“We can go shopping this weekend to decorate it,” Poppy said as I took in the bare space. She nudged me and added, “We’ll be out shopping for your new clothes anyhow.”
I smiled and rolled my eyes at her. Evidently, Poppy had already decided that the wardrobe I’d brought with me was entirely useless.
“I had a business partner for a while, you know,” she said softly after a moment, glancing at the bare desk and then looking away. “But she’s gone.”
“What happened?” I asked. It was hard to imagine that anyone would walk away once they’d landed the Guillaume Riche account.
“I’ll tell you later,” Poppy said quickly. “But it doesn’t matter. For now, it’s just me and you, Emma. Did I mention I’m really going to need your help?”
The first three days of work went smoothly. Véronique, our liaison at KMG, was out of town on business until Thursday, so I wouldn’t get to meet her until the following week. Nor would I get to meet Guillaume—although I spent several hours drooling over his chiseled features and muscular physique in the hundreds of photos in Poppy’s database. According to Poppy, he was holed up in a hotel room somewhere in Paris, writing his next album.
“You’ll meet him before the junket,” Poppy assured me. “KMG doesn’t like us to bother him while he’s creating.”
That week, I had to read over some KMG company literature, sign a bunch of employment papers (I was being paid through KMG’s small American branch to avoid the French employment laws), and help Poppy write a press release about the upcoming release of Guillaume’s first album, Riche, which we were describing (somewhat cornily) as a “lyrical ode to Paris and the power of love.”
Poppy also caught me up on the plans for Guillaume’s London launch, for which she and I would be solely responsible. It sounded amazing. One-hundred-plus members of the media would be flown into London from the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa—as would a few high-profile English-speaking music reporters floating around continental Europe. At London’s five-star Royal Kensington Hotel, Poppy and I would host a two-and-a-half-day media junket—complete with a welcome reception, a surprise live performance, and five-minute interviews for every reporter—to officially launch Guillaume Riche and his debut album to the English-speaking world.
Guillaume’s first single was due to hit airwaves next week, so there would be plenty of buzz built around the star by the time the junket rolled around.
“Emma, this guy is gold,” Poppy said on Tuesday as we laid out photos. We were trying to select two to send out with the advance press packet. “Millions of women are already in love with him.”
In fact, I’d half fallen in love with him myself by the time we were done poring over his pictures. As I already knew from the dozens of photos I’d seen of him in People, Hello, and Mod, he had dark shaggy hair, deep green eyes, broad shoulders, and the kind of perfectly chiseled features that you expect to see on Michelangelo statues, not real human beings. Women all over the world were going crazy for him, and his breakup with Dionne DeVrie had only excited the public appetite. But would his sound measure up as Poppy had claimed?
Thursday afternoon, I had my answer. Before we left work for the day, a courier delivered our first copy of the “City of Light” single, hot off the press, and we popped it into the CD player at Poppy’s desk excitedly. It would be Poppy’s first time hearing the final recorded version of the single, but at least she’d gotten to sit in on some of Guillaume’s studio sessions, which was why she was so awed by him already.
It was my first time hearing Guillaume at all.
The song, which he had written himself, was hauntingly beautiful. Poppy was right—it was reminiscent of Coldplay and Jack Johnson, with perhaps a little James Blunt thrown in—but there was no doubt that Guillaume Riche was in a class all by himself.
“Oh, my God,” I said, gazing at Poppy in wonder when the song finished. “We really do have a star on our hands.”
I’d never felt something so strongly in my life. It suddenly made sense that KMG was willing to invest so much in Guillaume. His voice was incredible, the lyrics were gorgeous, and the melodies were so pretty that they gave me goose bumps. It was a totally new sound, familiar yet ultimately like nothing I’d heard before.
That night, Poppy took me to a bar in the fifth arrondissement called the Long Hop. It was, she explained, a bar that catered to Anglos like us. But, Poppy added with a smile, it was always populated with lots of Frenchmen, too.
“It’s classic,” she told me as we walked through the entryway beneath the fluttering flags of our homelands. “They think we British and American girls are so gullible, we’ll fall for their smooth talk. But don’t be fooled, Emma. They’re just as bad as men anywhere else.”