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Shoe 
This has what to do with anything? He’ll see. It started while he was
driving his older daughter to school. His younger daughter looked so grown-up in
skirt and high-heeled shoes last night, he said. Those weren’t high heels, she
said. They’re platform shoes. "Platforms; okay. But that reminds me of a
funny story. Actually, not so funny. But something I probably haven’t thought
about for more than thirty years. It concerns high-heeled shoes. You
interested?" "Depends if it’s interesting." And then in the
short trip he told her the story. A friend wanted to hook him up with what he
said was a very good-looking, intelligent woman. I., around thirty-two at the
time, said he hated going on blind dates, and his friend said he promises this
one he won’t regret. So he asked the friend to call the woman to see if
she’d mind I. calling her. "Don’t build me up or anything. I don’t
want her disappointed that way if she does agree to see me." She told the
friend to have I. call her. So he did. They spoke for a while and seemed to get
along and have several similar interests, and made a date to meet for coffee.
The woman was as attractive and as smart as his friend had said. She was beautiful,
even, and pleasant, and had a lovely slim figure. So they had coffee, a good
time talking; he walked her back to her apartment building, and in front of it, he
said, "Would you mind if I called again?" "Sure," she said,
"that’d be nice." He said "Why even bother calling? Maybe we
could arrange right now to meet for dinner or a movie sometime or anything else
you might like to do." "Sure," she said. "when’s good for
you? I’m not busy Friday." "Friday, then," and they shook hands
and he went home—he was living with his folks till he saved enough money
from his job to afford to get his own apartment—and started fantasizing:
beautiful woman, great figure, gorgeous legs, very smart, cheerful, terrific
sense of humor, and interested in so many of the things he was: books, music,
theater, art, certain movies, even opera. He saw himself kissing her goodnight
at her door after their first real date—they’d settled on a movie. she
might even invite him in after that kiss, and then more kissing and maybe some
petting. She seemed modern, uninhibited, so who knew if she wouldn’t suggest
they go to bed after a lot of kissing and petting, or they just ended up in bed,
neither of them suggesting it, most of their clothes off in the living room, the
bedroom the next natural place to go to. He didn’t tell his daughter any of
that. Nor that he went to the woman’s building that Friday at the time
they’d set. A brownstone, not far from his parents’ building. Rang her bell
in the vestibule. No one answered. Rang it several times, waiting a minute
between each ring. It was ten minutes or so after he was supposed to be there.
So what the hell’s going on? he thought. Someone was coming downstairs from
the second floor. A woman but not her. He thought she might object if he just
walked in while she was walking out, or kept the door from closing, so he said,
when she opened the door, "I’ve got an appointment with Susan Geller,
third floor, and her bell doesn’t seem to be working, excuse me," and
slipped past her and hurried upstairs. He found her apartment and rang the bell.
No answer. Rang again and knocked. "Susan, you home?" He heard someone
walk quietly up to the door, sounding as if she was barefoot or in slippers. He
forgot to mention he’d come with flowers. He didn’t know why he'd brought
them. He thinks she'd expressed an interest in flowers the last time, that she was
raised in the country and how much she missed flowers not being right outside
her front door this time of year, so he thought they’d please her and, lets
face it, get him in good with her. Of course that was the reason. Anyway, he
said, "Susan, that you? We had a date tonight, don’t you remember?"
"Oh... gee," she said, tsking. "I'm sorry; I forgot."
Just then someone from far off in the apartment—a man—was saying
something I couldn’t make out. "Shh, if you don't mind," she
said.
"I’m talking." The man got a little angry in his voice and said
something about solicitors and canvassers and for her to do what he always does
to them through the door and that’s to cut them off fast. "Is there a guy
in there with you?" I. said. "What kind of stuff is that? We were
supposed to go to the movies right around now." "Listen," she
said, "I'll have to break the date. Please call me tomorrow and I'll
explain." "Call you tomorrow? You crazy? Go screw yourself," and
he threw the flowers at the door and left. What he told his daughter was that he
was once interested in a woman when he was thirty. Dated her a couple of times,
or maybe just once but with a little coffee date before the first real movie
one, when—after it, at her door—she told him she wasn’t interested in
seeing him again. "All right, that happens; you can't expect every woman
you want to go out with to want to go out with you or continue to after the
first or second date. You're lucky, in fact, if one-third of the ones you like
or are attracted to and so on—or at least that was my ratio, or maybe a bit
higher, since I didn't always go for the ungettable—have the same feelings for
you. But I did like this woman and was sorry she didn't want to see me again.
