Urbane Sprawl

A couple of months ago, during the late-lamented summer, my parents and I found ourselves driving from Shelter Island’s Heights back to the Center, from the pharmacy and Stars Café to the post office and George’s IGA.

Turning into Dering Harbor village (population: 13), we were treated to a unusual sight for our small, modest island community: two young women in bikinis skipped down the street arm-in-arm, Laverne-and-Shirley-style, with their bikini bottoms pulled down beneath their pert-but-untanned buttocks. My father later recounted that day as his favorite of the summer.

We also later discovered that this semi-nude jaunting had been a summer-long habit of the two women, likely a fun way to get a rise out of the more staid and sheltered residents of the island.

Unfortunately for one of the women, who had been working as a hostess at one of the island’s inns, her reputation got back to dining room. When it did, she was fired.

While my parents thought it was ridiculous that the woman should be dismissed just for having a little fun, my grandmother and I agreed that the inn’s owners were right — or at least had the right — to dissociate their business from their hostess’s indecent public displays.

It surprised me, though, to see an institution actually exercising a desire to uphold somewhat stuck-up standards of “decency”; the idea of a small-town community collectively looking down their noses at an impetuous young woman — and actually ostracizing her in some real way — seemed to belong more to the age of Ellen Olenska or even Hester Prynne than the age of Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga.

I thought about the incident again last month after reading an article in the New York Times “Vows” section about a couple that met and fell in love while performing together in La Bohème:

…When he kissed her, she momentarily lost her footing. “I was thinking, ‘What was that?’ ” she said. “There was definitely something there.”

After the rehearsal, Mr. Miller decided he had to see Ms. Kabanuck outside of work and invented a reason to call. A question about their schedule quickly turned into an invitation to a movie. That evening they went to see “50 First Dates.”

“I was so drawn to him immediately and tried to talk myself out of it,” Ms. Kabanuck said. Theirs was a clash of outlooks, if not cultures. He wore red cowboy boots, had earrings in both ears and spiked hair. She had been raised as a Baptist fundamentalist and said she remained devout, describing herself as “a little church girl.”

A sweet story so far, an opposites attract rom-com plot against the backdrop of a classic love story. Very Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey. Just one problem:

The date led to a few other encounters, but he was about to depart for Piacenza, Italy, for what he expected to be a triumph as the Duke of Mantua in a new production of “Rigoletto.” She drove him to the airport. Neither of them knew what would happen next. She was still married, but very much wanted to be close to him. He later described the experience of looking into her eyes on the first date as “that thunderstruck moment.”

“I was in love,” he said, “not just in my heart but in head, my body, my soul. That was it.”

…Holed up in a hotel in the Latin Quarter for two weeks, they reveled in their own vie bohème. Only in this version, the two lovers began planning his next career move, an audition for the pop-opera quartet, Il Divo, then being put together by Simon Cowell. She scraped together the last of her money to buy him an MP3 player so he could rehearse.

The player turned out to be a solid investment. He became a member of Il Divo and now tours the world with the group.

Ms. Kabanuck, when she returned from Paris, moved out of the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband and found an apartment in Manhattan. The decision to leave her marriage and devote herself to Mr. Miller was extraordinarily difficult, she conceded. Still, she added, “from the moment our eyes met through those two weeks of being in Paris and the pain of going through a divorce, I knew that I loved him.”

Emphasis mine. Call me old-fashioned, but I was a little thrown to be reading this in the Times.

Sure, love doesn’t always happen neatly, but should adulterers be rewarded with a profile in the Sunday Styles section? The Times chooses whom to include in their highly competitive Weddings pages — isn’t the inclusion of the cheating coloratura and her Divo an implicit (bordering on explicit) endorsement of flouting marital bonds?

The devout “little church girl” shouldn’t have to be marked with a scarlet A, but shouldn’t cheating on her spouse disqualify her from being celebrated in a national newspaper?

I wasn’t the only one surprised: a post on New York Magazine’s “Daily Intel” blog slammed the couple — and others who end up in Vows after cheating on their spouses — for wanting the world to applaud their disregard for their first husbands and wives:

We at Daily Intel are not naïve. We understand that sometimes people in relationships fall in love with other people, and that they sometimes want to marry those people, which necessitates ending their current relationship. The heart wants what the heart wants, and all of that. We get it. We’ve even applauded it, bizarrely. But what we do not understand, what we cannot abide, is when said people, in the throes of connubial bliss, lobby to have themselves included in the New York Times “Vows” column, and then proceed to tell the reporter about how they cheated on their previous partner in a way that suggests they think of it not as something crap they have done to another person but instead like it is a part of their personal love story…

We actually just find it kind of distracting as a reader of Vows, because it raises all kinds of questions that then go unanswered, such as: Do the people who tell these stories really realize this stuff is going to end up in the Times, really? Do they worry that it’s going to ruin their wedding announcement by making them sound awful? And what do the exes think? What’s their version of events?

The authors fault the Times for lazy reporting in not getting the story of the disbanded husbands and wives, but, really, it’s a question of values. Why offer your institution’s extremely well-respected stamp of approval to clearly distasteful if not unethical behavior?

In Edith Wharton’s world, one whiff-of-a-hint of an adultery scandal that coalesced into an acknowledged item of society gossip could push someone out of social life forever.

That end of the spectrum seems too extreme. One mistake doesn’t define a person; there should be room for rehabilitation — of one’s reputation if not of his character.

A few weeks ago, after Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s address to Congress; after Serena Williams told a line judge at the U.S. Open that she’d shove the f-ing tennis ball down her f-ing throat; and after Kanye West assured Taylor Swift he was really happy for her and he was gonna let her finish, but Beyoncé’s video was one of the best of all time, the blogosphere punditocracy’s take-away message was that civility was dead.

But my take-away was slightly different and more reassuring: ostracism was alive, if not totally well.

Joe Wilson was “rebuked” by the House of Representatives, Serena Williams was fined by the tournament, and Kanye West was called a jackass by none other than Barack Obama.

The institutions which these individuals represent — Congress, professional tennis, the United States of America — made clear that their constituents’ actions were not in line with their institutional values.

Like the inn on Shelter Island, unlike the New York Times Vows section, these institutions (metaphorically) fired their flashing hostesses.

But we have a short societal memory and a shorter cultural attention span. These events will remain wrinkles on their perpetrators’ reputations forever, but they won’t bar all reputational rehabilitation.

Case in point: Eliot Spitzer. Eighteen months after resigning in a prostitution scandal, he has a column in Slate and may even run for office again.

This is a kind of provisional ostracism that we now generally practice. Serena can earn back the respect of her fans and become a model sportsman. The flashing hostess can be hired by another Shelter Island restaurant next summer. Institutions can censure those who show disregard for their values while still leaving the door open for redress.

If we want to keep civility alive, though, we must keep ostracism working. We must sometimes retain collective scowls at distasteful behavior. Let’s congratulate former adulterers on their weddings but keep them out of the Weddings sections. Let’s let Michael Vick play football but not give him endorsement deals. Let’s let Joe Wilson keep his seat but not make him minority leader.

And let’s get the flashing hostess a job at the Gardiner’s Bay Country Club so my dad can see her more often.