When the coronavirus shut down New York City in March of 2020, Belle Burden, her husband—a lawyer turned financier—and two of their three children left their apartment in Lower Manhattan and decamped for the wide-open spaces of Martha’s Vineyard, where they owned a vacation home.
The island was firmly in the grip of winter and pandemic fears, but inside the family’s house, all seemed safe and cozy, Burden writes in her affecting book, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, an expansion of her 2023 viral Modern Love column for The New York Times.
James, the name she gives her husband in the memoir, chopped three kinds of wood and built impressive fires every evening, then made her a whiskey sour as the sun set. Burden, who had just turned 50, took long walks in the woods and tried valiantly to keep up with the cleaning and laundry, while the couple’s older daughter learned to make pasta. Her rookie batch of gnocchi was the accompaniment to a roast chicken that James made for dinner on the night of March 21.
Burden was tidying up after everyone else had cleared out of the kitchen when the phone rang. Not recognizing the number, she didn’t pick up. But when she heard the ping registering a message, she pressed play. It was a man’s voice.
“I’m trying to reach Belle,” the mystery caller said, then paused. “I’m sorry to tell you that your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
Burden’s first reaction was dizziness. Her second, incredulity, which was followed by desperate hope. Surely, it was all a simple misunderstanding, something that could be easily explained and quickly forgotten.
Alas, no. James readily acknowledged that, for the last few weeks, he’d been having an affair with a banker he’d met through work. But mere hours after insisting that the indiscretion was over and done with, that he loved her and only her, James had a change of heart, packing up his stuff the next morning and returning to the city. “I thought I was happy, but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” he said by way of explanation. She could have the Vineyard house, he told her. She could have the New York City apartment and custody of the children. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t want any of it.”
Such is the jolt that kicks off Strangers, Burden’s candid attempt to get a bead on the man she’d been married to for more than 20 years—a man she was so certain she knew.
The two met in 1998 at the law firm Davis Polk, where Burden, who earned her law degree at N.Y.U. after graduating from Harvard, was a second-year associate, and James a fifth-year. Initially, Burden was less than indifferent. James knew nothing about movies and looked too much like her recently deceased father: tall, fair-haired, and trim.
“It was too familiar, the WASP-y preppy-ness, too appropriate,” she writes. But, when she was rotated into James’s group at work, she was impressed by his intelligence, his gentle manner, but most particularly his steadiness. When he came to say good-bye one day as Burden was preparing to leave for a vacation, they moved toward each other as though magnetized and kissed. “The chemistry people talk about … was coursing through me,” she writes rather infelicitously. They married a year later. “I felt we were entirely united, a team riding the waves together,” she writes.
It’s a mystery long probed in popular songs: How could a love that seemed so right go so wrong? It’s a question Burden asks again and again in these pages. Was it a result of James’s somewhat troubled childhood? Did it have something to do with the death of his best friend years earlier? Was Burden herself to blame, as her gynecologist and others suggested, because she had become a stay-at-home mother, and thus less interesting to her husband? (Note to Belle: fire your ob-gyn.) At one point, she wonders, without coming to a definitive conclusion, if, perhaps, she is simply a hostage to genetics. Was she, like other women in her family, chromosomally inclined to throw her lot in with men who turned out to be unfaithful?
About that family: Burden is the daughter of Amanda Burden, a well-regarded urban planner and the daughter of the socialite Babe Paley and Standard Oil heir Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. The author’s father was Carter Burden, a three-term New York City councilman descended from the Vanderbilts. “Fidelity” was not the watchword of Carter and Amanda’s relationship. (The couple divorced in 1972 after eight years of marriage.)
Paley’s second husband (she and Mortimer divorced in 1946), CBS founder William Paley, was a notorious philanderer. Amanda was also cheated on by her second husband, Time Warner C.E.O. Steve Ross, who appears briefly in the book as “Stan.” There is also mention of “a journalist,” a reference to Amanda Burden’s longtime partner, Charlie Rose, whose predations have been well documented.
One might quarrel a bit with the memoir’s title. The truth is, James makes it pretty clear early on just who he is—if only the author’s besotted younger self had been paying attention. And, though Burden makes her pain and hurt touchingly palpable, she doesn’t necessarily cover fresh ground or offer novel insights into her marital postmortem.
Still, to her everlasting credit, Burden tries hard not to make herself either a victim or a saint. And, despite his less-than-attractive behavior about the pre-nup and his disinclination to see his children on a regular basis, she tries even harder not to make her former husband come off as a louse.
Sorry, Belle, but a louse is exactly what he is.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic
