and pretty lips, but no one likes to wake up to someone staring at them.  It got to me.  I didn’t think it would, but it did.  When she wasn’t there, I’d wake up in the night with that same feeling of being watched.

It went on like that for a few months.  I was getting tired of seeing her, but I’ve never been good at letting them go.  So I’d see her sporadically.  Once on the weekend, maybe once during the week.  She must have sensed that I was retracting.  Maybe she was used to men growing tired of her constant yammering.  All the questions.  It gets tiring being interviewed all the time.

One day she called me.  I let her talk for a while, then I put the phone down and let her talk some more.  When I picked it back up, she said she had a surprise for me. I tried to get it out of her.  I’m not big on surprises.  Especially surprises from a woman like Georgia.

I came home the next day, tired and dusty from work.  Georgia’s car was parked in front of the building.  I walked past it and looked in.  She kept that car in poor condition.  The back seat was full of clothes and shoes and odd trinkets.  You couldn’t see the floor in the front.  It was buried in trash and loose pages that had been torn out of fashion magazines.  I kept walking, keeping an eye out.  If this was her idea of a surprise, I didn’t like it.  My nerves were bad.  I told her surprises aren’t good for my blood pressure.

I walked slowly.  If this was a trap, I wanted my neighbors to see me.  In case I needed an alibi.  People looked out their windows.  I waved.  Some of them waved back, others didn’t.  I got to my door.  Georgia wasn’t waiting there like I suspected.  I put the key in, it pushed right open.  There was music playing.  It was coming from my bedroom.  Maybe Georgia thought this was the way to surprise a man.

I shut the door behind me and unbuttoned my shirt.  “Georgia.”  She didn’t answer.  She wasn’t talking, that was unusual.  I went down the hall and opened my door.  Ah, there she was – sitting on the edge of the bed wearing something white.  It hardly covered her parts.  Her legs were good.  Long, moisturized legs, folded on top of one another.  She smiled at me.  I wasn’t mad about her surprise anymore.

I unbuttoned more buttons on my shirt and kicked my shoes off.  Then the toilet flushed.  I looked at the bathroom door and back at Georgia.  She was still smiling, so I was still smiling.  The bathroom sink came on.  My stomach did a little flutter.  Who was Georgia surprising me with?

“Sit down over there,” Georgia said in her scratchy voice.  I pulled my socks off.  They were warm and damp.  I pushed them way down in the laundry basket.  I sat down.  Georgia smiled at me and then at the bathroom door, “You said you like to watch, right?”  I nodded.  I did like to watch.  But I’d never watched more than one woman at a time.  And I never did it from all the way across the room.

Georgia did something sexy with her legs and leaned back.  “You can come out.”  The bathroom door opened.  It must have been slow motion.  I waited for it.  When it was open, everything went back to normal speed.  Maybe it was two or three times normal speed at that point.  A man came out of the bathroom.  He had no shirt on.  I looked at Georgia.  The man gave me a nod.  I didn’t like that.  The nod was too casual.  There are better ways to welcome yourself into another man’s home.

Georgia wasn’t looking at me anymore.  She was making eyes with the shirtless man.  He was walking toward her.  If this was the surprise she was planning for me, I didn’t like it.  I wanted to tell her I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t say anything.  The music was still playing.  The man crawled on top of Georgia.  They kissed.   They were on my bed.  Georgia and her strange half-naked man-friend, embraced on my pillows.

I didn’t have it in me to stop them.  When I admitted my voyeurism to her, this wasn’t what I had in mind.  I didn’t like surprises.  Maybe I didn’t like to watch after all.  To be polite, I sat there trying not to look at them for a few minutes.  When I felt they were good and distracted, I put my shoes on without socks and left.  I walked fast.  I passed Georgia’s car and got into mine.  I started it up and drove off.  I waited another hour before I called Georgia.  I told her we couldn’t see each other anymore.