Chapter Eighteen

I wasn’t sure what would be harder to leave: Poppy, the friend I’d grown to trust; or Paris, the city I’d grown to love.

Poppy was full of apologies and promises to try to talk Véronique out of her decision. But I’d screwed up, and I knew it. I didn’t want to cost Poppy more than I already had. I had the feeling that her own job security was hanging by a string, and I knew that losing the Guillaume Riche account would mean the end of Poppy’s business. I would never do that to her. I felt terrible that I had already wreaked so much havoc. She had rescued me from my own depression back home, and I had repaid her by putting her job in jeopardy. Although Poppy kept insisting it wasn’t my fault, I knew it was. It was unforgivable.

Once Poppy realized that her powers of persuasion weren’t going to get me to revise my decision, she gave in and began to say her good-byes. She took me out to dinner at a different restaurant every night, perhaps to try to convince me to stay in France. But all the crêpes complètes and coq au vin and crème brûlée in Paris couldn’t change things.

She even loosened up on the whole French-kissing mission, which was a relief. I didn’t know whether her relaxing of the rules was due to her pity for me or perhaps over some sort of change that her visit with Darren had wrought in her. Nevertheless, it allowed me to slip back to my old ways of not dating, which were much less disaster-prone. After all, if I wasn’t dating and I wasn’t thinking about kissing Frenchmen, there was no chance of anything going wrong, now, was there?

I tried calling Gabe several times that week, but there was never an answer on his work or cell phones, and he didn’t return any of the messages I left. I’m so sorry, I said in several messages. It didn’t mean anything. In others, I apologized for my complete lack of professionalism and told him I was leaving for Orlando on Saturday morning. They all had the same general theme: I’m a jerk. And I’m so sorry if I hurt you.

On my last day of work, Guillaume, who had managed, quite impressively, to stay out of trouble all week, came by Poppy’s office in the afternoon for one final round of apologies.

“Look, Emma, I really like working with you,” he said, sitting down at my desk and widening his already enormous green eyes at me plaintively. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said with a nod. And it was. Guillaume was Guillaume, and I should have known better. This was my fault, for the most part, not his. “I’ve liked working with you, too,” I admitted as an afterthought.

This made him look even sadder. “Isn’t there anything I can do?” he asked. “Talk to the people at KMG, maybe?”

“No. What’s done is done, I think.” I gave him a small smile. “But you are really talented. I will wish the best for you. I know you’ll do well.”

On my last night in Paris, after I’d packed and left one final apologetic message for Gabe, I went to dinner with Poppy at a crêperie near the Place d’Italie, where we stuffed ourselves with a bottle of cidre, salads, buckwheat crêpes with cheese, eggs, and ham, and massive flambéing crêpes Suzettes and cafés doubles for dessert. Outside the window, a parade of Parisians strolled continually by, walking little white dogs, carrying baguettes, chattering away on their mobile phones, or tending to small, impeccably dressed little children with pink cheeks and spring coats buttoned all the way to the top.

“I love it here,” I murmured, staring out the window as Poppy counted out a small handful of euro bills and coins for our dinner, which she insisted on paying for.

“So why don’t you stay?” Poppy asked softly.

I shook my head and gazed out on the Paris outside our window before answering. “No,” I said. “I can’t. It’s obviously not where I belong.”

After dinner, Poppy suggested heading to Le Crocodile in the fifth for cocktails, but I only wanted to be alone with the city. “No,” I said. “I think I’m going to take a walk. I’ll see you at home in a little while.”

Poppy and I hugged good-bye and went our separate ways, her to a taxi and me underground to the 7 line of the Métro, which I took to Châtelet, seven stops away. I emerged twenty minutes later to a square full of sparkling lights lining centuries-old buildings. The Palais de Justice, the Hôtel de Ville, the Pont de la Cité, and Sainte-Chapelle were flooded with soft light and glittered on the surface of the Seine, which was broken only by the occasional silent passing of a bateau.

