REBECCA ROSE felt about Park Slope the same way she felt about her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abbie: basic unconditional love mixed with frequent spurts of uncontrollable rage. On this particular Monday afternoon, the rage was winning. It was two-thirty and Abbie was napping. Rebecca had already cleared the lunch dishes, folded the clean laundry that had been sitting in the dryer for a week, and spent an hour reworking an article she was writing for Cosmopolitan called ?Beauty Secrets You Don?t Want Your Man to Know About.? Her final order of business was to sit on the living room couch, pop in a DVD of Roman Polanski?s The Tenant, and masturbate to the scene of Polanski molesting Isabelle Adjani in a darkened Parisian movie theater.

As she lay back against the cushion and fast-forwarded to the scene, she was startled to see a man outside her window. He was not a muscular and Chippendales-esque Peeping Tom seeking to witness her afternoon transgression but a Pakistani facade worker named Rakhman who liked to sing praises to Allah while applying scratch coat. He was working his way down the building. The lower shutters were closed, but Rebecca had forgotten to close the upper shutters, which meant that Rakhman could see right in.

Rebecca and her husband Theo?s four-unit brownstone coop building was populated entirely by yuppie couples with kids, including Apartment Four: a gay black guy who lived with his teenage son and his boyfriend. Since Rebecca and Theo had bought their apartment two years before, the coop board had authorized interior painting, new carpeting, boiler replacement, and facade renovation. All the renovating was good for Rebecca?s property value but bad for her profligacy, because it meant a constant parade of workers out the window. This was one of the unfortunate consequences of being bourgeois: Your life was in such a constant state of improvement that it became nearly impossible to live.

The neighborhood itself was testament to this. On Rebecca?s block alone, Carroll Street between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West, half a dozen buildings had undergone facade renovations in the past year. Rebecca could not even push Abbie down Seventh Avenue to Connecticut Muffin to grab a French roast without bracing for the roar of jackhammers. Down on Fourth Avenue, a gritty strip of tire repair shops, gas stations, and glass cutters, new modernist buildings featuring million-dollar lofts were going up each day.

The Rakhman sighting made Rebecca too uncomfortable to pleasure herself in the living room, even with all the shutters closed. If she wanted to come before Abbie woke up, she would have to do it on her bed, an area that these days was better suited to the excretion of baby poo than any more appealing bodily fluids. As Rakhman trilled loudly in Arabic about his black-eyed virgins (a term that made Rebecca picture women who?d been socked in the face), she made a quick escape down the hallway to her bedroom, tiptoeing in so as not to wake Abbie in the baby room next door.

For a moment Rebecca considered using Rakhman as masturbatory fodder, in his early thirties, he wasn?t bad-looking, with a lean fit body and shiny brown skin. Still, although she had married a gentile, she could not imagine making love to an Arab. Too scary, too Munich.

She shut the bedroom door, closed the curtains, and turned on the air conditioner. It was only the first week of July but a hundred and three outside, thanks to global warming. She lay under the crimson high-thread-count Calvin Klein bedspread, leaned over the side of the bed, and...