Loe raamatut: «Dating By Numbers»

CHAPTER ONE

MARSIE PENNY GLANCED out her office door one last time before turning to her computer and entering her password into the dating website. She didn’t want to be filling out the profile now—especially at work—but one of her New Year’s resolutions was finishing the stupid thing. She’d promised herself that she’d have it done by today and, with the way things were looking at work, she wasn’t going to get home until after midnight. She was already behind schedule at work. Being behind schedule in her personal life as well would be beyond the pale.

The temptation to close the door was strong, but she never closed her door. If she did, someone was sure to comment. So, certain the coast was clear, she turned her back on the gaping maw of her open door and hit Enter.

“I know those colors.” At the sound of Jason Ellis’s voice, Marsie’s butt left the cushion of her chair and, once it made contact again, she spun around and slid her chair so her body blocked her computer. Not that she was embarrassed to be using an online dating service—everyone was doing it these days but...

Okay, she was embarrassed.

That wasn’t exactly right. Lots of the women at the research firm where she worked partook in online dating of one kind or another. Her cousins shared funny stories on the family’s Facebook group. She followed people on Twitter who talked about their experiences with online dating. But they were all using it casually. “To meet people,” they said. “It’s a good way to make friends.”

Marsie met enough people. She had enough friends. She wanted a husband and two children and, at thirty-five, she had to act fast.

None of which she would admit to Jason, who leaned against the door frame, his arms crossed over his usual office clothing. Today’s T-shirt was gray and long-sleeved, but no matter the color, the building’s manager and general handyman looked fit and manly. All he needed was a hammer to hang from the loop of his cargo pants to complete the image.

But regardless of how good Jason always looked, time was slipping away from her, and the research firm’s general fix-it guy wasn’t the person to help her keep the clock in her grasp. She recovered and shrugged. “It’s a good way to meet people,” she said, managing not to wince when the inane lie came out of her mouth.

“That’s what they say.” One corner of his mouth kicked up in a smile—a smile that seemed to put everyone but her at ease. His lopsided grin made her wonder what he knew that she didn’t, and she hated that feeling. “You know, if you want to meet people, you’re going to have to leave work. I don’t think I’ve ever been in this office when your car hasn’t been in the parking lot.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “All the more reason to meet people online.”

“Ha,” he said, with the smile of his that she preferred of all of them. This smile widened his eyes and showed his teeth. Jason had straight, white, magazine-worthy teeth. It was one of the first things she had noticed about him. “You could...you know...go to the gym or join a hiking club or go to a bar.”

She gritted her teeth to suppress a shudder. She’d tried the bar scene a couple times. She’d gone alone, willing to be “picked up” if the right guy came along. The dresses she’d worn had been cute, summery and flirty. She’d ordered glasses of white wine and smiled at random people.

Her friend Beck said it wasn’t the dresses or the wine or the smiles that had failed her, but the fact that she’d brought books to the bar each time. Marsie’s excuse—sitting in a bar alone is boring—didn’t stop her friend from laughing until she cried. “It takes a lot of guts for a guy to approach a woman and, you know, not be a creep. Sit there with a book and the hurdle’s even bigger. And you probably brought something like Dataclysm or another book about statistics and math with you.”

She and Beck had been friends for a long time.

Marsie hadn’t gone back to bars after that. She could read and drink wine at home. It was quieter there, and the wine was both cheaper and better quality.

But her experience with dating—or trying to date—was cringeworthy, and only Beck knew the whole story. She repeated a different bland lie for Jason. “I do get out beyond these office walls. But if you want to meet people, it’s best to keep your options open. The machine-gun approach, rather than a rifle.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you knew much about guns.” He took a step into her office, and she moved her body to keep her computer screen covered. Just because he knew what site she was on didn’t mean she wanted him to read her profile. Or, God, see her profile pic. Beck had said the picture was cute, but Marsie thought it looked like a fake her. An online her. A her that looked like fun.

Marsie had been accused of many things in her life, but fun wasn’t one of them.

“Only what I read.” As a teenager, she’d done some target shooting with friends, but she hadn’t shot a gun since high school.

“Based on what I know about you, I think you’d be more of an assassin than a gunner.” He took another step closer. A couple more steps and he’d be parallel with the two chairs in her office. If he got in the room that far, he might sit down. And if Jason sat down, he would want to chat. And when Jason wanted to chat, he chatted for a long time.

She didn’t have time for that.

“You’re the type of woman who would pick a stakeout position and hold it until mission accomplished,” he said, too close to one of those chairs for her comfort. “I’ll bet you date the same way. The work before the pleasure.”

Instead of protesting, her mind caught on what he’d said. “You think dating is a pleasure?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“No.” Honesty raced ahead of sense in her mind to answer his question.