I strolled toward the river in silence, pulling my cardigan close as a chill crept into the air. All around me, Paris was alive with conversations, smiles, the quiet exchanges between couples, the happy laughter of friends crossing the bridge on the way to a bar or a café in the fifth. As I crossed the Pont Neuf and saw the Eiffel Tower glowing over the river to the west, I could feel tears pricking the backs of my eyes. They blurred the searchlight from the top of the tower before I could blink them back.

As I walked farther across the Île de la Cité, the massive Conciergerie hulked in the shadows, a reminder of a time of sadness and horror when thousands were imprisoned and met their deaths during the French Revolution. To the left, Notre Dame basked in its own light across its broad, cobblestone courtyard, its many saints and gargoyles standing silent watch over the hushed clusters of tourists clutching guidebooks and speaking in whispers as they stared up at the fourteenth-century church in awe. Across the bridge on the Left Bank, the green-and-yellow cursive of the Café le Petit Pont glowed like a beacon, reminding me of my first night in Paris with Poppy and the interview I’d supervised between Guillaume and Gabe. Somehow, it all seemed so long ago.

I wandered for hours along the banks of the Seine, weaving down the Rue de la Huchette in the Latin Quarter then across the Petit Pont and Pont Notre-Dame and down the Rue de Rivoli on the Right Bank. The quaint cobblestone of the Marais gave way to the Pont Marie and then, as I wove back, to the regal buildings of the Place des Vosges, where Victor Hugo once sat and created a hunchback named Quasimodo to ring the bells of Notre Dame. By the time I had strolled back to the Pont Neuf to take one last look west down the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower, it was past midnight, the tourists had disappeared, and I felt like I had the city—or at least the tip of the island—all to myself. The ripples of the Seine kissed the embankment in a soothing tempo, and the moonlight reflected in the river mixed with the light cast from the buildings that had been host to kings and saints and history in all its forms.

I would miss it here. I would miss it a lot.

I took the RER from the Saint-Michel stop back to the Pont de l’Alma and walked up Avenue Rapp to our street. As always, the moment I turned right onto Rue de Général-Camou, the Eiffel Tower loomed enormous at the end of the short lane. Usually, it was a thrill to see it. Tonight it just felt hauntingly sad. In Orlando, the only thing that loomed at the end of my street had been a big traffic light. Here, one of the most beautiful monuments in the world sat just feet away, shining with golden light in the darkness.

I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t. I crawled into bed and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend my last hours in Paris that way. Eventually, I got up and walked to the living room window, where I sat with a bottle of Beaujolais and a crusty baguette, gazing at the Eiffel Tower long after the lights had gone out and it was just a dark silhouette against the distant rooftops of the city.

It was dawn before I realized that there were tears rolling down my cheeks. I wondered how long I’d been crying. As the first birds of the morning began to chirp and the sky turned gradually from inky blue to a blend of sunrise pastels, illuminating the steel of the tower, I got up from the window, took a shower, brushed my teeth, and went out for a walk. By the time Poppy and I had finished the pains au chocolat I’d brought home from the patisserie on the corner, along with the espresso she silently made in the kitchen, I still wasn’t ready to go. But it was time. Poppy walked me over to the taxi stand on Avenue Bosquet, and with one last hug good-bye, I was on my way. But I wasn’t so sure anymore that the place I was going to was home.

Because Brett had moved back into our old house and because I had no desire whatsoever to see any of my three so-called best friends in Orlando, I had nowhere to go when I got back to the States but to my sister Jeannie’s place.

“I told you it was a bad idea to move to Paris,” Jeannie said when she opened the door of her Winter Park home to find me and two giant suitcases waiting on the doorstep at 11 p.m. She’d been too busy to come pick me up at the airport, so I’d had to take a cab, to the tune of fifty-five dollars, which was not exactly the way I’d envisioned starting my life as an unemployed American. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but, well . . .” Her voice trailed off and she smiled sweetly at me.

“You know the story, Jeannie,” I’d answered wearily. After a grueling eight-hour flight from Paris to Detroit, a three-hour layover, and then a three-hour flight to Orlando, I was in no mood to argue with my sister.

