Welcome to the Neighborhood

        I am dawdling, and it’s going to lead to a confrontation soon with my wife, I just know it.

        We are the guests of honor at our next-door neighbor’s pool party because we just moved into the neighborhood two weeks ago. I am not a social guy. I’m in the kind of job that makes it actually hard to like people very much, because all day, every day, I have a front-row seat to every variety of shit one person can shovel upon another.

        I’m a freelance private eye for various law firms, including my wife’s. I’ve seen too much. And not that she hasn’t, too, but I see it in real time, as the assholes are doing the deeds, whereas she just sees the videos I take of it all.

        “C’mon, Jesse; we have to go,” she says.

        Before I can stop myself – and I swear to the lord, I really do know better than this – I gape at her and say, “You’re wearing THAT?” And then, because I’ve obviously OD’ed on Stupid pills, I change it to, “Or actually, should I say, “You’re ALMOST wearing that?”

        My wife is a knockout. I met her when she was moonlighting as a bikini model in order to put herself through law school. I was the photographer assigned to the gig, which was my side hustle while I was growing my detective agency business.

        So, she’s standing there wearing a hot pink, low-cut, string bikini for our intro to the neighborhood? I’ll be sure to bring drool mats for all the husbands and poison-tipped dart guns for their wives. How can the same woman who’s so unbelievably brilliant in the courtroom be so completely oblivious about basic social etiquette?

        “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says with her Prosecutor snark on full blast. “Should I go change into my Amish skirt and bonnet?”

        “Like, there’s nothing in-between?” I ask. “Something that doesn’t scream ‘Let the Gang Bang Line Start Here?’”

        “How are you such a priss?” she asks. “You were not like this when we met.”

        “You were not my wife when we met,” I say, kind enough not to add ‘Duhhh!’ “And back then, we were not about to meet everyone we’re going to be sharing a neighborhood with for the next many decades.”

        We’ve worked our asses off to afford this place. I don’t want to blow it at our debut.

        “Please, Cleo, just put on a cover-up. This is DC, not Vegas.”

        She rolls her eyes like a petulant four-year-old, only to return a moment later, having added a see-through pale pink sarong “cover-up,” Jackie O. sunglasses and a straw hat the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

        The lyrics to a vintage Calypso song begin playing in my mind:

        If ya wanna be happy fer the resta yer life,

        Better make an ugly woman yer wife…

But, as we enter the ten-foot-high pool gate of Vito Mastroantonio’s compound, I am flabbergasted to note that, instead of standing out, Cleo fits right in. Beautiful and scantily clad seems to be the order of the day, and I will be the one who needs a drool mat.

        Cleo’s led toward the bar by gaunt-faced, boobed-up thirty-somethings who seem to somehow already know her. My wife, the socialite.

        A tawny man of indeterminate age – could be sixty, could be seventy-three with a plastic surgeon on speed dial – approaches me with his hand extended.

        “Vito Mastroantonio,” he says, raising his sunglasses to expose jet black eyes that laser deep into the recesses of my soul. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”

        “Thank you for throwing this Welcome party for us,” I say.

        “Of course!” He smiles, and I immediately wish I had sunglasses of my own. Those choppers glow!

        “Your wife is gorgeous,” he tells me without preamble or decorum or any compunction whatsoever.

        I hate this asshole. I let my silence make that real clear.

        “No offense intended, Jesse,” he says. “My wife is beautiful, too.” He points to a leggy blonde in a bikini that looks as if four pieces of red twine were hot-glued across her chest and her privates. Sky-high red stilettos complete the look.

        I want to ask if she’s out of high school yet, but I opt for silence again and just nod my head.

        He whistles for her, and she scampers over like a good dog. She locks her arms around Vito’s bare torso and melds her near-nakedness into him. Then she opens her mouth and swallows in his lips for a prolonged suck-fest. When she’s finally done, she looks down at his trunks and giggles, then looks back up at him. He gives her an avuncular smile, and I pray to the heavens above to please keep my breakfast from re-visiting.

        “Darling, this is Jesse Preston from next door,” Vito says. “Jesse, this is Lilianna Mastroantonio.”

        She says, “hi,” in a baby-talk voice and runs a long, red fingernail down the cleft in my chin.

        “She’s very playful,” says Vito, grabbing her hand. Then, turning to her, he says, “Okay; go now.” She blows him a kiss over her shoulder and returns to the bar where the posse surrounding Cleo has now burgeoned exponentially.

        Vito tries to take my temperature of the tableau he’s just provided, but I make sure my screen reads ‘Out of Order.’

        “I’ve had you checked out, Jesse,” he tells me. “So, I know you’re a P.I. I want to hire you to follow Lilianna. I have a sense that she’s being unfaithful.”

        My hand involuntarily touches the cleft in my chin, where I can still feel the tingle of her fingernail.

        “Yeah, Vito, that’s not going to happen,” I say. He needs to understand that he does not have exclusive rights to the Alpha Males “R” Us franchise.

        “Well, I’m pretty sure it is going to happen,” he says. With a diagonal slash of those hyper-white teeth, he shows me a snarl of confident amusement. “I’m growing tired of her anyway,” he says. His eyes dare me to react. I don’t.

        Someone shouts, “Can we kill this techno-pop shit already? I’m worried my ears are going to start to bleed soon!”

There is a murmur of laughter, then another voice shouts, “Alexa, play sexy jazz!”

Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For washes over the party and transforms it at once.

