In time, Donald and Adrienne came back inside with the dog and the serving platter heaping with swordfish and vegetables. A blast of cold late-November air gusted into the kitchen before they shut the door behind them. The topic of conversation was being finished off: the fact that Adrienne wished she could have joint custody of Lucy when she moved to Washington.

“But, as I tried to remind her,” Donald said, looking my way to include me, “she won’t be able to have a dog at the Kennedy-Warren apartment building.”

Disappointment and tragic sadness registered on everyone’s face. And then:

Introductions were made (Adrienne and Terrance), hands were shaken (Adrienne and Terrance); cheeks were kissed (Adrienne and Gayle; Gayle and Donald); dinner was served. Sitting down in the dining room with our glorious grilled meal of horseradish-crusted swordfish steaks, butterflied artichokes, and passing the bread and shallow plates of olive oil for dipping and a simple arugula and shaved Parmesan salad (Adrienne opted out of serving herself greens at that point in the meal, by the way: she was, she explained, accustomed to the “Continental” habit of having her salad at the end), it would have looked, to any outside observer who didn’t know any better, as if we were a wonderfully warm group of interesting people who wished each other well.

But of course, that’s not what we were at all.

Not Adrienne and me, anyway.

We were competitors in the oldest competition in the book: passive-aggressively, tacitly, unofficially, we were fighting over a man. The thought that I was engaged in such a banal, politically incorrect endeavor depressed me greatly. Never before had I overtly competed with another woman for anything—let alone a man. Never before had I viewed another woman as the Enemy. Had I always had great girlfriends, or had I simply been too naive all these years to see them as adversaries? Or was it because, until now, I hadn’t had someone worth fighting for and someone I was forced to fight for? This was a game I could not forfeit. And so, regarding Donald across the table (his charmingly tousled hair; his flushed cheeks; his strong smooth neck coming out of the V neck of his black cashmere sweater), I pledged to myself that I would see this through to the end, whatever that was, wherever it took me.

Unfortunately, however, my resolve was not (I thought of the overdue manuscript on my desk and nearly laughed bitterly out loud) “empowering,” “enhancing,” or “ennobling.”