Paparazzi by Erika Vanzin
I’ve pulled a box of photos out of the closet that I had put aside when the reality of life required all my attention. Thomas is flipping through them, taking an infinite time between photos, and I’m watching him with my heart in my throat, fearing his judgment. In this moment, my passion for photography doesn’t disgust me like it usually does when I work as a paparazzo, and the feeling is so pleasant I can’t stop smiling. Snuggled up on my bed, he analyzes every composition, questions me, marvels, makes me feel like the center of his attention, of his world, and I find it difficult to get used to it.
“Wow, this one of the Romeo and Juliet statue in Central Park is amazing. How the hell did you find a moment when there were no snow prints on the ground? Did you cover them?”
His expression is so incredulous it makes me laugh. “No, actually, this picture was taken at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning in December, after a snowstorm. It was dawn and the snow had stopped falling for less than half an hour. An hour later, the prints were already there. There wasn’t much light, but a tripod and long exposure can work wonders.”
He’s about to say something, but we are interrupted by a knocking on the door. “Are you waiting for someone?” he asks, intrigued.
I cover my face with my hands and curse. Wrapped in this bubble of happiness this afternoon, I completely spaced out on my plans for the evening. “I forgot about dinner with Emily and Albert.”
Thomas pulls his phone out of his pocket. His eyes go wide. “It’s already eight o’clock.”
Emily knocks again violently.
“I’d better go open before the neighbors call the police.”
He giggles behind me as I get out of bed and catch up with Dexter, who’s already in front of the door. When I open it, I find Emily with a huge pizza in her hands and Albert right behind her with two bottles of wine, one tequila, and six beers. I raise a perplexed eyebrow. I wasn’t going to get drunk tonight.
“Finally!” my friend yells as she enters. “Were you getting off staring at a picture of Thomas? Oh! I see you have the real deal right here.” She admires Thomas, who is fastening his shoes sitting on my bed.
“Emily!” I scold her, certain my cheeks are burning with embarrassment.
“Look, it’s not my fault you take a lifetime to open the door. One can only imagine what’s going on behind closed doors.”
“Emily, stop it!” I try to sound stern, but it comes out shrill and desperate.
Meanwhile, behind me, Thomas laughs, and I don’t dare look him in the face, at least until he encircles my waist with his arms and kisses me on the cheek.
“So, you like to masturbate to my photos. Do you use the ones you find online or the posters they sell on the record company’s website?” he teases me as Albert looks at us disgusted and goes to put the drinks in the fridge.
“I don’t do that!” I say more embarrassed than indignant.
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with it.” Emily sides with him, laughing.
“I’m going now before I discover any more secrets that might shock me.” He kisses me on the nose.
“You have no idea how many there are,” mumbles Albert, annoyed while Emily punches his side and he grunts. Thomas doesn’t seem to notice his comment, but my heart jumps in my throat.
“Hey, you can stay for dinner,” Emily proposes with a smile from ear to ear.
“Thank you, but I leave you to the evening you have planned. I’ve already had the pleasure of her company all afternoon.” He turns to me and says softly, “Look...I know it didn’t go very well with the dinner invitation, but there is this Christmas event at the Met...I don’t need you to give me an answer now...I mean, but I’d love it if you came with me.”
I’m staring at him like he’s a mirage. Did he really just invite me to the most famous event of the winter season? This is a surprise of epic proportions. I open and close my mouth a couple of times without being able to formulate a coherent answer.
“Think about it?” He turns around to leave—smart move to drop the bomb when he’s already on his way out. He opens the front door, turns around with a smile, and gently kisses my lips. Before he goes out and closes it behind him, he winks, and I smile like a sixteen-year-old on cloud nine.
“Look at the two lovebirds.” Emily’s voice is a mixture of teasing and dreamy sighs.
“Not lovebirds. And do you think it’s a good call to embarrass me like that in front of him?”
“I swear, I had no idea he was here. Otherwise, I would have said worse!” She bursts out laughing as I throw a pillow at her in response.
“Are you fucking him? Christ, you’ve stooped low,” Albert says bluntly.
Emily rolls her eyes, exasperated, and I don’t know what to say. Albert asked me out once and I said no. Since then, he’s become a plague every time I have a guy interested in me, whether or not I actually date him. We all go out together, we have fun at concerts, and he often helps me with extensive research and systems I don’t have access to. He works for a newspaper; he verifies that facts and sources are accurate and reliable on behalf of the journalists who then put the paper’s signature on their articles. He has access to means and sources, sometimes legal, much more often illegal, that I’ll never have. Every now and then, I feel guilty for taking advantage of him, but he always offers to help, and sometimes I give in to temptation.
“What do you want me to tell you? It’s not true?” I snap, annoyed. I don’t like to answer him so meanly, but sometimes frustration outweighs my determination to respond nicely.
Albert gives me the side-eye and offers me a piece of pizza without answering my questions. Luckily, it’s Emily who comes to my rescue, breaking the tense silence between us. “Do you realize that Thomas had the arrogance to come and ask me for a caramel macchiato today? To me, who works in a place that doesn’t serve that junk.”
She’s outraged. I laugh, amused. “I know, he told me. You terrified him.”
“I wanted him to learn his lesson. You have to train them, or they’ll keep ordering caramel macchiatos!”
