Monty skipped the clubhouse, but his golfing mates would carry on without him, conversation proceeding to speculations about his profession. It was as if he had served in Vietnam, and they couldn't stop asking him, "What about the snakes? Big spiders in that jungle? What's it like to hear shrapnel whizz? Did you run? Did you duck? Did you shoot back? Ever kill anybody, Monty? Ever kill Charlie, in the bush? What about it, Monty? Tell us. Tell us, tell us.""Where you going?" Bert said. "Come on, get out of the car and have a drink like we always do."
"I have to leave."
"Leave and do what?"
"I just have to go."
Through the tinted window, he watched his friends amble toward the club.
"Do you dream about women, Monty?" they would have asked again. "Do you think about 'em the way we do? Or do you get sick of it all? You must be sick of it by now. A Porsche is no big deal to a Porsche dealer. Sees 'em everyday. Is that what it's like? Tell us, Monty. Tell us what it's like to be a gynecologist."
He did not dream about women. He had become immune to their magnetic pull. Sex was a biological matter and had been for a long time. Now he was divorced because, after two children, what was the point? His wife had said, "You're kidding, right?" But the need had departed him, and he could not call it home. His wife never said goodbye but left the word on a Post-It and disappeared.
He found out later she had remarried, to a plaintiff's attorney. As long as she steered clear of car accidents, they could share a life together. But, Monty also knew, if his ex-wife sustained a bulge at the L-5 disk in a T-bone accident, the new couple would need counseling, at the very least. "I hear this all day at work," her new husband would say. "If you had women troubles, would you want me to be your gynecologist? Well, it's the same thing. Don't talk to me about back pain. And get that car out of the garage. I'm sick of looking at that wreck."
Monty drove toward the exit and pulled over to the gully. He opened his trunk, took out the clubs and sent them into the water with a sideways toss. It was his best swing in months.
There was a time when he believed his condition was endemic to the population of male gynecologists. He once approached the director of a conference and said, "There must be a lot of sexual dysfunction with us. We should commission a study on that."
"Never heard of such a thing. Where'd you get that idea? If we did that, what would the public think?"
"We're human?"
"No, they'd think we've got mental problems."
He wanted to ask, "You mean, most gynecologists don't view the female anatomy as a tunnel of cells with all their mischief? That it's not made for one reason, with pleasure like the smell of skin to a mosquito?"
Over the weekend, Monty finally accepted those revelations. He announced his retirement the following Monday.
On his first day off, he went to the clubhouse and had a few drinks. He surveyed the women. He saw a blond he knew had been watching him for some time, but he looked away from her. She reminded him of his patients. What was hidden must remain a secret if he was to have any chance of recalling desire. Yet all women reminded him of one patient or another. He could guess more than he cared to remember, intimacies forcibly shared with physician.
"How's it going, Monty?" the bartender said.
"You know that woman over there, the blond?"
"Who doesn't?"
"You mean --"
"She's nice enough. Monty? Where you going?"
He left and returned home to a new decision. Besides trips for necessities, he would confine himself to the house for a month. He would watch only all-male sports. If a commercial featured a woman, he would change channels. He wouldn't look out the window when the post office lady came with the usual stack of medical journals. At stores, he would look the other way when a woman passed him in the aisle. And when he could not exclude females from his field of vision, he would blur them into shadowed ghosts by removing his glasses.
After four weeks, he returned to the club, but just as he realized he had come on a Saturday morning without even golf clubs for an excuse, Bert circled behind him, patted his back and said, "Drinking early's a bad sign. Where you been? We call, but you never answer."
He got up without response. On the way home, he called a GP friend and asked for a prescription, something to help him relax.
"What you need's a girlfriend."
"Yeah, well, that's the problem. My nerves are shot. It's temporary."
Half an hour later, he had the script for thirty Klonopin filled. At home, he took three pills. He watched sports for a while, and then the medication rolled through and over him, as if the air itself had been dosed.
He drifted into a love affair with a woman he had never seen, one not made of cells and tissue but plasticized skin with the waxy feel of leaves. He mentioned that they should be careful, the way things were nowadays, but she made a sign he understood: "That is not a factor." He awoke just before what had not happened in so many years was about to happen, in whatever way it could happen with this -- it could only be put -- "woman."
He took another pill. When he fell back asleep, the dream resumed. For a moment, he knew it was a dream, and then he lost grip of consciousness. It was finally happening, in the golf course gully. But when he looked up, Bert stood above. Bert tossed his clubs at the couple and started climbing down.
"No," Monty said. "Leave us alone."
After that, the dream would not resume. He tried for another week without success. By then, he was tired of the way Klonopin made the world appear wrapped in cellophane. He stopped taking the pills.
Free of sedation, he made another decision. He would leave the house, force himself into overstimulation, which by now clouds overhead would provide.
He wanted to see women at the mall, to test himself. On the way, he passed the golf course. He saw the clubhouse and thought of the blond woman. It was Tuesday, but it felt like Monday. "La la," came the song. "Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be." He reached for the knob, but the radio was already off.
As a boy, he had noticed old men watching him from the mall benches, and he never understood why: Shouldn't they be looking at women? Now he knew. Soon, he would watch boys from the bench, trying to project himself into a younger body. Time would fold back upon itself, theoretically, but he would remain at one point on the film strip, closer to the credits than the title, and nothing could be done about that.
