Page 57 of Paparazzi

“What do you want me to cook for you?” I whisper in her ear as I deeply inhale the scent of her hair.

“You don’t have to do anything. I can do it.” I can’t tell if there’s any irritation or mockery in her voice, so I decide to split the tasks between us.

“Make the coffee while I look at what’s in the fridge?”

She nods, jumping down from her chair and freeing herself from my embrace. It feels like she peeled off a layer of my skin and left me exposed.

“Sweet or salty?” I ask as I stick my nose in the refrigerator, which thankfully has been filled since I was here last time.

“Salty is fine.”

I take out the eggs, bacon, and sliced bread and find the pots on the kitchen shelves. I spot the dishes and cutlery and realize how natural it is to move around this apartment with her as she hands me a cup of steaming coffee and the eggs start to fry in the pan. It’s a routine I never thought I’d do with anyone, and it’s both reassuring and terrifying. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I wasn’t born to trust people. But she’s like a drug—I tried her once, and she sucked me into addiction. Like all drugs, though, in the corner of my mind, I know she’s going to kill me someday. I can’t shake the thought, despite feeling extremely happy with her. Maybe it’s because the only time I’ve ever been this happy is when I was a kid. I forgot how it feels.

I put our breakfast on the table, and she follows me, carrying the cups of coffee.

“How does a paparazzo’s life work? Do you go hang out in certain places looking for famous people?” I ask, genuinely curious.

Iris shrugs and makes a slight guttural sound of pleasure as she tastes a bite of the food. It takes considerable effort for me not to pull her into my lap and make love to her for the fourth time in less than twenty-four hours.

“No, not always. I usually take my laptop to one of the cafés in an area where celebrities are known to frequent, then I start searching online for the various accounts that report spotting celebrities. People who hang out on the streets, using social media to report someone’s presence. There’s usually five or six of us working the same area. I have friends that I trust, and we alert each other in a chat when we hear about celebrity sightings. When a restaurant waits for a high-end customer, there’s more frenzy. Often their assistants will call ahead to make sure everything’s in order. This gets everyone all excited: waiters are reassigned, tables are freed and reserved... Basically, clues that something is happening. And some of our friends are waiters or drivers who call us with tips.”

“Really? What restaurants? Can you tell me?’

She bursts out laughing, clearly amused. “Do you want a tip about where you should never show up?”

“I’m just curious.”

“The Mandalay is full of waiters who would easily sell other people’s private lives.”

“Is that why I met you there a few weeks ago?”

She nods blushing, like she’s embarrassed for lying to me. “But I wasn’t there to photograph you. Ron called me, saying Alicia was going to be there with her new boytoy. Sometimes, very often lately, it’s these people’s managers who tip us off.”

“If Evan did something like that, I’d punch him in the face,” I say with a smile on my lips and seriousness in my voice.

“That night you caught me outside the Mandalay, Alicia played her part and so did the kid. They took their time getting in that car, and they didn’t particularly hide themselves from the shots. We were there for major national news outlets—in fact, the next day, the photos came out in the three largest print magazines in the United States.”

I feel a little relieved hearing this. “Do you work only for Ron or for other magazines?”

“I don’t work for anyone. Photos are usually uploaded to agency websites where magazines pay a monthly subscription. Ron and Agata are the only two people unscrupulous enough to get photos under the table that agencies would never touch—either because they were illegally obtained or too raw to be published without warning the reader. Michael’s pictures would never have passed an agency’s guidelines, but Ron would sell his own mother for something like that.”

“It’s absurd how morbidly attracted people are to this kind of news.”

My statement is mostly me thinking out loud, but I see Iris nodding. “I feel sorry for Alicia. Really. She’s the one who found herself with an unfaithful husband and a marriage that was falling apart. But the news is so perverted they made it about him running away with a man. What difference does his sexuality make? If he’d run away with a woman, it would have been no different: Alicia’s the victim in this case. And yet she gets massacred by the media. People are attracted to what they think is the most scandalous, and the media gives them what they want. They know exactly how many times a link is clicked on their site, what topic attracts the most readers, and what keeps them glued to the page. So–it’s more of a scandal in America if you’re gay than a cheater.”

From her tone and the two small wrinkles that form between her eyebrows, I get how annoyed she is by this, and it’s all the more reason I can’t understand how she does this job. It’s clear that she doesn’t want to hurt people; following them and taking pictures like this without feeling something for them is not in her nature.

“But what do you like to do? What does a musician do when he’s not on tour?” she asks, smiling, lightening the heavy mood that my questioning brought on.

“We’re now at the stage where...we have nothing to do,” I admit, chuckling.

“Nothing? Don’t you have an album coming out?”

“Yes, but we’ve finished recording, we’re just making the final tweaks, and the marketing staff, along with the press office, has been preparing for the launch for months. In a few weeks, the promotional campaign will start with radio, television, newspaper interviews...basically, we’ll be targeted day and night. At its most intense, right around the release date, we’ll be doing three or four television appearances a day.”

“It must be stressful. The fact that you can’t stretch out the promotional appearances over time, I mean.”

“It’s just a crazy time. Over the years, I’ve learned to completely trust the people around us who organize our every move. Basically, we do nothing, just show up where we’re told. The assistants are the ones who have the worst life.” I smile, embarrassed, because we sound like spoiled children.

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