I dressed quickly, brushed my teeth, tucked my hair up into one of Donald’s old Mets caps, and headed out to my car. In the coming weeks, the inside of my Jetta, with its double cup-holders, its reclining front seats, its ample glove compartment, adjustable visors and mirrors and headrests, quick-accelerating V-6 engine, would become the control center for all my spying activities. I would live in that car; cry in that car; contemplate my future (or, as it seemed more and more, lack thereof) in that car. From the driver’s seat—with my small measure of control and power behind the wheel—I carried out my mission: to get to the bottom of what was going on with Donald and Adrienne.

It goes without saying, of course, that had I still been in the care of Dr. Frond, or, for that matter, any reputable mental heath care professional, I would have had a slightly different mission: I would have been trying to get to the bottom of what was going on with me—my suspicions, my paranoia, my extreme lack of trust in Donald, in our relationship. But I was not in the care of anyone. Free to roam the streets, my thoughts unbridled, I was a disaster waiting to happen.

And so that morning it began, the obsessive-compulsive routine that was, now, officially, taking over my life. After a quick stop for coffee at the bookstore, I would get back in the car, put my cap, scarf and sunglasses on, and commence to drive by.

What I thought I might find driving by her house in the morning, late morning, then noon, two, four, and five-thirty—and then past the parking lot at the Sidwell Friends School to finish the loop—I do not know. Maybe I was looking for inconsistencies (a late start or a sudden day off for Adrienne; the absence all week of Terrance’s car parked in front of her house); certainly I was looking for outright flagrancies (any evidence of Donald and Adrienne sneaking off for lunchtime escapades; after-work sexcapades).

Round and round I would go through the neighborhood in my car, making my little boxes, my eyes glued to the window, assessing the scenes I had just seen. Round and round. A crazy person with a head full of misfiring, misdirected, mistrustful impulses.

Mind you, I still somehow managed to maintain the illusion of a (semi-)normal life being lived in between the drive-bys. I’d work for a few hours in the morning—Fat to Fit still hadn’t gone away, thanks to its ongoing subtitle problems, and I was up to my ears in the author’s recent pile of tardily delivered pseudoscientificized charts (“How Fat Are You?”; “How Fit Do You Want to Become?”), graphs (“How Fat Most People Are”; “How Fit Most People Should Be”), and illustrated exercise instructions (“fig. 1: Buttocks up”; “ fig. 2: Buttocks down”; “fig. 3: Buttocks tight”; “ fig. 4: Buttocks relaxed”).

Right.