My friend Lisa and I sat outside our office building on a blessed, abnormally warm January day, and talked sex. We were both eating chicken wraps, and trying to ignore the fat corporate asshole smoking a cigar nearby. Lisa expressed amazement at what she viewed as my very active sex life. I had just described a recent late night hookup to her.

"How do you do it? I just want to know. Where do you find these guys?" she said.

"What do you mean, how do I meet these guys? How does anyone meet men?"

"At bars?"

"At parties," I said. "Parties are better."

"I need to go to more parties," she said.

"Look, it's not like I just pick them up or anything. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I've done it plenty in my past."

"So these are guys you already know?"

"I have a roster."

She laughed at me.

"Laugh all you want, but one of us is getting laid regularly, and one of us isn't."

"OK, tell me about it."

"Look, if you live in a city long enough, dating, playing around, whatever, and you somehow manage to remain single, you develop a roster after a while. There's plenty of relationships where the sex is good and everything else isn't. Not all of those end badly. In fact, some of them end quite nicely. You add those ones to the roster."

"How many men do you have on your roster?"

"Oh, not too many. After a while some of them fade away, get girlfriends, get married, or they move, or whatever. You lose their phone numbers. They change jobs and you can't find their email, and in some cases, that's the only way you communicated with them."

"So there's no time limit."

"Nope," I said. "There's one guy, we dated two years ago, and every six months we start talking again. We've never hooked up since we stopped seeing each other, but we reconnect every so often just to let the other person know, 'You're still on the roster.'"

"Amazing," she said.

"Not really," I said. "Guys do it all the fucking time, and you know I'm right."

"I'm so bad at this," she said. Two years ago Lisa got out of a bad marriage to a man she had met at work, and promptly started sleeping with a succession of co-workers. As recently as a month ago she was getting out of an unealthy relationship with a supervisor on a project. Her pet name for the last guy is "Loser." The loser, however, bought her a five hundred dollar handbag from a boutique in Soho. She has no idea what the rest of the world is like.

"Get a roster," I said.

"But I don't know --"

"Get. A. Roster."

"But--"

"Listen, you remember that guy you went out with twice last summer, the one who took you out to dinner? What happened to him?"

"I don't know. It just sort of fizzled."

"Roster material. Call him."

"You're good at this."

"I'm no good at having a steady boyfriend, but this I know how to do."

"So I should call him?"

"Call him."

She came into work a few days later, guzzling a bottle of water. I smiled cheerfully.

"Don't tell me you got laid again," she said immediately.

"No, no. That was it for the week."

"I should hope so," she said, and sat down sullenly across from me.

"Did you call that guy from last summer?" I asked.

"No...I called the loser instead."

"Lisa, I can't help you if you don't want to help yourself."

"I was drunk. And I looked really hot."

"I'm sure you did."

"And now I'm hungover."

"And?"

"And he never called back."

We both shook our heads sadly.

"I've been there before," I said. "I just never want to be there again."

"Me neither," she said.

Someone changed the subject. I can't remember if it was me.

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