In still another manifestation of the glory days of my youth (so gruesome to me in retrospect), I developed the laughable habit of inviting women over for dinner and preparing the same meal every time. On each of these occasions, I offered a highly derivative menu that I had gleaned from the Veal Marsala at Ralph's, the Fettucini Alfredo at Villa di Roma, and a frozen package of green beans with almonds, a side dish that I had picked up from my mother. But if I had any chance at all of impressing these women and getting them into bed, I carelessly gave it away by consuming screwdrivers throughout the cooking process, one or two of them while doing my best to soften the cheapest veal I could find, another while immersing a box of Ronzoni pasta in boiling water, and still another while poking at the block of frozen vegetables in order to pry them apart, my drunkenness linked not only to the screwdrivers but to the sickeningly sweet Marsala wine that I swigged directly from the bottle. By then, I was cooking each of the three major components of the meal at far too high a light, and the burners of our gas range were being pressed to their very limits as I hurried to complete the preparations. It is likely that each of my dates was charmed by the fact that I had taken it upon myself to cook for her until the moment that I opened the front door, at which point it became all too obvious that I was plastered, so that in stepping aside to let her in I not only irrevocably altered her evening but made it impossible to complete the seduction that I had planned. I realize now that I would have been a lot better off taking the young women to Ralph's or Villa di Roma in the first place, which would have given me a halfway decent chance to limit my alcoholic intake and suavely drive them home. On nearly every occasion, my dinner guests recognized all of this at once, took whatever pleasure they could in the ill-prepared meal, and refused to see me again. The lone exception was a nurse named Margaret McAlister, who took pity on me when I pleaded in the pathetic manner of Billy McDevitt. When my pleading finally got to her, she followed me up the stairs, past Sarah's door, and onto the shag carpet in my room, where I undressed her and failed to become erect. This failure provided me with very little choice but to perform oral sex instead, a joyless exercise that left me with a hangover, a painful recollection, and a line for a short story, Teresa sharing it with a co-worker at the Western Union switchboard in Moorestown. To hear her tell it, the two women passed the story back and forth and twittered like school girls when they read the witticism in question: "As it happened, I found another way to please her, though it gave me something of a stiff neck." But the real payoff occurred in a dusty little comedy club years later, when a hopelessly obese comedian nailed it with a painful precision, referring to that particular form of oral sex as "too many u-turns in bed." And as I drowned out all of the others with my laughter, Michelle caught another glimpse of who I really was.