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.
Chapter Nineteen
Two weeks after I’d gotten back from Paris, I was sitting in the family room with Odysseus, watching Saturday-morning cartoons and trying to keep him from licking the carpet (which I suspected he did because Jeannie had started using a chocolate-scented vacuum powder to make the house smell like she’d been baking all day). He was babbling to himself in nonsense talk—a habit I thought was sort of worrisome at the age of three, but Jeannie encouraged it by babbling in baby talk right back to him.
“Use your words, Odysseus,” I said, keeping my voice quiet so Jeannie wouldn’t hear. She always said that criticism would wound a child’s fragile sense of self-esteem. Not that it was my business, but I figured that Odysseus’s precious self-esteem would be in grave danger anyhow the moment he began goo-gooing and gagaing to kids on the playground who’d left infant babble behind in their infancy.
“Goo goo blah goo ga blah,” he said defiantly, then went back to licking the carpet.
Just then, the doorbell rang.