“You have to admit, it was really immature to go to Paris on some silly whim,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re going to have to grow up someday, Emma.” I bit my lip, figuring that things would be better all around if I didn’t reply. She turned away, leaving me to drag the suitcases inside myself. “Try to be quiet, Em,” she said over her shoulder. “Robert and Odysseus are in bed!”

Ah. I wouldn’t want to disturb her husband. Or King Odysseus, as I liked to call her spoiled three-year-old.

Jeannie and I had never been close. After I’d turned about five (to her thirteen) and was no longer as cute to play with, she had started treating me with a general disdain.

“I’m still Mom’s favorite,” she used to whisper to me throughout my childhood. “She’ll never love you as much as she loves me.”

For all of our squabbles and differences, I knew that deep down we loved each other. It was just that she had an opinion about everything in my life. Her way was always the right way, and she couldn’t see that she might not in fact be correct. We’d barely spoken since I moved to France, because she was so horrified that I had left Brett without trying harder to work things out.

“You have to forgive him if he’s made one little mistake,” she kept telling me. “It’s not like Robert has always been perfect! At least Brett makes a lot of money and will provide for you. Where do you think you’re going to find someone else like that when you’re almost thirty?”

Now, since I’d had no choice but to come crawling back to her and stay in her guest room until I figured out what I was going to do, she had basically been proven right. As I crept into bed that night in the immaculately clean, freshly dusted, Febreze-scented room that had been prepared for me (complete with Jeannie’s perfect hospital corners on the bed), I had a bad feeling about how the next few weeks would go. There was no question about it: I needed to find a job and get out of here as soon as I could.

“You know, if you had just tried to work things out with Brett, none of this would have happened,” Jeannie said the next morning as I sat sipping coffee and she sat making airplane noises and “flying” little spoonfuls of Cheerios toward Odysseus’s mouth; upon each landing, he would wave his arms wildly, shriek, and knock cereal and milk into the air. It was a little hard to take Jeannie seriously when she had soggy O’s in her hair, milk splashed on her cheek, and a three-year-old who seemed wholly uninterested in obeying her.

“There was nothing worth working out,” I said with a sigh.

Jeannie blinked at me blankly. “But you dated him for three years. And he has a great job.”

“No Cheerios!” Odysseus screamed at the top of his lungs, sending another spoonful of cereal flying around the kitchen. “I want chocolate!”

“Odysseus, sweetie, you can have chocolate later,” Jeannie said in a high-pitched baby voice that drove my crazy. At three, Odysseus was old enough to be talked to like a human being rather than a poodle. “Now it’s time for Cheerios! Open wide for the airplane!”

“Waaaaaaaaaaaah!” Odysseus screamed, his little face turning beet red as he waved his chubby arms around. Jeannie sighed and went over to the pantry to get some Cocoa Puffs. The moment he saw the box, his screams subsided.

I rolled my eyes. “Jeannie, it doesn’t matter that Brett has a great job,” I said once she had commenced with shoveling spoonfuls of Cocoa Puffs into the contented Odysseus’s open mouth. “He left me. Then he started sleeping with Amanda. How am I supposed to be okay with that?”

“Em, you’re almost thirty,” Jeannie said, spooning more chocolate balls into Odysseus’s mouth. Chocolate-colored milk dribbled down his chin in little rivers. “You’ve got to wise up. If your fiancé’s looking elsewhere, maybe there’s something you’re not doing at home.”

“Oh, come on, Jeannie,” I snapped, feeling suddenly angrier at her than I normally did. “You can’t really mean that! I must not have been screwing him enough so he had to go and sleep with Amanda?”

“Not in front of the baby!” Jeannie snapped.

“Screw, screw, screw!” Odysseus repeated in delight, little globs of mushy chocolate shooting every which way.

“Sorry,” I muttered, glancing guiltily at my nephew. “But seriously, Jeannie. I can’t go back to him.”

Jeannie sighed and put down the spoon. She turned away from Odysseus, who immediately knocked over his sippy cup and began eating fallen Cocoa Puffs off his high chair tray by picking them up with his tongue, in between muttering screw, screw, screw thoughtfully to himself.

