Record of New York City coronapanic

Friends in Manhattan now deny that they were ever locked down, that their kids’ schools were ever closed, that they were ever forced to wear masks, and that they ever had their vaccine papers checked.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (wife) is nominally about her husband “James” (a pseudonym for Henry Patterson Davis (nytimes 1999 wedding announcement)) deciding to avail himself of New York’s no-fault no-shame unilateral divorce system in which “I’d rather have sex with a 35-year-old than a 50-year-old” is a sufficient reason for breaking up the homes of two sets of children. The book, however, also provides some insight into how elite youngish healthy-weight New Yorkers’ processed the threat of SARS-CoV-2, a virus that was killing obese 80-year-olds.

The couple starts by fleeing the filthy virus-ridden city for their Martha’s Vineyard house and, while there, the wife learns that the husband is having sex with a mom who “was thirty-five but looked twenty“.

In the days that followed, I continued to try to hide the truth from the girls. A therapist I spoke with said I should wait to tell them until the pandemic was less scary. It was still March, the second week of lockdown. We thought it would be over soon. Or at least that the worst of it—the deaths, the shutdown, the unknowns—would end. But instead of easing, the pandemic had become more frightening. And so had I, appearing at dinner with swollen eyes and unwashed hair.

Zoom isn’t only for 18 months of pretend school:

He said he thought it would be better if I told them alone. Initially, I agreed with him. I was afraid that he would expose us to COVID. He was not in quarantine; he was having an affair in the middle of New York City. We decided we would do a family Zoom call to break the news.

May, during a brief visit back to the plagued city:

As he welcomed the girls, with the same blue mask and excited energy we’d seen in April,

September 2020, also in the city. Schools would be closed for another year, but adults were free to mingle in restaurants, meet each other on Tinder (Grindr for New Yorkers?), etc.:

We still had to wear masks, pulling them down to talk, back up when the waitress approached to take our orders.

Late November 2020, at an expensive house in the Hamptons:

Thanksgiving that year, at Susan’s house in Sagaponack, was strange and chaotic—twenty people, including my brother’s family and my cousins, all of us cooking in masks.

Diversity is our strength, but when a virus becomes more diverse it is time for renewed panic:

I debated doing something different, going somewhere new, but it wasn’t possible. COVID was still raging. The first variant had arrived in the United States in November.

The author is defending a divorce lawsuit in which her spending power is to be cut by 90 percent (a prenup kept their property and earnings separate, for the most part, and the husband/plaintiff had become a hedge fund hero), yet still has time for a full year of personal coropanic:

In early 2021, the pandemic continued to keep New Yorkers home. We were still masked, still avoiding gatherings, still scared.

While kids in NYC housing projects are consigned to watching a bored government worker on a small screen via Zoom, elite children can enjoy the company of other humans 24/7 at a boarding school:

I visited Evie at her boarding school in Delaware as often as I could, as often as the school would allow me. They had very strict rules during the pandemic. Parents could not enter buildings. The students could not leave the gates. It was like they were in prison. I brought Evie and her friends Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle. We sat outside on the lawn, in the cold, pulling down our paper masks to eat.

After years staying at home(s) and in the Vineyard tennis club, the mom/defendant goes back to work as an attorney. Her first project is trying to make sure that there isn’t any reduction in the supply of labor for landscaping at her Martha’s Vineyard house:

My law partner and I took on another immigration case. We were representing our first male client, a fourteen-year-old boy. His mother had died when he was two. He had been physically and emotionally abused by his father. He had been forced to miss school to work in their fields. He had been harassed, chased, and beaten by local gangs. At thirteen, he traveled by bus and train toward the United States, eventually crossing the border by foot. He was detained by border agents and released with a USCIS hearing date. He took a bus to New York, where he was welcomed by his maternal aunt. Neither my partner nor I speak Spanish, so we engaged a friend of hers, another former corporate lawyer, to translate. We conducted interviews, all slower with translation, and prepared his documents. We appeared at our client’s USCIS hearing and filed his paperwork in family court.