THE FIVE DOLLAR CYRANO
It started with a simple, only slightly insulting request: would I proofread an email for five dollars? The client was a university professor whose book I had edited. In person, he spoke with a typical, even above-average fluency and vocabulary, such that the agrammatical rambling of his manuscript had come as a surprise. Insulting, but not so insulting that I didn’t look: the email was a love letter, rhapsodising on how the stars had aligned for the two of them to meet. The breathless lack of punctuation and focus on her “delicious mouth” suggested something typed with one hand. I had follow-up questions. How well did he know this person? They’d only been on one date, it turned out, the night before. Perhaps something more casual, I suggested, like “Had a great time. Let’s do it again.”
After that, he ran all of their correspondence by me. I rewrote it all – five dollars a pop to reduce his flowery, desperate, increasingly explicit emails to bland, socially acceptable missives. Penthouse to Hallmark. I developed an image of her, the Roxane to my Cyrano. She studied ornithology at the same university, so I pictured her as birdlike, beak-nosed with a melodic voice, easily startled. He described her as having “butterscotch hair”. (I left that one in, though it was unclear if it referred to her hair’s colour, texture or smell.) I wondered if I was doing the right thing. If they were truly meant to be, wouldn’t she find his filthy logorrhoea charming? Wouldn’t we all be better served if I just threw in some commas and called it a day? In retrospect, it’s likely that he got a thrill from sending this language to a woman, any woman, knowing she had to read it, without risking anything with the woman he was actually pursuing. It’s even possible she was fictional, and the fee was degrading in a different way.
Eventually, inevitably, he asked me to write her a break-up email. When
I refused – my butterscotch-haired darling deserved at least a phone call – I never heard from him again, other than the 65 dollars to my PayPal account. I’ll never know what she made of the sudden devolution in his grammar and writing style. I can only assume she thought he was drunk, or had a stroke, or was so heartsick over ending their relationship he could scarcely type through the tears.