He would start at Sears. He went to the women's department and walked between racks of clothes. He touched the dresses and hoped within them lurked his dream lover, deplasticized, stripped of even atoms, but present. He would buy her a dress and hang it on the closet doorknob. Perhaps she would return.
Then he spotted a mannequin. He stopped and stared, his mind working on the connection. He sensed the process. No, it didn't look like the woman in the dream. Still, when he touched the "skin," it had the same waxy feel.
"Sir," a clerk said behind him, "can I help you with something?"
His old receptionist now wore a Sears' name tag.
"Oh," he said, "Margaret."
"I'm only working here part-time," she said hurriedly, "until something dependable comes along, something in my normal line of work."
"I'm sorry I left the way I did."
"We all have to do what we have to do. So here I am."
"I'm not -- I'm just wandering."
"Well, you have that luxury. To wander. I do, too. I just have to fold clothes while I'm doing it. Was there something you wanted?"
"This," he said, touching the mannequin's dress.
"You know, that's the last one. I just sold the other one this morning. They're supposed to take the mannequin down."
"Could I have this one?"
"It's the right size?"
He looked at the tag. "Actually, yes."
"I suppose I could take it off."
"Would you?"
She sighed and lifted the mannequin, then set it on the floor. She wrested the dress from the figure, her face turning red.
"Here," she said, handing it to him.
He looked at the mannequin, sexless yet alluring.
"Do you want me to ring it up?"
"What?"
"Do you want me to ring the dress up?"
He nodded as she set the mannequin upright.
"Damn," she said. "This thing is supposed to have a blond wig."
He drove to the clubhouse with the dress in the back seat.
The woman was seated at her usual table, holding a glass, waiting and not waiting, like the men on the benches. The males who passed her table said hello and kept walking. If accompanied by wives, they glanced in the woman's direction, then back at their mates, whose mouths formed a sarcastic smile of detection.
Monty sat at her table.
"Well," she said, "hello."
"I thought since we're here so often --"
"Monty, right?"
"Right."
Her face seemed to morph into all the women who had passed through his office, then became singular: She had never been his patient.
"Did there used to be a woman like you," he said, "who maybe sat over there on the other side of the bar, just as you're sitting here now, only she was a little older than you were then, and you said to yourself, 'Why is she sitting there like that? What is she waiting for?'"
"You mean because now I've become her?"
"Something like that."
She leaned forward and looked at him in a way no one had looked at him in a long time: directly.
"How did you know that?"
"How else? I think we should go out together some time. Here would be fine. Or anywhere."
She covered her mouth. "Wait a minute. Are you saying I'm as pathetic as you, so you want to go out with me? Why, because your friends told you stories?"
"I don't have friends. Why don't you come to the car with me? I bought you something. A dress."
"You bought me a dress when we've never met?"
"I was thinking about you."
"At the mall?"
"Just come to the car with me."
"Oh, I thought so! A pick-up!"
She started to leave, but he touched her wrist. "This is anything but a pick-up."
"Is it? All right, I'll come to your car. But don't try anything."
On the way to the parking lot, she lectured him about adulterous husbands, concluding, "I'm done with men. I'd rather sit and watch. I don't need to...touch."
He opened the car door and grabbed the dress, handing it to her.
She laughed. "Where'd you get it, Sears?"
"You don't have to wear it."
"Then what's the point?"
'It reminded me of you."
"Me or someone else?"
"It reminded me, that's all."
"Well, you keep it."
He took the dress and dropped it on the back seat.
"I suppose," she said, "you'll go home now that you know nothing will happen?"
"What makes you think I want something to happen?"
"I'm just a caddy here, but I can't lift the clubs anymore. I can't carry everybody's burdens on my back. That's all I get is burdens and five minutes. Then they go home to their wives."
In the sunlight, she appeared still more singular. Before, he had made all his patients one, so that each woman became Woman, but now, finally, he saw a woman.
"Let's walk," he said. "I want to show you something."
He led her by the hand down the road and toward the exit.
"Where do you think you're taking me? Did you hear a word I said?"
"There," he said, pointing at the gully, his sets of clubs rotting in the water. "I've got nothing to carry."
"Well, you certainly know how to play the part."
"What part?"
"Mr. Weary, that's what part. If you're so wise, you would have picked a better dress."
"You could pick another."
"Now you want me to go to the mall with you? How do I know you won't make a detour and take me to your house?" She looked at the clubs for a moment, then at him.
"All right," she said. "I'll go to the mall with you. But don't try to dress me like somebody else."
"There's nobody else."
On the way to the shopping center, he noticed that she stared out the window as if all the adulterous husbands paraded before her.
"I've changed my mind," he said. "Let's go back."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Not the clubhouse. We'll walk the course."
"But why?"
He made a U-turn and headed back. They parked, then crossed through the lot to a trail that wrapped around the course.
"You're a little odd," she said. "But maybe."
"Maybe what?"
"Maybe I'll change my mind about men. Give me time."
He looked behind himself, saw no one there, and nodded that he must be patient.
Paul A. Toth lives in Michigan. His first novel Fizz and its successor Fishnet are available now. Short fiction credits include The Barcelona Review, Night Train and The Mississippi Review Online. His latest project, a multimedia exploration of the connection between Hitler's love life and the central catastrophe of the 20th Century, is available in a signed, limited edition. See www.netpt.tv/twbooks for more information.