“No?” His shock sounded genuine as he pulled out a chair so that he could sit. “What about it isn’t fun?”

“Well, I haven’t had much experience with online dating. Maybe it will get fun.” That was only a half-lie. She didn’t have much experience with online dating, but more the dating part than the online. She’d signed up for the site over a year ago. Last New Year’s Day, to be exact. She’d paid for six months of use and gotten a grand total of one terrible date out of it. Of course, at the time she’d signed up, at Beck’s urging, she had been in the middle of a big project at work. Snapping a selfie and posting an edited version of her résumé had been all she had time for.

This go-round, Marsie was doing it right. She and Beck had done a couple of photo shoots. She’d crafted the perfect profile and A/B tested a couple versions on Beck’s husband and his friends. More importantly, she’d scheduled time in her week for the next six months to meet people. Not a rigid schedule—it would be too much to expect that all men were available for a drink on Wednesdays after work. She’d set aside some Sundays for coffee, some Wednesdays for a drink and even a couple Tuesday lunchtimes.

Flexibility was the name of the game.

He waved a hand through the air. “It’ll be fun. You’ll see. Even if you don’t meet someone you want to sleep with, the world is full of interesting people and most of the single ones are doing online dating these days.”

“Including you.”

“So you think I’m interesting.” He leaned forward, his bicep flexing against the soft-looking cotton of his shirt as he rested an elbow on the edge of her desk.

None of the men Marsie had dated, including Richard, who she’d dated and lived with for three years before they’d both realized they made better colleagues than lovers, had enticed her to lean into his space like she wanted to lean into Jason’s right now. She took a deep, calming breath instead, concentrating on the air as it soothed the suddenly alert nerve endings on her skin.

And she definitely wasn’t tilting toward him in her chair. She was folding her arms on her desk and resting on her forearms. There was a difference.

“Yes, you are interesting,” she said slowly. “And you do good work. I appreciate that.”

He laughed. “Well, I’ve been put in my place, haven’t I?”

“I didn’t...” She stumbled over her apology, retreating from the space with her body as well as with her words. What hadn’t she meant? And why was she apologizing? She and Jason worked at the same company; appreciating his work was a high compliment. What did she know about his hobbies or reading habits or anything else that would make him interesting?

Though her mind raced from wanting to know more about him to how she could learn such things. He’d said he recognized the colors of the online dating site, and he admitted to using it. She could find him on there. Then at least she’d know what interesting things he did outside of work.

No. She discarded that thought right away. One of the worst parts of online dating had been seeing all the people who’d looked at her profile and then not initiated a conversation. Of course, she’d looked at profiles and not initiated anything, too, so she knew she wasn’t supposed to take the silence personally, but knowing was not the same as doing.

“I respect you as a worker,” she said finally. Respect you as a worker. God, no wonder Richard had said she couldn’t be passionate about anything that didn’t involve equations.

Besides, Jason wasn’t shy. If he noticed that she’d looked at his profile, there was no way he would remain silent. He’d come in her office and sit in the chair, put his elbows on her desk...and she would want to lean right back into him.

Silly. He wasn’t what she was looking for. Too short for one. Maybe an inch taller than her five-ten, and she wanted kisses that gave her a kink in her neck.

“Worker, huh.” Disappointment came and went over his face, too quickly for Marsie to register why what she’d said was insulting. Then he smiled at her and the back of her neck tingled. “You’re right,” he said. “Coming from you, that is a high compliment. And I’m flattered. Thank you.”

She cocked her head, examining his face for the teasing she was used to seeing in his eyes. When she didn’t find any, she reached up and rubbed the spot on her hairline where she could feel him, even though he was sitting on the other side of her desk. “You’re welcome.”

“So, do I get to see your profile?” There was the teasing sparkle that she was used to.

“No.”

“But I could help you with it. I’m a guy, and I know what guys want. Plus, I’m great at getting things from people.”

“I don’t want to get something from someone. I want to be liked and respected for who I am. And my profile reflects that.” She hoped.

“What if I look you up or come across it on my own?”

“Umm... Then I guess you see it.” The online algorithm was supposed to be spot-on. That’s what the creator had said in his book on datasets. In theory, based just on what she knew of Jason, his profile wouldn’t come through her matches. He wasn’t what she was looking for. Too...

She snuck another peek at his arms. Too much bicep and not enough sleek suit.

Her brain reminded her with a wag of her finger that just because he didn’t fill her requirements didn’t mean that she didn’t fit what he was looking for in a match.

No, of course she wasn’t. Men like Jason weren’t looking for a woman with a PhD who played the daily bridge question in the paper. He was friendly and outgoing and charming. He liked to talk and laugh and socialize. He wouldn’t be interested in quiet evenings at home. Plus, there were thousands of women in the area using online dating. She’d be lost in the masses.