“Emma, I’m just trying to help you here,” she said. “God knows Mom and Dad don’t have anything useful to say. I’m the only one in this family who seems to know how to make a relationship work.”

I decided to change the subject before I was forced to pour the remaining milk-sodden Cocoa Puffs over Jeannie’s perfectly sleek hair. “So I think I’m going to see if there’s an opening at any of the restaurants on Park Avenue,” I said, referring to Winter Park’s shopping and restaurant district.

“You want to waitress?” Jeannie asked, her voice rising incredulously on the last word.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can go back to Boy Bandz. And there’s not really a music industry here, you know? I can start applying for PR jobs, but who knows if that will work out?”

“But waitressing?” Jeannie looked at me with what appeared to be disgust. “At the age of twenty-nine?”

I bit my lip. I was determined not be drawn into an argument.

“Well,” Jeannie said after a moment. “I suppose it’s a good way to meet rich guys. Just make sure to flirt. A lot.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m planning to waitress, not husband-hunt,” I said. “Besides,” I muttered under my breath, “I think I’m in love with a French guy who hates my guts.”

“What?” asked Jeannie distractedly. She had turned her attention back to Odysseus, who had finished his Cocoa Puffs and was now flinging chocolate-colored milk around the kitchen.

“Nothing,” I said with a sigh.

“Huband-hut! Huband-hut! Huband-hut!” repeated Odysseus, who had apparently been listening more closely than his mother.

By the end of the week, I had landed a lunch-shift job at Frenchy’s, a French-American fusion restaurant on Park Avenue. The owner, Pierre, had been fascinated that I’d just returned from Paris and had given me a job on the spot.

“You know Guillaume Riche?” he asked once he looked at my résumé.

I nodded, wondering why I’d even bothered to put the miserably short-lived job on there.

“Merveilleux!” he exclaimed, clearly excited. “He is a huge star! You have heard his new single, non?”

Indeed I had. “Beautiful Girl,” the second single off his album, had just been released and was heating up the airwaves. The Internet buzz was that Guillaume could have two songs—“City of Light” and “Beautiful Girl”—in this week’s Billboard Top Ten. It was incredible.

I talked to Poppy every few days; it was the only thing that kept me mentally afloat. Despite the fact that I had spent a small fortune on international phone cards at CVS to call her, it made me feel infinitely better to talk to someone I knew was a true friend. And hearing her talk about her blossoming relationship with Darren and her increasingly infrequent crazy dates with unsuspecting Frenchmen made me laugh and forget for a moment that I was a lonely boarder in my sister’s house, working at a job that just didn’t fulfill me the way working with Poppy had.

Poppy attempted a few times to mention Gabe; she had seen him several times since the junket, and she said he always looked dejected. But I suspected she was just saying that to try to cheer me up.

“I can’t talk about him,” I finally told her. “I need to move on. I need to stop thinking about him.”

Of course that was easier said than done, because everything seemed to remind me of him. Every time I turned on the radio, I heard “City of Light” or “Beautiful Girl.” The second song in particular always made me feel empty inside, because the last time I’d heard it was at the junket, where everything had fallen apart.

Poppy kept me informed of Guillaume’s progress, and the week after I got the new job, I was at Jeannie’s one night watching the eleven o’clock news when I saw a clip of Guillaume waterskiing down the Seine with three police boats chasing him. He was, of course, wearing only his top hat and a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants boxers. I giggled a bit to myself and then groaned in empathy with poor Poppy. I thought I’d be glad that I wasn’t there to clean up yet another Guillaume Riche mess. But in a way, seeing him grinning and waving at the cameras as he glided illegally down the Seine just made me miss him—and the job—even more.

“I have no idea how to get him out of this one,” Poppy had confided to me when she called in a panic from her cell phone.

“Just say he was out for some exercise and the boat took a wrong turn,” I advised.

“What about his underwear?”

I thought for a moment. “Say that he thought it was a bathing suit and apologizes for his error.”

“Emma.” Poppy laughed. “You’re a genius.”

“I don’t think that’s the word for it,” I muttered.