Emily jumps into her invective against the chains that transform people into robots, and Albert and I are forced to grab the alcohol out of the fridge to turn the evening into a more cheerful one. A pizza, a bottle of wine, and six cans of beer later, we’re sprawled on the bed with my laptop on Albert’s legs googling stupid things like what penguins smell like while Emily opens the bottle of tequila.
“Do you realize that you slept with the rock star you’ve had a crush on since you were sixteen?” she asks me in a tone that is a mixture of conspiratorial and dreamy.
We’re all a bit tipsy, and maybe more than that. Unfortunately, when Emily is drunk, she tends to focus obsessively on a topic, and this time she chooses Thomas.
“Don’t talk about it. It seems absurd.” I cover my face with my hands, a little ashamed. I don’t know if I’m blushing about the turmoil of emotions that affect me or because I’m drunk.
“Really absurd if you consider you’ve slept with someone you don’t know anything about,” says Albert.
“Can you explain what your problem is?” Emily glares daggers at him.
Albert blushes but doesn’t give up. “It’s true! If he was any other guy, you’d never have ended up in bed without knowing anything about him. Doesn’t it seem odd that there’s no information out there about that band’s past? They seem to have materialized out of nowhere,” he says, agitated.
“He’s right. They have that halo of mystery that makes them to-die-for sexy, but, if you think about it, zero personal information,” Emily admits.
Not that I didn’t think about it. It’s true what she says, and maybe Albert is also slightly right: if he was any other guy I met at a club, I’d never be having sex with him without knowing anything about him. When you look at famous people, at the glossy life their press offices put out, you feel like you know them like friends, but that’s not true. We only know what they want the public to know about them, superficial things that satisfy the curiosity of their readers, but not what really matters. I know Thomas’s shoe size because I read it in a fashion magazine, but not where he’s lived his whole life.
“It’s not true that I don’t know him. Today he opened up a lot with me!” The need to justify my actions mingles with the guilt that’s been gripping me for days, making my voice sound shrill like a whiney little girl.
“If it’s true that he opened up so much with you, prove it,” Albert challenges me as Emily passes me the bottle.
I throw down a generous swig of tequila, trying to wash away the nervousness Albert stirs up, when in fact, this was a perfect day. I’ve never had such a wonderful afternoon just staying in the house talking to a guy. Albert’s words threaten to destroy the bubble I’ve built around myself to keep away the lies that try to crush me. I want to nip that negativity in the bud, drown it with so much alcohol it can never resurface.
“Indulge him. Otherwise, he won’t give up.”
“If what I say tonight leaves this room, you two are dead. No matter who talks. Do you understand me?”
“Who do you think we’re going to tell? We’re all drunk! Tomorrow morning, we won’t remember this conversation. We’ll only have a big headache to remind us of this night,” Emily mumbles as she pours another drink.
“Okay. Let me see... Well, he’s not from New York but a small town around here whose name I don’t know.”
“Really?” Emily is wide-eyed.
“That’s not news. Everyone suspected this because no schools in New York City remember them. Without the name of the town, it’s not even information, it’s a random guess,” Albert complains as the blood begins to boil in my veins.
“You want names? His mother’s name is Susan and his father Arthur,” I snap, annoyed, as a half-smile appears on his lips.
“Now, this is what I want. Start talking.” He leans on my shoulder and hands me the bottle of tequila after smelling it and wrinkling his nose without touching it.
I drink again, feeling my throat and stomach burning like I’ve swallowed lava. I pass the bottle to Emily, who takes a sip and makes a disgusted face. It’s not our favorite alcohol, but it’s doing the job—driving away that feeling of heaviness brought on by Albert’s insistence.
“Anything else you want to confess to Uncle Albert?” he jokes.
Emily passes me the bottle of tequila again, and I take another sip. The evening took a strange turn: I feel my head spin, and I have to squeeze my eyes a couple of times to focus on Albert. On the other hand, the lightness filling my chest feels good.
“Come on, spill some more secrets while I go get the salt. Tequila alone sucks.” Emily crawls off the bed and drags herself to the kitchen cabinet to grab the blue container I keep on the top shelf.
“He doesn’t have a car…” I realize I’m slurring, and Albert’s smile is getting blurry.
“What the hell kind of information is that? Most people who live in this city don’t have a car,” he groans, and I’d like to punch him.
“I don’t think he even has a driver’s license, because he said he didn’t need one where he spent his teenage years.”
“Really? A kid in a small town who doesn’t have a driver’s license? They make you get it when you go to high school. You don’t even have to leave the building to take the class!”
I take another sip from the bottle, and Emily sticks a slice of lime in my mouth after smearing my lips with salt. I almost throw up and take another drink of the tequila to rinse my mouth of the horrible taste of salt.
“Where did he go to high school?” Albert pushes.
“I don’t think he went because he told me he didn’t have many friends his age.”
The words come out drowsy, and my eyes close until Emily gives me a shove to wake me up. I study her, and her face is blank, without expressions. For a moment, it seems to me that she doesn’t even have eyes.
Albert is talking to me, but I respond with difficulty, slowly, like I have a potato in my mouth and can’t form the words properly. Sometimes I nod with my head, sometimes I don’t. Albert gets close to my face and doesn’t stop asking questions. Then I close my eyes, and even his voice slowly disappears into oblivion.