Couple's Divorce Stuns Tight-Knit Community of Manhattan

	MANHATTAN, NY -- Nestled in the southeast corner of New York State,
	Manhattan is an old-fashioned sort of community, the kind of place where
	people still live in close proximity to one another and walk to the
	corner store to pick up the daily paper.
	
	So when the people of this close-knit burg on the Hudson River found out
	that two of their own, Abe and Myra Saunders, were divorcing after 23
	years of marriage, disbelief was the prevailing response.
	
	"I was stunned when I heard that somebody in our town was  getting
	divorced," said David Cutler, 37, who said he doesn't  know the
	Saunderses but lives just six blocks from their  apartment on 77th
	Street.  "This just isn't the kind of thing that normally goes on
	around here."
	
	"My first reaction was total denial -- I simply didn't think it was
	possible," said Andrea Zimmer, 34, a lifelong resident of the town's
	sleepy little Upper West Side neighborhood.  "Maybe things like this are
	considered commonplace in other towns, but not here in Manhattan."
	
	Even more shocking to local residents were the circumstances surrounding
	the couple's breakup.  For the past year and a half, Abe, 48, a tax
	attorney with the local savings-and-loan Chase Manhattan Bank, has been
	having a affair with Lisette Solomon, a 26-year-old co-worker.
	
	Myra, 47, a buyer for Bloomingdale's, a local clothing shop, did not
	find out about her husband's infidelity until Jan. 21, when he confessed
	and requested a divorce in order to move in with his mistress.
	
	"Abe's scandalous affair with a younger woman is the talk of the town,"
	said Elliott Sharperson, a writer for the local paper, The New York
	Times.  "From the post office to the library to the butcher shop, pretty
	much anywhere you go around here, that's all anyone's talking about."
	
	"Can you imagine?  A tax attorney secretly sleeping with a woman 22
	years his junior?" said Manhattan resident Edna Rudolph.  "I don't know
	how Abe can ever expect to walk down the street in this town again
	without feeling like everyone's staring at him.  The shame he must
	feel."