Paris/COVID: Emily in Paris “Scarlet Zone”
It’s been a few years since Emily moved to Paris and started her career at Savoir. She’s married the most seductive, creative, and age-appropriate of her swains (no spoilers!) and they now have a young son. After winning every major award known to her profession, she’s taken the parenthood plunge and shocked herself by wanting to prolong her congé parental to be with her little boy and breast feed! None of her Paris acquaintances, even Mindy, approves of this crazy departure from stylishness. All her designer outfits are soon too small and when she finally fits into them again they get covered with baby spit-up. Emily takes the baby to show her friends at Savoir and he projectile-vomits on Sylvie.
Emily keeps a finger in the professional pie with consulting gigs she snags and somehow squeezes in between sleepless nights pacing and jiggling her colicky infant. Starting when he’s 2 weeks old, all the French parents say, “You mean he doesn’t sleep through ze nuit yet? Let him cry himself to sleep, zey have to learn to comfort zemselves!” Then come the teething and the endless colds, sapping her career motivation. She joins an English-speaking Moms’ playgroup, which saves her sanity and before she knows it little Jr. is 2 and can attend maternelle. There is still hope! Mad about her toddler, she doesn’t want to work full time like 80% of French mothers. Citing a technicality about the length of Emily’s leave, Sylvie can refuse to take Emily back to Savoir part-time. Instead, Emily turns to freelance writing as a micro entrepreneur, staggered by the paperwork involved.
Over the next few years, her son graduates to primary school and she navigates the torturous hallowed and haunted halls of the Education Nationale, ignored and sniffed at by teachers because of her US accent, failing to understand the grading system (a full point off for forgetting a comma?) And why do students have to do math homework in pen? but still churning out pieces for French style bureaux and US magazines.
Then COVID hits, all the companies she has contacts with go under or slash their budgets to the bone and anyway she has to homeschool her son during confinement, trying to reinvent herself evenings and weekends.
Her sexy husband, now CEO of his own société, works from home in a bathrobe, completely preoccupied with saving his business, no longer shaving and reverting to the ancestral custom of not wearing deodorant. Romance slides onto the back burner.
Fall 2020, Jr is back in school, spouse is back at the office a few days a week, but Paris has been declared a “scarlet zone” due to the galloping COVID infection rate of the second wave. The government is threatening confinement again… Now what?
(Will include ultra glam shots of Paris. Story ideas and comments welcome.)
Originally published at http://thankyouparis.wordpress.com on October 11, 2020.
