[12] Bmw Darien Becomes Daily Issue

As unemployment has hit a 16-year high and Wall Street shakes off tens of thousands of jobs, affluent couples in the New York area find their families suddenly in flux. It’s not only the high-flying income and the attendant abundance that have evaporated. For many couples, it’s also the assumption of what their marriages would look like; the traditional model — executive husband and stay-at-home wife — may be a little dated, or unworkable.

One mother in TriBeCa, who is married, at least for now, to a Wall Street executive, put it rather bluntly: “My job was to run the household and the children’s lives,” she said. “His job is to provide us with a nice lifestyle.” But his bonus has disappeared, and his annual pay has dropped to $150,000 from $800,000 a year. “Let me just say this,” she said, “I’m still doing my job.”

The Berrys’ marriage isn’t as fraught, and they were never the kind of couple who lived bonus to bonus — which may explain why they, unlike most newly unemployed Wall Street families, are willing to open their lives to a reporter. In good times, they saved, set up college funds for their children and paid off their mortgage. Aside from a modest car loan, they don’t carry any debt. Despite their year of little work, their 11-year marriage seems as solid as their spacious five-bedroom Colonial home.

It helps, too, that they are not the only ones making adjustments. They live in an affluent bedroom community of New York, one whose very name has become synonymous with wealth. The median income for Darien, a village of about 20,000 in Fairfield County, is $180,000. The median price for homes sold last year was well into seven figures. But when Scott Berry walks along Darien’s commercial strip on a weekday, he sees many middle-aged men like him: part of the growing corps of the newly unemployed. At his local Y.M.C.A., the out-of-work Masters of the Universe and the professionals who relied on those huge salaries — architects, landscape designers and high-end contractors — can be found pumping iron together at 10 a.m.

“A lot of them have a deer-in-the-headlights kind of look to them,” he said. “If you have a massive mortgage and your wife has been out of the work force for a decade or more, being laid off can seem crushing.”