Twice, Jocelyn searched Fry's Electronics Warehouse from one end of the store to the other before she finally spied Nate. She would have stormed up to him and demanded to know why he had abandoned her in the major appliance department but something in his expression held her back. He had a faraway look that she had never seen before. He looked like he had fallen into a hypnotic trance.
She waited at the end of the aisle for the longest time, watching him stare at racks of blister-packed gadgets. She craned her neck but, from where she stood, she was unable to see what was inside the rows of plastic bubbles. Not wanting to disturb him, she backed partway around the corner and watched him through the space between boxes of disk drives stacked on the end of the shelves.
She felt like James Bond trying to catch Dr. No in the act of hatching some evil plan.
Eventually he plucked a package from the rack and read the back, studying every word as though he wanted to memorize it. Then he turned the package over and stared through the plastic at the gadget inside, tilting it this way and that to see it from different angles.
He looked like he was caught in the throes of a religious epiphany. Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. Except that he was staring as no blind man ever would.
She glanced down and was shocked to see a bulge at his crotch.
Something seriously weird was happening here.
Looking at electronics was giving her husband an erection.
When he replaced the package, he glanced furtively around, but he must not have noticed her peeking between the shelves, twenty feet away, because he picked up a different package and began reading that one.
She wondered how long it would take him to read every package on the display. Her feet were growing tired and her patience wearing thin.
It must have been twenty minutes before he finally wandered off, fortunately in the other direction, presumably to find her and tell her that he was ready to go home.
Before she revealed herself, she had to find out what had held her husband's attention for so long. And, more significantly, what had given him that hard-on.
When she was standing on the spot recently ceded by Nate and looking at the gadgets that had been so attractive to him, she was astounded.
He had been looking at racks of miniature video cameras. Tiny cameras with lenses the size of nail heads. Battery operated cameras. Cameras that could be mounted anywhere and send videos wirelessly to be recorded on nearby computers.
James Bond indeed. This was Q's treasure trove.
What would her Nate want to record with these tiny spy cameras? They didn't have children so they didn't have a babysitter to watch. They lived in a low crime cul-de-sac with no vandalism to speak of. He was an accountant with an office in a small building that he shared with several other accountants, all men, so he had no female colleagues to spy on.
She was certain that he was faithful to her, so he had no mistress to drool over.
That left only one significant person in his life for him to spy on.
She thought about his erection. She had never seen him sexually aroused in a public place before. He was not only dedicated to maintaining a flawless conservative image; he was an actual, dyed-in-the-wool conservative from his premature baldpate to the soles of his orthopedic shoes. She would not have believed that he could get an erection in a public place if she had not seen it with her own eyes.
A man like him didn't get a stiffie like that in a place like this unless he was gripped by a sexual fantasy that thrilled him to his very core. And, if he was that enthralled by his fantasy, he was going to do something about it.
When she caught up to him, she said nothing about the cameras, only suggested that it was time to go home. But she could not stop thinking about what she had seen.
She mulled it over all night. This was her husband. She had lived with the man for more than five years. She knew everything about him. She knew that he liked ketchup on his eggs but never used it when other people were around because he was afraid that it looked low class. She knew that he played video games with the sound off when he woke up in the middle of the night. She knew that he liked to look at her when she was getting ready for bed, even on the nights when they weren't going to make love.
How could she not know that he was a pervert? A would-be voyeur.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon, Nate told her that he had some errands to run and went out for more than two hours. He didn't say where he was going nor did he invite her along.
She was sure that he was going back to Fry's to buy a miniature camera. Or maybe a bunch of them. They didn't cost that much.
She sat in the rocking chair by the picture window with a bestseller in her hands and watched for him to return. When he did, he didn't park in the driveway but drove the car into the garage, out of sight, as though winter had arrived in September. Was he pulling a bag of goodies out of the trunk and stashing them somewhere out there? Or had he left them in the car, intending to retrieve them tonight after she went to bed?
"Where've you been?" she asked when he came into the house. She tried to make it sound like casual question, his answer of no special import to her.