And even though nothing ever happened between us, I couldn't get her out of my
head and even suffered a bit of heartsickness over her. She was so beautiful and
smart and funny and lovely, I thought she was perfect and I would have died
to have something happen between us. Then, a couple of weeks later, when I’m
still pining for her and even thinking of calling her for a date, though I never
believed she’d go out with me again—and I should make this short so I can
get the whole story in before we get to school—I see her on Broadway in the
Theater District. I was looking for a job and she was working as a publicist for
a movie director, though I think really as his factotum—someone who does a
lot of different menial jobs for someone—who was casting then for a film he
was going to direct in New York. A big name too, I remember, though I forget it
now. She was standing as if frozen next to a building and not looking too happy.
I was about to go over to her and say something like ‘What a coincidence’—not that we were both unhappy, me over her and she I didn’t know what yet,
but of meeting her—when her expression changed to anger and then, as if she
were about to explode, her body started jerking. She was struggling, it
turned out, to get one of her high-heeled shoes—this is where the high heels
come in—out of a sidewalk grate it was stuck in. You know, the long thin heel
part wedged between two of the bars. First she tried jerking it out with her
foot still in the shoe. Then she took her foot out and tried pulling the shoe
out by hand. Finally, she squatted down and tried pulling the shoe out with both
hands, but nothing worked. I thought ‘Should I help her?’ Then I thought,
‘After what she did to me?’" "Why, what’d she do that was so
bad?" his daughter said. "She didn’t want to go out with you.
That’s all right, isn’t it?" "Of course, and what I immediately
thought too. So I started over to help her, if she wanted me to. But just then
she got the shoe out—she never saw me, you understand—but the heel part
separated from the rest and stayed stuck in the grate. That did it for her, and
she raised the bad shoe over her head as if she wanted to throw it someplace.
Well, I don’t know if I remember all that exactly, but something like it, and
then calmed down. I think she tried dislodging the heel part from the grate
again, couldn’t, and walked lopsidedly to the curb—because she only had
one shoe on, you see—and stuck her hand out for a cab. People were staring
at her walking in this funny way and then standing there, one side of her a few
inches higher than the other. She was fuming again, so nobody dared, it seemed,
to say anything to her or help get her a cab. Me, I ducked aside because I knew
she’d never want to know that someone she was acquainted with and had been
introduced to by a fairly good friend, even someone she probably didn’t think
much of—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to flail myself like that, but that’s
what I felt then and still do—had observed all this. Then a cab came, she
got in and drove away, and that’s the end of the story. And right on time,
too," as they just then pulled into the school driveway. "But what was
your reason for telling me it?" she said. "Shoes. Or that’s what
started me going. So maybe it was just that seeing her looking so awkward and
even buffoonish, though that might be too hard a word for it—her foot stuck
in the grate at one point before she pulled it out of the shoe and then hobbling
to the street carrying the broken shoe, and with a briefcase and in a good suit—sort of made me feel better and helped me get over her from that moment
on because I never again thought of her in a romantic or even a positive way after
that." "Why didn’t she take the good shoe off and walk in her feet
on the street? And how come she didn’t put the broken shoe in her briefcase,
if it wasn’t too stuffed up, so she wouldn’t look silly? But that’s mean
what you said, using her trouble and then her being embarrassed for your own
benefit like that." "You could be right. And also about the shoe in
the briefcase and walking with both feet instead of a shoe and a foot. I don’t
know why she didn’t do either of those. But you’re definitely right about my
wrong attitude at the time. What I should have done then was help her get the
shoe out of the grate, if she would have let me, and why wouldn’t she have? Or
at least the heel after it had separated from the shoe. A shoemaker could have
put the two parts together easily, I’d think, while without the heel, she
probably had to throw the shoes away or just hope that a shoemaker or the store
she'd bought the shoes at could send away for a new heel, not to say all the time
she must have spent cabbing home to get another pair that day or to a store to
buy a new pair. And think of the money she could have saved if I had retrieved
the heel, and certainly the whole shoe intact, which is what I should have thought
of then instead of taking whatever pleasure in her predicament. Also, for
whatever it would have been worth, she would have thought of me better
too." His daughter smiled, as if she liked that he thought she was right,
and he kissed her goodbye and she got out of the car. "You have your
lunch?" and she said, "You asked me that when we left."
"Right, I did, and besides, I can’t even remember the last time you
forgot it. So I’ll see you at 2:20. Don’t be late because I have a class at
three," and she waved and went inside the school. Driving home, he thought
he wished Susan had seen him staring at her while her foot was stuck in the
grate and then when she tried to get the shoe out and hobbled to the street and
later when her cab pulled away. No, he did the right thing by making himself
invisible. It was enough the incident got him over her, and who needs revenge?
He heard from that same friend about a year later that she moved to L.A. and got
a good job in publicity for a movie company. Then he never heard anything about
her again or even, he thinks, thought of her till he was in the car with his
daughter.
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