Later on, at dinner, with all of us in jeans (Adrienne in those perfectly tight Diesels) and our hair pulled up or back (hers expertly twisted in a tousled heap) and no makeup (could her skin, with an adorably faint dusting of freckles over the bridge of her nose, I saw now, possibly have been any clearer?), packed into a cramped table for four, I had to admit that maybe Fran was right. Maybe Adrienne wasn’t the malicious home-wrecking worst-nightmare beast I’d thought she was. Watching her inhale her corned beef sandwich and devour a huge black-and-white cookie for dessert; listening to her tell (somewhat) funny, charming (though completely narcissistic) stories about work (“So instead of getting fired, I ended up getting a huge raise!”); Francesco (“How many different ways was he going to threaten to kill himself if I didn’t marry him? It was like Harold and Maude!”) and mountain climbing (“So I stuck the pick into the ice and boom! I fell flat on my ass! Luckily, Tom Brokaw, who was making the climb with us, was there to catch me”), I felt she was one of us.

Or almost one of us.

Actually, she was nothing like us.

She would never be anything like us.

Still, whatever she was or wasn’t, whatever her motives were or weren’t, I knew I had to make a change in strategy.

Given the fact that she and Donald had been in touch behind my back that very morning, and would continue to be in touch once she moved to Washington (about the dog, if nothing else), I decided I’d better be careful not to inadvertently push them together by letting my paranoid jealousy show.

From now on, instead of fighting her, I would try to be friendly.

I would adopt or at least fake an attitude of strength; selfconfidence; acceptance.

I would welcome her to our city with (semi) open arms.

And two weeks later, when she arrived in Washington, that’s exactly what I did.

Chapter 20

20

Instead of moving into that spacious, gracious apartment at the Kennedy-Warren, however, Adrienne moved into a fabulous Victorian on Morrison Street, about two miles further up Connecticut Avenue, right below Chevy Chase Circle (another friend of her father’s, this one a professor at Georgetown going on sabbatical for a year, had bequeathed it to her at the eleventh hour).

I was shocked. This wasn’t the plan!