"Oh. Looking for a new winter coat," he said. To her ear, he sounded like he was forcing himself to sound as casual as her, but less successfully.
"Find one?"
"No. It's too early in the season. I'll look again when it gets closer to Christmas. Maybe there'll be some sales."
* * *
On Sunday, she had to get groceries. She invited him along, as always. Often he came with her -- he was a prince -- but this time he said that he was too tired and wanted to stay home.
She didn't know why he would be tired. He'd slept in and had done nothing but read the paper since getting dressed at ten.
As she was squeezing tomatoes and hefting potatoes, she imagined Nate at home, crawling around the bedroom and the bathroom, drilling tiny holes in the walls, putting miniature cameras in secret places, their lenses glittering darkly as they began waiting to catch a glimpse of her unawares.
Her heart felt cold and she felt sick in her gut when she thought about it.
But that cold heart pounded hard and hot in her chest.
* * *
Jocelyn was a freelance graphic designer. She spent most of her days at home, sitting in front of her computer, standing at her easel, or hunched over her drafting table, working with mouse, pencils, and brushes. On Monday, she acted the same as on any other day. But, beneath her calm outward appearance, her mind was seething in turmoil.
She usually awoke after Nate was dressed and never got out of bed until she heard him start his car. Their house was small and there was no reason for her to get up and get in his way while he was trying to shower and shave and grab a cup of coffee.
Monday morning when she woke up, her first impulse was to try to guess where the cameras might be hidden. She didn't want to be seen searching, so she looked around casually as she swung her feet to the floor. Was that a glint of glass in the cold air register? Had the books on the bookshelf been re-arranged? Did the pupil of the woman in the Lempicka print look a little too realistic today? Was there a fresh shadow against the shade of the light fixture?
She wanted desperately to rush about the room and tear it to pieces, looking for the damned cameras. But she dared not do it. If she were right about the cameras, then Nate would have videos of her ripping her house apart like a madwoman. To what end? So that she could hold the thing up in his face and tell him that he was a despicable sneak. If he didn't divorce her then, to preserve her self-respect, she would have to divorce him. She didn't want to have to start looking for a new husband all over again. Divorce would mean throwing away all the years that she had been with Nate. A year and a half of dating and more than five years of marriage. She had no desire to begin from scratch. Not at the age of twenty-seven.
And if she searched the house for hidden cameras and didn't find them? What would that tell her? Either that they were hidden too cleverly for her not-mechanically-oriented mind or that she had falsely suspected her husband of being a despicable sneak.
That would tell her more about herself that she wanted to know.
Instead, she told herself that she was being silly. She had been mistaken about what she thought she saw in Fry's. Nate had been curious about a technological toy but had no interest in spying on her. He could see her naked for the asking. Why would he care to look at glimpses of her on a grainy, ill-focused video screen?
She chided herself, laughed at herself, told herself to get a grip.
But on Monday morning, she took her clothes into the bathroom, showered as quickly as possible, then got dressed before coming back into the bedroom -- hoping that the cameras were installed only in the bedroom and not in the bathroom. The bathroom would be too intimate to contemplate.
She spent all day trying to draw an illustration of a cute puppy sniffing a sausage that had fallen on the ground but she failed. She should have been able to whip up a trite illustration like that in an hour at the most but she simply couldn't get it right. Every time she tried to fix the puppy image in her mind, it was crowded out by images of herself being recorded on a computer hidden in some dark closet.
Did the computer have to be nearby? She remembered some of the packages in the store saying that their cameras were "internet ready". They did not have to be connected to a computer at all. They could be directly attached to the Internet.
She wasted two hours on the web, researching such cameras and studying the technical descriptions.
From what she could understand, Nate could be sitting in his office right now, watching every move she made.
She ruined yet another illustration, drawing a puppy that looked a lot like a slobbering wolf about to devour a severed human appendage. There was nothing cute about that.
When Nate came home, expecting dinner, he found take-out pizza on the table.
Jocelyn had not been able to bring herself to cook, fearing that there might be cameras installed in the kitchen, recording every potato she peeled, waiting in hope that she would be the tomato that got peeled next.
