First Wives.(The Talk of the Town)(United Nations Delegation's Women's Club)

Correction appended.

Last week, the United Nations Delegation's Women's Club (sometimes known as the U.N. Wives Club) held a "Women for Peace" event, timed to celebrate International Women's Day. At a party afterward at the Turkish Center, on First Avenue, conversation drifted away from Darfur and state-sponsored day care to another international women's issue: the Eliot Spitzer disaster and its attendant problems. As the seventy-year-old wife of a Syrian ex-diplomat put it, wearily, "Men are men."

There were some men on hand--delegates and a few U.N. aides--and about a hundred women, many of them bunched around an international buffet table, wearing traditional clothes. "How did it happen?" Zarine Nandan, a U.N. wife from Fiji, in a hot-pink-and-green sari, muttered to a group near the tabouli. Nandan was talking about Spitzer. "He had everything going for him," she said, rubbing her forehead. "There must be some psychological--something lacking somewhere." Her husband, Satya, the head of the International Seabed Authority, had downloaded a picture of one of Spitzer's escorts onto his BlackBerry. "This is one of Eliot Spitzer's girlfriends," he said, passing the device around the table.

"Forty-three hundred dollars!" someone said.

"Oh, my goodness!"

Nandan asked, "Where does he get that kind of money, anyway?"