“Where’s the sex?!”
Rowan was a grown man, but his voice in Valloree’s headphones broke like that of a boy who couldn’t get a date for the prom. How old was he, and how had he landed his job at this dating site for grown-up married cheating people?
“Sex, Val, sex!” Rowan said. “You’ve written 50 women’s profiles and not one of them has any sex!”
Valloree wished she had run outside for a smoke before taking this call. She was determined to keep calm and placate Rowan. She didn’t want to lose this assignment. It was a fun break from all the marketing brochures and the email campaigns and that annual report that was due tomorrow.
“Not all women place sex at the top of the menu in an affair, Rowan,” she explained. “The first thing they want is someone to pay attention to them. That’s what they don’t have at home.”
“ ‘Looking for someone intelligent, reasonably fit, witty, polite, and able to string together a coherent sentence,’ ” Rowan read from one of her profiles. No matter what time of the day they spoke, Rowan was always outside, walking briskly from somewhere to somewhere else, yelling all the way. Valloree could hear cars honking from his end of the line and a church bell and a woman with what she took to be a Mexican accent shouting “Tamales!” The end of the day in Toronto, three thousand miles away.
Valloree’s granddaughter had once asked her, “Grandma, don’t you go to work like Mama?” It was 15 years since she’d had a job in an office with co-workers you could talk to and eat lunch with and get all the gossip from. Her life was one freelance gig after another, or multiple freelance gigs piled atop each other. Computer, phone, four walls. Woman on the verge.
“That’s an important list,” Valloree said.
“ ‘I’m interested in some great conversation,’ ” Rowan read from another profile. “ ‘I expect to be charmed, I hope to be delighted, and I would like to know a bit about you before you whisper the room number.’ ” She could hear him handling sheets of paper like they were carrying typhus.
“A real gentleman would rise to that challenge,” Valloree said, waiting out his mood. There was always a man in a mood.
“And I love this one: ‘Getting intimate is a process, not a lunch break.’ ”
They should teach that in the schools, Valloree thought.
“Val. Val. Val! These profiles are fake profiles, for godsakes,” Rowan said. “We use them to bulk up the number of real profiles. There aren’t enough real profiles. I need more fakes!”
