Most of the women I've dated may not have been perfect, but they had enough redeeming qualities to make it worthwhile to date them. Except Jill.

As a portent of what was to follow, my introduction to Jill came in an unusual way. As I walked into the ER to begin my shift, Betty, the clerk, said that a woman with a strange voice had just called the ER asking for me.

“Why was her voice strange?” I asked.

“It was as if she were putting on an air of sophistication, to make herself sound really high-class, but it was fake. She left her phone number. You're not going to call her, are you?”

Partly because of simple curiosity, and partly because of sheer horniness, I called Jill the next day when I was at home. The second she began speaking I realized that Betty's assessment of her voice was on-target (Betty was always right), and warning flags began popping up. Her contrived voice was intended to be an enticing blend of intelligence, culture, and justifiable snobbery, but it came off as a pretentiously ersatz and downright phony veneer. Ostensibly, Jill called because she wanted to date me. The real reason, I later learned, was something else.

Jill claimed that she was a Harvard grad and a lawyer, but was currently working as a hairdresser. This struck me as implausible, especially when she had no convincing explanation for why she wasn't working as a lawyer—not that we actually need more lawyers! Another indication that she was a fake came when she mispronounced and misused several words that virtually anyone, and especially a Harvard grad, could use correctly. Some of these malapropisms were so comical that I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I asked her a few questions about law, and it was clear that she knew less about law than I did about hairdressing.

Unless people give me reason to believe otherwise, I assume that what they tell me is the truth. Since Jill seemed to be constitutionally unable to speak without lying, I decided to check her out. I called the law school she claimed to have attended and—surprise!—they had no record of her. I was not astonished by this revelation.

True to her character, Jill had a simple explanation for this. She said that some man, whom she refused to name, had agreed to pay her tuition in law school with the condition that she attend school under an assumed name. Tell me, Jill, what do the other Martians think about this?

Jill also claimed to be a model. Since she knew I read a certain health magazine, she said that all I'd have to do if I wanted to know what she looked like was to look at one of the ads in that magazine. She was, she said, that model in the ad. Yeah, and I was on the cover of GQ last month, too.

Jill made it eminently clear that men were always giving her expensive presents. For an ER doctor, an expensive sports car was not too much to ask, was it? She was what my friend Greg would call a high-maintenance woman, and I figured that her thigh abductor muscles would not operate until I'd given her a good $100,000. I would not stoop to paying a prostitute even when I was 17 and had testosterone bubbling out my ears. Now that I was twice that age and with half the libido, I wasn't about to spend money on such a woman. Undeterred by my lack of interest, she demanded that I lavish her with gifts for at least six months before she would even agree to meet me. Thanks, I told her, I'll pass.

The strain of maintaining such an assumed voice must have been too hard for her, even though she was a Harvard grad. During one of our conversations, she forgot to camouflage her voice and she rattled on in a nasal twang, oblivious to her slip-up—or so I thought. When I asked her about this, she said she decided to discontinue her highfaluting voice since I had not given her any money.

During most of our talks, I heard a man's voice in the background. She claimed that she didn't live or sleep with him, and that he was just a guy who had a crush on her. She said that he did not make enough money to ever have a chance to boink her, but that he was always buying her things, taking her out to dinner, and doing favors for her. He'd begged for sex for five years, she said, but she wasn't putting out. More bull. A thirsty man is not going to stick around a dry well for five years, right Jill? Or is it Michelle? After calling herself by the latter name, I said that I thought her name was Jill. Her confused explanation was replete with so many ums, uhs, and pauses that I didn't know if her name was Jill, Michelle, or something else.

I don't date kooks—well, not knowingly, anyway!—so I wrote her off and went on with my life. Four years later, after I moved to another part of the state, my phone rang. The kook hadn't given up.

Since no money was forthcoming from me, she explained, she decided to fess up. Yes, she lived with that guy. Yes, she was sleeping with him, except that their sexual positions were often made difficult because of injuries she had sustained after falling in a restaurant. She wanted to sue the restaurant, but she couldn't find a lawyer who would take her case. (Now I knew she was lying!) To top it off, she was a diabetic and was half-paralyzed from a stroke. Going blind, too. Given her track record, I wasn't certain if this was the truth or just a change in tactics; perhaps sympathy might make me want to give her money. Not with her.

Speaking of liars reminds me of another one. Jen wrote to me via my www.ERbook.net site. She told me that she was a cardiothoracic surgeon who practiced in New York City but lived in Ohio so that she could look after her bipolar sister-in-law. She also claimed that her family owned the largest steel mill in the United States and was fabulously wealthy. Surely I'd heard of them? Um, no, I hadn't. Given the surplus of cheap imported steel and the well-known plight of American steel companies, I was incredulous.

After talking to her on the phone, I was convinced that the bipolar illness was real, but it affected her, not her sister-in-law. She rambled on like someone desperately in need of lithium and said one thing after another that made me question her sanity—and mine, for talking to her. She seemed to be reasonably intelligent, but not as bright as any of the cardiothoracic surgeons I've known. She also could not satisfactorily explain how she could live so far from where she worked, so I casually asked her a question about cardiac output that could be easily answered by any cardiothoracic surgeon—or first-year medical student, for that matter.

She couldn't answer that, so I knew the bit about her being a cardiothoracic surgeon was hogwash. However, I wondered why someone who wasn't a doctor would lie to one in such a brazen manner that was certain to be exposed? Was it just a facet of bipolar disease, or did her grandiosity have more mundane roots? I thought that she was trying to impress me, but why choose a story that was bound to crumble?

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