A glance at his Fossil tells him he’s still got an hour before the fateful showdown. Or encounter. He prefers this to “showdown,” with its relatively bad connotations of a hail of bullets and someone being buried in an unmarked grave. A someone who looks remarkably like himself. Yes, better to think of it as simply an encounter. A meeting between two modern, savvy, educated people. He smiles at this, imagining that some good might actually come out of the meeting. He checks his watch again, remembering that she isn’t free until 12:30, what with her karate class and all. Well, its self-defense, to be fair, but all that stuff is some sort of karate. That’s how he sees it, anyway. “It’s all Asian and it’s all beyond me,” he’d said at dinner one time, causing a silence to slip over the entrée like a fog bank. He’d actually watched her once, back when he’d been obsessed with her—or liked her, at least. Sneaked down to the field house where her class was and sat in the stands, studying her. The way her perfect little body moved, that tilt of her head as she performed a throw or moved into a stance. His mind started to drift—no cause for alarm, this often happened—and he could easily imagine himself at the mercy of one of those tosses. Some sort of argument about girls and parties or whatever and there he’d be, cartwheeling through the air, end over end, past the art deco lamp that she loves, and down onto her glass coffee table. Crash! With her temper—redheads are famous for that—this was not out of the realm of possibility. Not even out of the fiefdom. It could happen. He had shuddered at the thought, then slipped back out of the auditorium without her knowing.

If he was honest with himself—which he rarely felt much if any compulsion to be—he’d been thinking about this breakup for a while now. Planned it out in his head like a Peckinpah action sequence. Maybe it was the karate class she was in, but the idea of breaking up with her always came with images of shattering glass and spurting blood. All in slow motion. Even horses, which made no real sense but helped complete the analogy. And there was nothing he disliked more than some cheap, aborted analogy. Bad analogies sucked, as far as he was concerned.