“If I see it, and I think it can be improved, do you want me to let you know?”

She leveled her sternest look at him. The one that had gotten her through being the only woman in her graduate school cohort. Only once had the men made jokes about Barbie not being able to do math.

“With the condition that I get to give you feedback on your profile.”

“That’s a deal.” His smile flattened out into a seriousness that she didn’t expect from him. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d seen him be serious when arguing with contractors about the new office space. He just never let his seriousness get in the way of the rest of his life. It was one of the things she liked about him.

Though she was still surprised when the next words that came out of his mouth were, “We should be each other’s online dating support”—said with a straight face, even.

“Hmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “No. I already have someone helping me with my profile, and you know what they say.”

“Never look a gift horse in a mouth?” he said with a raised brow.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

He shrugged. For a moment she thought she saw hurt flicker across his face, but she dismissed that as improbable as winning the lottery. “Well, it was worth an ask. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Sure,” she said, not meaning it. And judging by his raised eyebrow as he lifted himself out of her chair, he believed it as much as she did. Though he still said “Later” with a smile as he walked through her door.

He has a nice butt, Marsie thought as she spun her chair back to face her computer. She opened the document she and Beck had worked on for hours. The short profile put a lighter spin on her personality, as did the carefully crafted answers to the shorter questions like, “Favorite movies.” For example, they decided not to include Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the last book she’d read, even though it was. And a reread at that. Beck had told her to pick a novel, so she’d included the latest Jonathan Franzen, even though she’d hated it.

* * *

TWO NIGHTS LATER, Beck’s hand holding a glass of red wine was the first thing Marsie saw when her friend opened her front door. Marsie shifted her purse higher onto her shoulder, grabbed the glass and had taken a sip before Beck had the door fully open.

“Hey, that was my glass,” her best friend said once the door was fully open.

“No, it wasn’t,” Marsie said as she stepped inside and slipped off her shoes. “You’re still wearing lipstick. If this had been your glass, there would be lipstick on the rim.” She set her bag on the console table by Beck’s front door and dug out her laptop. It was a Lenovo laptop, because they came in orange and she liked orange. Maybe she should have a reason for this preference, like that it represented processing power or battery life. But she allowed herself one bit of silliness in her life, and her laptop color was it. Once her laptop was safely tucked under her arm, she took a long sip of the wine, then stopped to take a deep breath and let the alcohol warm her throat on the way down.

When she looked up, her friend raised an eyebrow and nodded to the glass, which had a near perfect kiss of Beck’s pink lipstick staining the crystal. “You must have a lot on your mind,” Beck said.

“I do.” Marsie took another drink. She needed the wine more than Beck did. “Do you need help with dinner?”

Beck laughed softly and shook her head. “No. But you can pour me another glass of wine.”

“In charge of booze. I can handle that tonight,” Marsie replied, taking another sip before following her friend into the kitchen.

The kitchen smelled like a dream of garlic and tomatoes and pork as a pot burbled away on the stove. “You make the best food,” she said, sliding onto a bar stool. She minded her responsibilities though, pouring a glass of wine for her friend before adding more to the purloined glass. She was the checklist queen and knew that checklists worked best when you took care of the important stuff first.

Beck filled up a big pot of water, put it on the stove and turned on the gas. She chuckled when she turned around to grab her wineglass. “You don’t want to wait until after dinner?” she asked, nodding toward Marsie’s open laptop and the printouts of her Excel spreadsheet on the counter.

“As of five tonight, thirty men have looked at my profile, five have winked at me—whatever that means—and two have said, ‘Hey.’ Action is required.”

“You could have written something in return.” Beck’s fingers trailed along her granite countertop as she came around the island and looked over Marsie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You don’t need me every step of the way.”

“Ha. You weren’t at the bar for the disastrous date I had the last time I tried this all by myself. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”

“That’s an n of one,” Beck said, mimicking one of Marsie’s favorite phrases, the thing she said whenever anyone tried to generalize to the entire population based on a small sample size.

“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to waste any more time kissing frogs. There has to be a prince for me out there somewhere.”

“What’s this?” Beck pressed a finger on the printouts and glided the papers across the counter.

“It’s my rubric,” Marsie replied, not glancing up from her laptop as she signed into her profile. “So I can score profiles and know who to reply to.”

“Height, possible five points,” Beck read. “Education, possible ten points. Compatibility of television shows, possible two points. Attractiveness of profile picture—I like how you spelled out picture instead of writing ‘pic’—two points. Only two points?”

Marsie looked up. “I either think the profile picture is attractive, has the possibility to be attractive, or isn’t at all attractive. So three options, zero, one and two.”

