He glanced at the table, then closed his eyes, and nodded. “Whatever.”

And that was when, like a fool, I promised we’d file early every year, so that by the time our anniversary rolled around, we’d be opening our refunds.

By the time our salads finally came, brimming with bits and shreds and crumbs and chunks of blue cheese, chicken, avocado, bacon, and tomato, I had completely lost my appetite. The sight of my food sickened me, so full of anxiety was I now about the certain fiasco our wedding day—not to mention marriage—would be; I stared down at the plate but didn’t touch it. Adrienne stared at her plate, too, but didn’t touch hers either. The only one of us who ate—voraciously, gleefully—was Gayle.

“I’m famished!” she announced between bites, her mouth full of food and practically splitting at the seams.

Of course she was. Anyone would be after all that ass-kissing.

Seeing Gayle eat with such wild abandon for the first time, Adrienne must have feared she was truly and seriously undernourished. Pushing her plate discreetly across the table and touching Gayle on the arm, she said: “Here. You eat mine. I had a late breakfast.”

(One strawberry, two grapes, I imagined.)

Gayle licked her lips, then devoured much of Adrienne’s plate, too.

And after a round of coffee and the check, which Adrienne insisted on picking up, we left the dining room and headed up to Fran’s store.

14

Certain of the blatant rudeness, inescapable torture, and deeply scarring psychological damage Fran would surely inflict on Adrienne, I opened the moon roof and gunned the engine up Connecticut Avenue, through Dupont Circle, on past the zoo and over to Chevy Chase.

Nestled between Cartier and Versace, just blocks away from Neiman’s, Saks, and Tiffany, lay my spider’s web. We parked in the lot across the street and I led the way with a spring in my step. Adrienne would be toast.

It was the least suicidal I’d been all day.

But, despite Fran’s I’ll-take-care-of-this-one wink when we first entered the store (I’d called her on my cell phone, from the ladies’ room of the Hay-Adams, to give her a heads-up that we were coming), she, too, fell under the spell of Adrienne.

First, there was the Attenuated One’s figure, which looked “fabulous” (Fran’s word, not mine) in anything—and everything— pushed through the purple velvet curtain for her to try on (no gigantic, oversized, body-hiding Eskandar sweaters this time). Then, there were her cash reserves and her willingness to spend them: she bought two sweaters (clingy), a pair of pants (tight), and one floor-length evening dress (positively painted on) in just under forty-two minutes, and I doubted she’d be on the twenty-four-month payment plan like I was. To top it all off, there was her impressive and, of course, firsthand knowledge of avant-garde designers and their wares: Dries Van Noten’s Belgian mother and her mother had met in postwar France and had stayed in touch over the years, Dries sending Adrienne, his young distant-cousin American muse, boxes of clothes gratis from his Antwerp studio.