We had a town house, but we weren’t allowed to touch it. I had to be lifted up by the armpits to peer inside. The brick façade appeared to be cut from a single sheet, but, if you looked closely, you could see how my father had smeared cement onto miniature bricks with a butter knife. The town house was electric, too, modelled after its nineteen-twenties counterpart and outfitted with stained-glass lamps and micro-editions of “Moby-Dick” and “Jane Eyre.” There were even lights on the outside, brass sconces that framed the doorway and cast shadows on the perennially green hedges below.

The house I grew up in is not like this. It’s compact and boxy, built on a cement slab and encased in vinyl siding. On the Tim Burton Sliding Architectural Scale, it’s less “Beetlejuice,” more “Edward Scissorhands.” Ours is one of two models of homes on the street. It’s as if an architect approached the neighborhood the way you approach a child at mealtime. You’re not supposed to ask a child to conjure an ideal dinner out of thin air; you’re supposed to say “Chicken or spaghetti?” or all hell breaks loose. The neighborhood itself is shaped like a ladle, with four lines of streets cutting across the middle and one long one, which bends like a handle before merging into some woods. My parents live in the soup, surrounded by neighbors making an effort with koi ponds.

My whole life, my parents refused to do the decent thing and pretend they couldn’t hear every step I took. I have never been trapped in a bunker or a submarine, but I have to assume there’s an understanding in these situations. These people would never survive. If I picked up the phone in the kitchen, my father’s voice would come booming from the basement, asking who I was calling. If I unfolded a blanket in the den, my mother would shout down from the top floor, offering me another one. If I passed their bedroom door, they would demand to know what I was up to. Seems harmless enough until you know that the only room after theirs was the bathroom.

Thus, the town house became my platonic ideal of a house. It was always grand and peaceful. It stood in the corner of the living room, covered with a tarp, like a birdcage. Light from the television would be visible to any tiny people living inside. They would be able to hear my parents’ cries of “What are you watching?” as I changed the channel. But there were no tiny people beneath the tarp. No eyes to see or ears to hear. No one to tell me that I would one day live in Manhattan, where, if someone follows you around, asking you who you’re calling, you can have that person arrested.

A couple of decades later, I was living in a railroad apartment in Chelsea, illegally subletting from a friend’s sister. The sister lived in Los Angeles and I never met her, despite repeated offers to meet whenever I happened to be in L.A. This was for her benefit, not mine. If it were me, I’d want to vet me. But I never heard back from her. I never heard from her at all, actually. One time the peephole fell out, a thing I did not realize peepholes could do—just dislodge themselves and come thudding onto the floor like a car part. I wrote to her, explaining what had happened. No response. Eventually, I taped the receipt for a new peephole to my reduced rent check, which she cashed without a—well, you know. The second I saw her name appear on my phone, I knew I was getting evicted.

Not wanting to stray too far from home, I paid a broker to find me a place nearby. In the easiest gig of that guy’s already unchallenging career, we walked nine blocks south, to a prewar building, the kind with a name engraved above the awning, but none of the residents could tell you what it was. The broker unlocked the door to a six-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom on the second floor that had been recently occupied by a boy (the clothes pole in the closet was missing). But the moldings were thick enough to double as bookshelves, and the view was unreal. Tulip trees shaded a row of the private back yards of town houses. Cherry-blossom detritus drizzled in the wind. A blue jay landed on the fire escape. It was the first apartment I saw, I could barely afford it, and I took it immediately.

The West Village is a ridiculous place to call home. People with unseemly bank accounts spend thousands of dollars freshening the flowerpots on their stoops. Rosebushes, hydrangeas, pansies, and zinnias—all casually exposed to marauding vagrants. Except there are no vagrants, not even marauding ones. It’s a generationally diverse area, but otherwise it’s as removed from reality as a movie set. Celebrities’ kids skip along the pavement, backpacks twice their size bobbing up and down. One of the houses visible from my apartment is owned by an elderly couple. The woman likes to tell guests how Hilary Swank used to climb a fence and exit through their house in order to avoid the paparazzi.

Down the block and around the clock, people take photos of the façade of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment in “Sex and the City.” Submitting to their fate, the real owners have installed a donation box on behalf of a local animal shelter, to collect a contribution for every photo taken. These tourists’ heads would explode like a bomb full of nicotine patches if they knew that Sarah Jessica Parker herself lives around the corner. I can’t help but wonder what she feels when she walks past Carrie’s building. It must be like driving past your high school—at once everything and nothing.

I only cared about the celebrities the way all New Yorkers care about celebrities: I ignored them or, if they were especially famous, congratulated myself for ignoring them. The real draw of the neighborhood was the quiet. And not just any kind of quiet. Here, in the heart of Manhattan, was a pod of that suburban silence that had eluded me as a child. You could hear a pin drop in my bedroom—on the bed. Early mornings, I listened to the heckling of seagulls that had strayed inland from the Hudson River. On warm evenings, a cellist sat on the street corner with his case open. When it rained, water pelted the leaves outside my enchanted tree house.

And then one day the leaves dropped and Jared came out. Jared lived in the town house directly behind my apartment. He must have been on summer vacation or touring Europe by colonial rickshaw when I moved in. Jared was between fifteen and eighteen years old. It was impossible to tell. I could never get a good read on his height, as his resting state was slouched in a lawn chair, watching viral videos on his phone at full volume. And I never heard him say stuff like “Looks like I can be legally tried as an adult now” despite being someone for whom the distinction was clearly relevant.

How do I begin to explain my relationship with this creature? Is it a relationship if you’ve never met? Certainly this is an acceptable dynamic online, but played out in real life it’s called stalking. All five of the windows in my apartment faced Jared’s house. And, for as many years, I heard every word this kid said. I would like to tell you that his woes were typical of his age bracket: unrequited crushes, parental oppression, social strife. But Jared had no woes. Plato advised us to be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle, but I am here to tell you that I have witnessed Plato’s exception. Jared’s battles centered around selecting the right surfboard (for show or for use at a beach house, both equally abhorrent) and the occasional obligation to come inside and set the table. And that he didn’t have to do, so long as he ignored the sound of his own name. Jewish guilt is no match for teen-age entitlement.