“But isn’t attractiveness at least as important as height, which has five possible points.”

“Oh—” Marsie waved her hand in the air, then went back to her computer “—the final grade is basically a weighted average. Height and attractiveness of profile picture equal out in the equation, though education stays more important.”

“Right. How silly of me,” Beck said in that tone of voice she had when she thought Marsie had taken something too seriously.

“Here.” Marsie turned her computer around with the spreadsheet pulled up. “I put desired traits across the top and names along the side. I was just going to total the scores, which is this cell,” she said, pointing the mouse at the correct spot on the screen. “I was planning on basing all my decisions on that total score, but I’m worried that someone could skew their results by getting full points in all the minor desirables and zero points on the major ones. Like all cute and good taste in television, but not the kind of education I want my life partner to have.”

Marsie looked up to see if Beck was following her. Beck’s lips were pursed, so she was paying attention, but that was also a sign that she thought Marsie was being ridiculous. Which Marsie ignored. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted out of a partner and creating an equation to match. Plus, the math was the interesting part. Filling out the profile, going on the dates...drudgery.

“I created this equation here,” she said, moving the mouse to another cell, “to give me a better understanding of how someone scores, assuming they are high in the desirables that really matter to me, like education, and low in the desirables that don’t, like where they’ve traveled to in the past. If someone scores 70 or higher in either the total score or 7 or higher in the weighted average, I’ll wink at them or respond to an email. If they score 80 or 8, I’ll message them. Before I’ll agree to a date, their total score through all forms of interaction has to have reached 90 or 9.”

“Your total scores are either 100 or 10? How’d you make that work?”

Marsie felt the sheepish look that crossed her face. “I massaged the equations a little. I like the round numbers.” Then she shook off her embarrassment as if it were a light dusting of snow. She’d had fun creating the equations. Sitting at her desk in her favorite chair, her lamp making a spotlight on the pages spread out over the wood, and a cup of tea that had already cooled because she’d been too diverted by the math to stop to drink it. Flow, that feeling of being so involved in something that the rest of the world fell away.

At the time, she hadn’t cared about how massaging the equation to force the round numbers would affect the validity of her system. It was her system, and she was going to be applying the equations equally to all of the men. Plus, she wasn’t handing her system into a professor to be graded. Beck was the only person who would see it. Sure, Beck made faces at Marsie’s silliness, but that’s what her friend called it: silliness. Like Marsie was just one of the girls.

When the flow had stopped and Marsie had looked up from her scribbles, what she had wanted was someone to share her equations with.

More silliness. Because if she’d had someone with whom to share her fun with spreadsheets, she wouldn’t need them in the first place.

But she’d kept the pages because the man she fell in the love would want to see them. He’d be amused by them, maybe even offer suggestions on how to improve them. Comment on the way she’d labeled the charts. Laugh about how much she liked round numbers. It would be a romantic moment they would share over a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti with a spicy marinara sauce.

No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.

Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”

“The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.

She didn’t have that kind of time.

Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

“Well, I figure we can look at the first ten men on the site and see what we get. That will be enough for the night.” Maybe enough for the week. Online dating was, in theory, fine. Everyone was doing it, and it’s not like Marsie was meeting people at work or at bars or at the gym. Though, to be fair, she ended the bar experiment a while ago, and she was at the gym to work out not to talk, and she was at work to work. But she’d rather continue trying online dating than change her routine.

But fine in theory didn’t remove the squicky feeling that she would be looking at pictures of real people, reading what they had written about themselves, and then she was going to grade them. As if they were objects, not human beings.

She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another big glass. The spreadsheet helped with her uneasiness. It made the judgments of who to interact with and why less personal. What she didn’t know was if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Maybe it was just a thing, she thought, taking a long sip out of her glass. “Who’s first?” she chirped, picking up her pen and readying herself over her printouts.

Judging by the expression on Beck’s face, she wasn’t fooled by Marsie’s fake cheer, but she clicked on the first picture anyway. “He’s cute,” she said, turning the computer so that Marsie could see the screen.

“I’ll give him one point for attractiveness,” Marsie said, scratching a one into the appropriate cell. She’d always liked doing the work on paper before entering anything into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t always possible, but writing things out by hand helped her think.

“Only one? From what you said about your rating system, I would think a two.”

“His smile in the picture looks fake. But I’ll bet it’s nice in person,” she allowed.

“Whoever you award a two will have to be a paragon of attractive masculinity,” Beck replied. “And I can’t imagine that man will be any fun to be around.”

“That’s why attractiveness of the photo doesn’t have much weight in my equation,” Marsie replied tartly. “Ultimately, it’s just not that important to me.”

“By why... Never mind. I’m sure you have a reason for being picky about the scores you assign even when it’s not an important factor to you, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”