Chapter One

Language, as Sylvia's mother was fond of saying, mimics the human condition. What is harmless one moment can become fatal the next. Drop a prefix, and, before you know it, what was innocuous has grown noxious, dispensing fumes that are certain to kill you.

Take voyeur, which derives from the French voir-to see. A powerless or passive spectator. You might define it that way, if you were willing to strip away its unsavory meanings and free it from the clutches of Peeping Toms.

Consider this: as a girl in Sacramento, Sylvia liked to climb trees. She started out in the fruit and nut trees of her neighborhood and then branched out, if you will, to the spreading oaks on the capitol grounds. Innocuous enough, you might say. Yet the physical pleasure she took in scrambling from limb to limb and hoisting herself into a hidden hollow was more than matched by her exhilaration with what she saw: a long-legged woman mowing her lawn in a pair of powder-blue shorts, a pair of terrier mutts humping in the early morning, the opened mouth of an ingenue as a sailor squeezed one of her smallish breasts.

Now, as a woman in San Francisco, Sylvia takes a heightened pleasure in what she sees, but she no longer worries about concealing herself. When Sylvia moved to San Francisco last year, she found a one-bedroom apartment, three flights up, situated along the Hyde Street cable-car line. Home in the evenings, she watches the corner of Washington and Hyde through her curtainless front window. Sipping a glass of cheap burgundy and listening to a Bobby Darin record, Sylvia watches her neighbors, briefcases and sacks of groceries in