Terrance was a lightweight. A cat toy. She would paw him around the floor for a while until she got bored.

Kicking myself for not having figured that out before we’d fixed them up, and bemoaning the fact that nothing I had done since Adrienne had stepped off that plane had gone right—not Gayle, not Fran, and now, not Terrance—I saw my amateur, bush-league machinations backfiring. I was in a tailspin—a death spin, as pilots call it.

I reentered the dining room just as Donald was going into the kitchen. Ships passing in the night, I thought melodramatically, fatalistically (it was all that wine on a still empty stomach). He kissed me on the cheek and then disappeared to bring out our dessert: pears poached in Armagnac. When he returned with them and we were both reseated, all eyes turned again toward Adrienne.

“. . . It’s not something I generally like to talk about,” she was murmuring (audibly enough, though, to be overheard) to Gayle. “But it’s part of who I am, I guess.”

As always, my curiosity got the better of me. I took the bait, asked her what she was talking about.

She smiled demurely, flipped the hair away from her face, and once again removed one pesky strand that had gotten stuck in her lip gloss. I looked over at Donald to see if he knew what was coming, but his face was a blank. We were entering uncharted territory. I wondered quickly if she was going to start name-dropping again.

“My father is a scientist. A molecular biologist. He’s a professor—head of the department, actually—at Yale medical school.”

Gayle, who had been eating her poached pear with such velocity and intensity as not to be believed, suddenly choked on a mouthful. Accepting a slap on the back from Donald and a refill to her water glass from Terrance, she still managed somehow to wave her hand in Adrienne’s direction, imploring her to continue. Which, of course, she did.

“Anyway,” she resumed, “my father is the pathologist who studied Einstein’s brain. To see if there were any clues to his genius.”

There was a hushed silence. Which I felt compelled to break.

“His actual brain?” I said, knowing I asked the question for the whole table.

“Yes. He sectioned Einstein’s brain to determine whether there were significant quantifiable physical differences between it and a normal brain.”

Forks dropped. Lips were licked, re-licked. Then, a barrage of questions directed at Adrienne immediately erupted: Had she ever seen the brain herself? (No.) Had her father known Einstein when he was alive? (No.) Were there indeed quantifiable physical differences between Einstein’s brain and a normal brain? (No.)

The table was mesmerized. I could have taken all my clothes off and set myself on fire and nobody would have noticed.

Her father had fondled Einstein’s brain? Her mother knew Dries Van Noten? Ben Bradlee was her godfather?