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It's important to stress right off the bat that I did not have much sex in my thirties. Granted, I thought about sex all the time, and wrote about it a good deal. But as for the having, it was predominantly a solo affair, executed in vigorous, porn-addled outbursts. Tennis Elbow, meet your new roomie, Jackoff Wrist.

I mention this because the chance to have sex with someone else ranked as a major occasion in my life. That a woman would undress and let me at the hidden places, that things between us would turn wet and desperate - the notion alone was enough to send me shivering off to the bathroom, dong in hand. This makes it difficult to explain why, on numerous occasions, faced with this delicious prospect, I chose instead to watch a sporting event.

But let's start here, in southern New Hampshire. It's a Sunday night in early October, 2000.

I'm at a fancy hotel, doing a buffet dinner with a bunch of artist types. There's one in particular: packed into a school-marmish blouse and shooting me the lonely brown eyes. I've got my own lonely eyes, and so we find each other over the chicken skewers and do the necessary coital sniffing. Molly is separated from her husband, up from Manhattan for the week, a friend of a friend. She's drinking Merlot.

I'm drinking too, whiskey and soda, but that's just an excuse to freshen my drink at the bar, where I can sneak looks at the TV overhead, because my Oakland A's are in the playoffs for the first time in a decade, matched up against the Yankees in the fifth and deciding game of their series. I've rooted for the A's since I was five years old, a doomed loyalty that marks the longest-standing commitment in my life. The team was not expected to make the playoffs, let alone push New York to the limit on the very night of this buffet dinner.

It comes as a curious relief when the A's give up six runs in the first inning.

The Yanks have Andy Pettitte on the mound, their ace. The game is over, in essence, which frees me up to return to the buffet and my pursuit of Molly, who has returned from the bathroom with a new coat of lipstick.

She tells me about her sculpture, which sometimes involves body molds, and this leads, hopelessly, inevitably, to a broader discussion of genital molds, and the logistics thereof. Molly prefers plaster of Paris to the newer polymers. She describes the process in less than delicate terms. "There's some crushing if you don't shave down," she tells me.

"Sounds messy," I say.

"I don't mind messy." She sips at her wine. "Sometimes messy is the most fun."

This is clearly an allusion to me, and our conversation, and the mess that might lie ahead, given that we are both soused to the point of considering genital molds acceptable small talk.

I excuse myself to get another drink and resist checking the score of the game, except that there's a guy standing in front of the TV scowling.

"What?" I say.

"Fucking Pettitte."

Yes, Fucking Pettitte who has (against all reasonable expectation) given up three runs in his first three innings. I should turn on my heel and report back to Molly. I should do that. Because her skin is pale and her mouth is red and she's a sculptress and she's up north for only a week and she doesn't mind messy. But the A's have just scored two more, and the tying runs are now on base, and the truth is I can see how it's going to proceed with Molly; I've seen this picture before. It's great for the first half hour. Then the glandular momentum winds down and we're left with the complicated sorrow that draws two people into such abject arrangements. So I sit myself down on a stool and watch the A's murder the rally and fifteen minutes later, sure as rain on London, Molly makes her appearance: stunning, disheveled, at least one Merlot past her limit; the tilt of her mouth murmurs something promising to my groin.