Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent Page A

were living across the street next to the Blooms, but they split up about two years ago, and now it’s just Dorris and the brats in situ, Miriam, ten, and Isaac, twelve. I’ve had cameras in there for a while now, predivorce and after, but even if Dorris finally noticed one of them and made the connection (highly unlikely), I still don’t see either of the Katzes as the type to plot or pull off Pinko’s style.
    Dorris is far too stupid, for starters, a prime specimen of what they used to call the Jewish American Princess, or what the JAPs themselves called a Kugel, as in pudding, as in tasty dish, but brain like a warm dessert.
    Jonathan, meanwhile, a pediatric neurosurgeon, poor bastard, is so bitter about the size of his alimony and child support payments (think GNP of Burundi and you’re probably in the ballpark) that I bet he’d love the idea of someone posting “Keyhole Exploits of a Divorcée” on XTube. (When I do share my footage, by the way, which isn’t that often, as a legal precaution I blur out the faces and any singular household items. But still. You never know who might recognize that cluster of three moles just below Dorris’s left armpit.)
    Even so, as the TV detectives say, I don’t like Dr. Katz for this one. He just doesn’t have the motivation. Besides, how many neurosurgeons do you know who have the time, much less the chops, to toss off the likes of “Childe Bride: Bluebeard’s Last Seduction”—or whatever you wanna call this “material” I’m getting?
    Okay, sure, it’s possible, remotely, that Katz is the William Carlos Williams of the criminally insane, but I’m gonna take the under on that. Call it a hunch.
    He’s since moved to greener stomping grounds, anyway—Twin Pines, wouldn’t ya know—and now resides not far from Dave. I’m sure he’s rolling in his newfound bachelorhood, happy as happy gets.
    And yet, boy, does that man have a pair of lungs. Whoa. And a tongue to match. I’ll say that for him. And her, too. I had my cameras in that house for the whole last year plus of their trip down the nuptial toilet—one in the family room, one in the bedroom, and one in the en suite bath—and, Jesus, talk about scenes from a fucking marriage. Holy crap.
    You get a couple of Sephardic Jews going at it with all the wrath of the old religion behind them and the pitchfork of the gender wars out front, and it gets nasty in ways that the less ethnic peoples among us just can’t wrap our vanilla minds around. Let’s just say that, when it comes to spousal abuse, the silent treatment never made it past the Alps, and a good old-fashioned Mediterranean beat down is for the birds when you’ve got the right vocabulary.
    Sticks and stones would have been a relief and, I’m here to tell you, names can definitely hurt you. Not a word went unshouted between these two. Shrieked, actually, at a pitch that isn’t even human anymore. My ears are still ringing with it.
    I can’t believe it lasted as long as it did. I was exhausted just watching. He’d be standing there in nothing but his golf shoes and a jock strap and she, completely starkers (as usual), would be sitting at her dressing table screaming the laundry list of his failings in high C and gesticulating so wildly with a hairbrush that it made me clench my jaw and the cheeks of my ass until they cramped.
    Scary, scary shit.
    That ended, finally, with him fishtailing so furiously out of the driveway in the white Caddy at three a.m. that there were skid marks halfway down the block. They left the rest to the lawyers, I’m assuming, or the good folks at AT&T, because I never saw the Escalade with the MD plates in the driveway again, though I was privy to a few choice hang-ups on the bedroom extension.
    Yeah. I was well wired for them when that action went down, and as with Dave, I came to mostly regret my