Once the wedding planning work was done, the spying shenanigans could resume with a vengeance.

They agreed: since Adrienne hadn’t even moved yet, we wouldn’t really be missing much anyway.

17

Adrienne’s move was scheduled to take place on Saturday, January fifteenth, but don’t think for a second that just because she hadn’t arrived yet she was out of sight or out of mind.

Every few days or so after she left our dinner table that late November evening, and with the alarming unpredictability of an inflicter of random violence (no set pattern could be established for when she would call, and why), she would leave a message for us on our answering machine:

“Hi Donald. Hi Elise. It’s Adrienne,” each message would begin, as if we were one big happy ménage à trois. Then she would proceed to either ask a favor (“Could either of you possibly be able to let the phone people into my apartment on . . . ?” ), impart information (“My moving date has been pushed up a day to Friday, January fourteenth . . . ”), or, in my opinion, simply torture (“It won’t be long now: only six more weeks . . . !”). If she ever managed to get Donald on the phone, I never knew about it. Which began to make me suspicious:

Were these innocuous messages really that innocent? Were they a smoke screen, containing coded instructions for scheduling phone dates, romantic trysts? Was she calling him—and reaching him—privately on his cell phone? Were they having long, secret, nostalgic conversations full of sadness and regret about the dog, about New York, about the past which I knew nothing about?

Initial investigations into these variations of the same question turned up nothing. As I had done in the past, after Donald would fall asleep, I’d creep downstairs to his study and snoop. Only now, my techniques for infiltration were a little more sophisticated. I’d find his cell phone, press the automatic voicemail retrieval button on the keypad (he had programmed it so his access code and password didn’t have to be reentered every time), and scroll through the list of incoming calls he’d received. Then, with the slim metal phone pressed to my ear, my heart pounding with guilt, I’d listen to any messages he had received or saved. But they were all unincriminating: the dry cleaner calling about shirts he’d forgotten to pick up; a school administrator scheduling an English department meeting; a parent thanking him for giving a child another chance on a pop quiz. Tiptoeing back up the stairs afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling incredibly foolish: every time I looked, I found nothing. When would I give up the search?

Never.

No matter how many times an investigative mission came up empty, I never felt relieved or secure.

Because I knew it was only a matter of time before I hit pay dirt.

By early December, just after the first snow had fallen and quieted our already quiet city under a soft layer of white powder, I had ironed out all the details at Dumbarton House (no chuppah; a Justice of the Peace in lieu of clergy; a tent); decided on the music (a single violinist for the ceremony; a jazz quartet during the reception); selected a videographer (a friend of a friend of Gayle’s) and photographer (formerly of the Washington Post; black-and-white shots, predominantly). Anne, a close friend of the writer from the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times who shows up at weddings and reports on them as if they were actual news stories, had offered to “pitch” our story—two ex–New Yorkers who’d actually met on that Northeast Corridor!—for possible “coverage.” But though I knew my mother, an unapologetic addict of People magazine, would have loved a publicized wedding, the idea of having some gauzy photo of my predictably Edwardian Peter Fox shoes or Donald’s cake-and-frosting covered face next to the “story of us” made me queasy with embarrassment. “Then just make sure there’s someone for me to sexually harass at the reception,” said Anne when I told her no.