In New York City, a metropolis of some eight or nine million people, it’s inevitable that one day soon enough, after hopping subways and crossing streets, you’ll run into the one person you didn’t want to see again. It’ll happen, just give it enough damn time. This phenomenon is so reliable that when the prospect came up to hunt bookshops in the small town of Greenwich in upstate New York, a dot on the map consisting of four-thousand people or so, I hesitated. You see, that’s where I lived back when I was hitched, avowed, married, lifetimes ago, fifteen different James Duncans ago, and I figured that going back all these years later just to poke my nose into a bookstore would be like rolling those big Manhattan dice on a miniature scale.