HOME ALONE

And one night, he curled up on the chaise longue in the bedroom with potato chips and soda -- taboo, as far as his wife is concerned -- and watched baseball and war movies on a split screen.

"I had a big smile on my face," Stahl recalled, describing the evening as the high point.

As far back as the 19th century, wives have loaded up the kids and abandoned the hot city for the mountains and the ocean when summer arrived. Tied to their jobs, husbands stayed home and commuted to see their families on weekends. With air conditioning and the rise of two-income families, that practice has become far less common.

"Most women can't leave for two months in the summer these days," said Cindy Aron, a University of Virginia professor who has written a history of vacations, "Working at Play."

Perhaps no film captured the split family life with more glee than the 1955 classic "The Seven Year Itch," which begins with Richard Sherman putting his wife and son on the train to Maine for the summer. When Sherman returns to their Manhattan apartment, he learns that he has a luscious new neighbor, played by Marilyn Monroe, whose white dress famously flutters as she stands over a subway grate, allowing for a show-stopping view of her legs.

Reality is not so kind.

In Langenbacher's case, the neighbor is a young guy who likes to wear "white pants and a pastel shirt, collar up -- a military wannabe," the professor scoffed.

More reality: With all his free time and no family to structure it around, he works "with much less efficiency," he said. "I'm hanging out too much, and when I hang out, it usually involves beer."

His life alone, the seasonal bachelor confessed, "all gets so tedious."

Warga agrees. He compares his family-free summer to the film "The Omega Man," in which Charlton Heston plays a post-apocalypse survivor "rooting around for food and talking to himself."

After awhile, Warga finds himself wandering the kids' darkened, spotless bedrooms, perhaps gazing at his daughter's hand-scrawled school project hanging on her wall: "The Cockroach, By Marguerite Warga. Habitat: Cockroaches live indoors; Diet: Cockroaches eat anything."

Stahl said he stopped enjoying himself three weeks after his wife left. Maybe it was all that Chinese takeout piling up in the fridge (he ordered three days' worth to save on delivery costs). Or that he ran through all 45 pairs of underwear and had to summon the cleaning lady to do the laundry (Warga replenished by going to Banana Republic).