Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [37]
Travis showed up with bail money, and I was released after none of the men said they’d slept with me and Travis provided W-2s to show that I really did work as an actress. We collected my belongings, my wallet and my watch, and he took me to breakfast at the Griddle, apologizing as I glared at him between gulps of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a stack of syrup-soaked pancakes. “I had no idea, Samantha,” he said, gazing at me earnestly and maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice that he had the same sculpted hair and heavy cologne as the real-estate agents at the party . . . the men who, I’d heard from one of the girls in the holding cell, had paid to be fellated while balancing ashtrays on the girl’s head so they wouldn’t have to set down their hand-rolled cigars for the act.
“It’s India,” I reminded him. I’d had it legally changed right after my breasts healed. I took one last bite, set my crumpled paper napkin on top of my sticky plate, and pushed it away. “No offense, Travis, but I think I need another manager.”
His fleshy face hardened. “Wait, wait. Let’s not be hasty here. You still owe me.”
“And I’ll pay you,” I told him. “But I can’t work with you anymore.”
I got Kevin’s name from a friend of a friend of a girl I knew, someone who’d actually gotten cast in a network pilot. “He’s a baby agent,” she’d confided. I said that didn’t matter. Better a baby agent than an almost pimp.
Kevin had an office in a glass-and-marble tower in Century City. He’d gone to Rice, then moved to California and worked his way up from the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies in town. He was just signing his first clients: potty-mouthed comics who barely looked old enough to have learned the curse words they spewed onstage, wannabe starlets and fresh-off-the-bus singers and geeky fanboys who just knew they were destined to be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, mostly because their mothers had told them so.
Kevin wasn’t tall, maybe an inch or two more than my five foot six, with narrow shoulders and delicate wrists and hands. His clothes—sharply creased jeans and a checkered blue-and-white button-down shirt, a black leather belt with a silver buckle and black leather cowboy boots—were so well kept that they looked brand-new. He was losing his light-brown hair but not making a big deal about it, not attempting a comb-over or hiding beneath a baseball cap, and there was something about him, the way he looked at you when you talked, leaning close like it would hurt him to miss a word, that made you feel special.
He was a good listener, which was important for his line of work: after four years in Los Angeles I’d figured out that performers were black holes of neediness. Actors (I included myself in this tally, but at least I had good reasons to be needy) wanted to talk mostly about themselves, and they wanted you to listen, and if Kevin was prepared to do this—quietly, politely, intensely—then he’d be a success.
“Can you take me on?” I asked. He looked at my list of credits—scanty and padded, like my breasts before I’d had the work done—then gave me a look of earnest regret and shook his head. I wasn’t surprised. It was one thing to be nineteen, new in town and full of promise, but at twenty-three, if you hadn’t landed so much as a line and you’d spent four years trying, your prospects and potential had diminished considerably.
“I can’t offer you representation. However...” And he smiled, a charming grin that lit his face. “I’d love to take you to dinner.”
I figured I’d date him casually, just for fun . . . a sport-fuck, as my roommate, Terri, would say, while I tried to find another agent who could get me the kind of job that meant I didn’t have to waitress, or temp, or be part of crowd scenes on cop shows, or spend all day on a gurney as an extra on ER. But then I learned that Kevin came from