Most of the time, when you hear about the other woman in a story like this, she is almost never as ravishing, compelling, beautiful, stunning, elegant, mysterious, sensuous, sinewy, alluring, breathtaking, captivating, insecurity-inducing as you imagine her to be. Most of the time, when you actually lay eyes upon the nemesis in the story (the boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend; the husband’s ex-wife; their assorted female colleagues, secretaries, upstairs neighbors), she is almost always anything but.

Not Adrienne.

Usually, in reality, in the cold hard light of day, the other woman in a story like this is almost always this: Mousy. Plain. Insignificant. Mildly attractive. Nothing special. No competition.

Upon closer inspection (and several more vodka tonics imbibed in a dark bar where you and your tortured jealous friend are drooling drunkenly over bad snapshots of this unfortunate woman) she will even prove to appear worse: Thick-necked. Thick-thighed. Thick-ankled. Over-nipped. Over-tucked. Over-plucked. Over-tweezed. Insipid. Insufferable. Inbred.

Again, not Adrienne. Imagine this:

Willowy. Exotic. Intoxicating. Dark-haired. Thick-lipped. Bigboobed.

I could go on. And on. And on. And later, I will.

(All this gleaned from a single photograph snatched from one of Donald’s albums: the two of them, years earlier, in the Hamptons one soft-lit late August afternoon.)

Get the picture? I did. Immediately. And it wasn’t good. And I hadn’t even seen her in person. (That’s a whole other story, the first time we met. A preview—think push-up bra, skintight T-shirt and jeans, gelatinous lip gloss—her, unfortunately, not me).

So I went a little crazy.

Can you blame me?

1

We were, as it happened, Donald and I, deciding that evening on how we would have our wedding invitations printed—Engraving? Thermography? Lithography?—when Adrienne, Donald’s exfiancée, called to share her good news: she was leaving New York to accept a job in Washington, where we lived, just after the first of the year.

It was late November.

We were planning an April wedding.

And until that instant when the phone rang and Donald ran to the Caller ID box by the desk and froze, I had been planning— perhaps naively, perhaps idiotically—on taking the high road when it came to Adrienne and her relentless pursuit of friendship with Donald. I had vowed, without any true understanding of just how deep-rooted and, well, virulent, my particular strain of jealousy was, I see now, to put an end to my obsession. My suspicion. My frenzied insecurity. I had vowed, as they say, at long last, to get a grip.

On my demons.

On my nemesis.

On her.

Clearly this was wishful thinking on my part; a momentary lapse of delusional optimism (quite common, I’d read, with most brides-to-be), for nothing of the sort—maturity, acceptance, suffering in silence—was in the cards.

Especially now that she—Adrienne—would be living, as it were, in our backyard.

We had been staring intently at three pieces of Crane’s Ecruwhite Kid Finish stationery stock that I’d managed to sneak out of Neiman Marcus’s sample book as “souvenirs”—the salesman, stout, balding, moist, had excused himself to take a phone call from an important customer: “And will this be a surprise celebration for the Chief Justice?” (This was, after all, Washington.) The three sample invitations were identical except for the method of printing (which is why I had lifted them: to better understand the hefty price differential) and the surely fictional inviters and betrotheds (Mr. and Mrs. Henry Stewart Evans request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Katherine Leigh to Mr. Brian Charles Jamison. . . . Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Fields, III, request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Tiffany Jane to Mr. Phinneas Welch. . . . Our joy will be more complete if you will share in the marriage of our daughter Blah blah blah to Mr. Blah blah blah.). Running our fingers slowly and carefully over the print on each card; holding them up to the light; sniffing them, even (my suggestion), yielded nothing. We were failures in the study and appreciation of fine printing techniques.