        A curly-haired babe with a Caribbean tan, killer abs and a white micro-bikini takes center stage on the pool deck with her Avenger-bodied date. What they’re doing doesn’t really qualify for “dancing” as much as “vertical gymnastic fornication.”

        He wraps her inside his manatee-sized arms, and she responds by scaling his legs until she reaches the waistband of his biker shorts. Then she opens her legs like barbeque tongs and holsters one onto each side of his hips. Impressively, she keeps them agape, rather than folding them around his waist, and he rewards her by cupping her half-exposed, baseball-hard ass cheeks with both hands.

        He sways her slow as he runs his tongue up and down her neck and chest, and they resemble a lion couple in one of those TV travelogues of the Serenghetti.

        More boozy couples join the erstwhile dance floor and perform their own renditions of Stuck On You until it looks like a scene from Caligula, or, worse, Boogie Nights.

        Cleo gives me raised eyebrows from her seat at the bar, and Vito toasts her with his flute of champagne.

        “As I was saying,” he continues as if this sea of half-naked bodies, grinding their loins together in time with frowsy rhythm-and-blues riffs, is just another Sunday afternoon. And then it dawns on me: that’s exactly what it is.

        Lilianna and her four-strands-of-Twizzlers bathing suit slips in between Vito and me. She takes Vito’s hand and slides it between the tops of her thighs while she tilts her head back and purrs. A moment later, she is delicately nibbling his right nipple, like a hamster on a grape, as she slides her free hand toward the waistband of his trunks.

        He catches her by the wrist and hoarsely coos, “I know, I know, Lilianna. But I’m conducting business right now, so please go back to the bar.”

        She gives him a pouty face but immediately does as she’s told.

        “I’ve already spoken with your wife about you taking this assignment,” Vito tells me. “I’ve had her firm on retainer for several months now.”

        “But why wouldn’t you just use whoever did all the background checking on me to also follow Lilianna?” I ask.

        “Because he’s her cousin,” he says. Then, as if he’s being noble, he adds, “I wouldn’t want to make him have to divide his loyalties.”

        Curly Hair’s dance partner has now just untied her halter top and tossed it to the floor of the pool deck. He carries her exposed-and-glistening supine body to the pool, as if she’s a prized sheet cake, then sets her atop the water, adjusting his hands beneath the surface to support her back. He leans down and begins to lick her some more, this time the entire length of her floating body and, oddly, I seem to be the only one noticing.

        “If she’s cheating,” Vito says, interrupting my voyeuristic incredulities, "she gets not one dime of my money. Our pre-nup is airtight.”

        “And what if you cheat?” I cajole him with a Bro Code smile.

        I swear he looks sanctimonious as he says, “Then I will have to pay her $400 million dollars.”

        “Wow! You must be a very faithful guy!” I smile and let my sarcasm hang in the air above him like a guillotine.

        “I wanted to make her feel secure,” he says. Mr. Magnanimous. “Besides, she trusts me implicitly. She comes from very humble beginnings and worries it will all be taken away, so she doesn’t ever challenge me.”

        “Well, then this is going to be her lucky day!” I say and give the asshole my biggest Fuck You grin.

        Immediately, Vito registers a ‘tell.’ The consummate chess player has just swiped his brow. Someone who wasn’t in the undercover business might not even have noticed it. But I noticed it, and in my mind, I did an exuberant Happy Dance. In a private investigator’s world, a tell like that is as good as a siren.

        “What do you mean?” His eyes are trying not to dart in the direction of the bar. He is a cornered weasel, and I am the huntsman with a perfectly sharpened axe.

        “Here,” I say. “Let me send you a video.” And with that, I stab an icon on my phone and hear a symphony of electronic receipts sound as the private movie lands on everyone’s cell phone in the vicinity.

        Eyes become riveted to their screens as they watch Vito Mastroantonio and my knockout of a wife, naked and copulating like rabid minks, on the conference table in her office. As a wonderful bonus, the law firm’s logo is on vivid display, in huge gold lettering, on the wall directly behind them.

        “You fucker!” he growls at me.

        “Well, I used to,” I tell him. “But now it’s your turn.” Then I offer up a lie and a taunt like twin cattle prods. “Hey, Vito, by the way, do you know what her life’s mantra is? ‘I love everyone…and you’re next.’ Myself, I’m used to it, but I bet you were imagining you were special, weren’t you? Do you think she’ll still be interested in you now that you’re $400 million dollars poorer?”

        I look over at the horrified face of my future ex-wife – wait; make that my soon-to-be-disbarred-future ex-wife – and note with amusement and great satisfaction that it’s nearly the same color as her low-cut string bikini.

        “How did you manage this?” Vito’s words burst out of his mouth between sprays of enraged spit.

        “Well, let’s see, Genius,” I say. I use a different finger to enumerate each item on my list.

        “I’m a P.I., so I’ve got scary-good instincts. I work for the same law firm where she’s a lawyer and you’re a client. I own lots and lots of small, state-of-the-art, undetectable surveillance equipment.”

        Over Vito’s shoulder, I see Lilianna finish the video then spring into the air and bounce, like she’s on a pogo stick, over and over and over. Then she extends her arms above her head and, with a beaming smile, tap dances in circles.

        But bless her heart. Even though she’s very, very young and from “humble beginnings,” this free-lance client of mine, who I met for the first time a week ago Tuesday, still has the class and courtesy to stop long enough to look me in the eyes, heartily thrust two thumbs up and then blow a kiss in my direction.