Bye, honey, see you on Labor Day

At the end of the long July 4 weekend, Jeffrey Horwitz, a law partner at Proskauer Rose, left his family in the country and drove back to Manhattan. After dropping his stuff at the family apartment, Horwitz zoomed over to an IMAX theater to meet a friend for a 10:45 p.m. movie.

The buddy he was supposed to meet up with, another lawyer returning from the country, got stuck in traffic, so Horwitz ended up alone. But he wasn’t lonely as he watched “The Matrix Reloaded,” a movie that his wife had little to no interest in. He was content.

There is something strange and unbalanced when only the men are around in the heat-woozy city. Everything is discombobulated anyway because of the way summer breaks up so many routines. With so many women in the workplace, this may sound like an old stereotype. But this city is still home to an appreciable number of families in which the husband works and the wife stays home with the children. And every July, old-fashioned as it seems, mom and the kids flee what feels like Dante’s Inferno for cool summer colonies, and dad stays behind to work. There are some families in which the husband spends the summer in the country with the kids, but typically that man is older and affluent with a second or third much-younger wife with a big-time job.

The Horwitzes retreat to bucolic Litchfield County in Connecticut, where they own a second home that this summer Jeffrey’s wife, Ellie, is painting all by herself for the joy of it while their 11-year-old-daughter is at sleep-away camp and their 8-year-old son is at day camp nearby.

“It’s just great that my boy is able to ride around on his bike or have a water balloon fight outside whenever he wants in Connecticut in a way he can’t in the city,” says Horwitz, who is 43.

These and other luxuries are within easy geographical reach to New Yorkers who can afford them -- Long Island beachside towns, the Jersey shore, Catskill mountain resorts. Others go even farther -- to Maine or Martha’s Vineyard.

Left behind, the men fall, more or less, into two categories: ridiculously miserable or smartly liberated. And mostly they’re in the second category, truth be told.

Of course, almost everyone I asked about the behavior of solitary summer husbands immediately raised the idea that there is a feeling of licentiousness in the air. But they just as quickly hissed that the guys who hound the honeys at bars in the summer are the very same ones who do it in the winter, spring and fall.

One wife who used to work on Wall Street but now stays at home with her children and is spending the summer in Essex, Conn., while her investment-banker husband is back in the city, says she doesn’t think about him when he’s not around. “If you have to worry your husband’s having an affair, you shouldn’t be out here. Period.”

Perhaps it’s because the very act of contemplating illicit sex makes it feel within the realm of the possible. Or maybe the 2003 equivalent of Marilyn Monroe holding her broken fan in “The Seven Year Itch” is not some girl sipping a Cosmopolitan alone at Cipriani’s bar, but the other “s” word for this hyperbolic age: solitude.

Dads who are alone don’t have to pretend to be interested in Elmo. They can leave a trail of clothes from the bedroom to the bathroom. They don’t have to get home in time to help the eldest with differential equations. Rather, they can linger alone over a Caesar salad and a steak at a local restaurant and drift home and actually light a cigar in their own apartments. (The smell is sure to dissipate by the time the family returns in August.) Or they can eat out of a Chinese food carton while standing up in the kitchen.

Several men said their wives had civilized them (surprise, surprise) but during these summer sabbaticals, they can revert to the slobs they were before marriage.

Then there’s exercise, the real jones that overworked overachievers of the 21st century crave but can never get enough of. Ah, the delirium of spending a blessed hour before work at the gym or -- in the case of one dad -- on his new titanium

Litespeed upon which he loops around Central Park not once but sometimes twice or three times in the summer!

If the men are giddy, as most secretly are about such indulgences, the women are apparently even happier away from schedules and after-school activities. In fact, the joke among many guys is: Never show up in the country on Wednesday if your wife is expecting you on Thursday. She won’t be home.

At an East Hampton screening last Monday night of “The Magdalene Sisters,” a new Miramax drama, there were 88 women and 33 men. The women, in short cotton skirts, clingy tank tops and sexy sandals, came in packs of three and four and went out to dinner together after the film. Their husbands, all Masters of the Universe of course, were back closing deals in the city.

“Miramax Films decided to tap into the influential women supposedly left in the Hamptons by their husbands by inviting them to a screening,” said Peggy Siegal, P.R. woman to the stars. But she insists three “inventions” have made the phenomenon of forced five-day separations less common: the fax, e-mail and the helicopter. “Now the guys who used to leave for the country on Friday night are coming up earlier and earlier, and working in their country-home offices more,” Siegal said.

This is especially true of men who hate being without their kids and oh yeah their wives during the week. These are the miserable men. They’re the ones making jokes about their wives’ accelerated social lives in the country, and they tend to be a little jealous and talk about missing their kids more than other guys. They wish they could be out frolicking in the pool instead of working longer (or so they say) and crashing in apartments that look like construction sites because their wives seem to plan a big renovation every summer when the rest of the family won’t be around.

Horwitz’s apartment is packed up for construction. His kids’ rooms are empty except for boxes; the lamps are packed up. But Horwitz barely notices. By the time he gets home he flops into bed. His friends with families who stay in the city all summer are always feeling sorry for him, inviting him for dinner or offering him an extra bedroom. “They have this impression that I’m pining away at 7 o’clock every night,” he chortles. But Horwitz, a hard-charging corporate lawyer who doesn’t see much of his family during the week even when they are around, takes this opportunity to work even longer hours, to court clients over dinner and, yes, try new restaurants. And if a deal goes down in the summer, he gets to throw himself into it and work around the clock without guilt.

“It’s like everything in New York,” he says. “People who live here want the action, they want change and in the summer that means living in a different way.”

And so summer sanctions breaking apart a family temporarily, allowing husbands and wives, parents and children, a chance to miss each other. If families splintered like this in November it would be considered freakish. But in summer, people stop cooking every night and going to church and synagogue regularly. It’s a time of release, a time to unravel at the edges, knowing that come Labor Day, life will hem itself back in again.