Page 10 of What I'm Looking For

Of course she’s got an adorable grin. How can someone so damn cute spend her days convincing poor schmucks like my dad that she’ll make them millionaires? I return my attention to the dirt pile. So what if they think I’m rude? I’m here to volunteer, not mix it up with rich people.

“Do you work there, too?” Steve asks Jessica.

She waves that away gracefully. “No, I’m an actress. Will and I are in a theater company. We do some work with at-risk kids here.” She sighs dramatically. “I thought I’d be working with them today. I don’t know if I can do this digging. I came straight from a film audition.”

“You’re an actor too, Will?” Kate asks.

“Yep.” I shrug. “Bartending just fills in the gaps.”

After a few moments of silence Kate claps her hands. “What can we do to help?”

It seems as though they aren’t going to move on to friendlier territory, and I do need at least one more willing pair of hands. Jessica isn’t likely to make much of a contribution, so I explain what the project manager laid out. Steve gets to work helping me dig while Kate mixes the fertilizer with the pile of dirt I’ve already unearthed. Jessica supervises. Meaning, she flirts shamelessly with Steve while pretending to work. This doesn’t seem to bother Kate. I’m guessing they’re not a couple.

Not that it’s any of my business, but it’s always useful to study people, get ideas for characters. Steve is going on about how he does sales. His glib, outgoing personality fits that bill. Kate, on the other hand, is tougher to pinpoint. Her pale, lightly freckled face doesn’t reveal much of what she’s thinking. She was guarded at the bar, too, but she warmed up after I served up the special drink.

“Right, Will?” A poke in the shoulder from Jess breaks into my thoughts.

I swat her hand away. “What?”

“Ugh. He is always zoning out.” She rolls her eyes. “Isaid, you think doing on-camera work is beneath you.”

“I didn’t say that.” Man, I hate this argument. “I think it’s a distraction from the career I want to build in the theater. I don’t want to have to run out on rehearsals to audition all the time, like some people do, leaving the rest of the cast in the lurch.” Like Jess, who’d been MIA more than once from rehearsals for the show we’re in together this spring. “And commercial actors seem to audition an awful lot to win just a handful of jobs.”

Jessica shakes her head at me like the tradeoff is obvious. “Yes, but when yougetthe job the pay is really good! And I only left early that one time,” she adds under her breath.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Steve cuts in. “I’ve got a buddy in the business—my roommate from Tufts. He’s a casting director. He told me an actor can earn a year’s salary on one job. That’s a pretty good ROI.”

Kate stops moving for the first time since she picked up a shovel. “Return on investment,” she elaborates, before turning to Steve. “Actually, they’d have to do a bit of research to find out what their ROI really is.”

She zeros in on Jessica. “Like you’d have to add up all the auditions that you had in a year and compare them to how many jobs you got. You’d want to include the hours you spent going to the auditions as well as any expenses.” Kate looks like a different person right now, speaking animatedly, her face alight, hands dancing in the air. “You might even want to quantify any lost wages during those hours, if you’re missing time from paying work.”

“Wow, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Jess says.

Kate barely stops to breathe. “You know, there’s another possible piece to this puzzle, because I’m sure that it’s not just a numbers game. You’re selling yourself, right? So you’d have to try to determine what your particular assets are—your skills, your ‘look’ I guess, your age, things like that—and evaluate the competition based on those assets.”

I glance over at Steve who seems as surprised as I am by Kate’s rapid-fire spew of information. It’s like a switch got flipped. She’s still firing a series of questions at Jess, something about “market saturation” and “viable product.”

“I mean, Jessica, you obviously have a unique look—maybe one that directors don’t see often?”

Jessica nods, waves a hand. “Yeah, it’s complicated. I’m one hundred percent Jewish, but my grandparents are literally from all over the globe.”

I can practically see an adding machine running totals behind Kate’s eyes. “There are a lot of beautiful women on TV, but as our society becomes more mixed culturally, having actors who represent that might be more marketable. You’d have to really study the trends there.”

Jess tilts her head. “Huh. I do get called in for every so-called ‘ethnic’ role and there’s a regular group of us—one’s Cuban, one’s black and this other woman who’s Greek, basically everyone who doesn’t look like a WASP—but I never thought about it as a market to study.”

Kate’s laser focus shifts to me. She blushes but doesn’t stop talking.

“Now, Will here. When he smiles, he’s really got that boy-next-door thing going, which I imagine is in demand, but in what is possibly a saturated market. You’d have to figure out what your niche is, I guess.” She leans on her shovel, studying me to the point that I feel stripped naked. “You seem to have an athletic thing going. All stuff to think about when you’re evaluating your marketability.”

I’ve heard enough. “See, that’s the thing. I’m an artist, not a businessman. If I’d wanted to just make money, I’d have chosen a different profession.” Since they work in finance, there’s little chance they’d understand.

Kate cocks her head. “You say businessman like it’s a bad word.” Eyes still on me, she pulls a scrunchie out of her pocket and efficiently sweeps her hair into a ponytail, balancing the shovel’s handle with her elbow.

I thrust my shovel point into the dirt. I do not need to be thinking about what those silky locks would feel like if I ran my hands through them. “No offense, but yeah. I want to do something with my life that I believe in, and that does not include making money at the expense of other people.”

“How is acting in commercials making money at the expense of others?” Jess asks.

My shovel clangs against the wheelbarrow’s side and tips the whole thing over. I bend to clean it up, swearing under my breath before answering her challenge. “Advertising exists to get people to buy crap they don’t need or even want half the time.”

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