Shoes

The ladies are gearing up for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar banquet. Those lucky enough to be going, and the still luckier ones who are up for an Edgar, are combing the stores and trolling the internet in search of the perfect festive shoe.

This is one of those things that men don't understand. I'm not going to try to explain it to them here, but rather I'm going to muse and rhapsodize on some of the perfect shoes I've had over the years and the perfect shoes I still yearn for. Harold doesn't understand either. There's a box in the attic labeled "Ymelda Marcos Shoe Collection" in his scornful handwriting, in which some of my old perfect shoes are resting quietly, including the red patent leather perforated square-toe sling-backs with the black heels that my sister and I invested in together, getting maybe two wearings apiece out of them before they went out of style. I would wear them tomorrow if my feet hadn't spread from narrow to medium in the last fifty years.

The prison matron shoes are in there also. They used to be bone-colored with brown piping and stacked leather heels, rather sweet really, until something fell on them and stained them, whereupon the shoemaker talked me into letting him dye them black. After that I couldn't wear them without looking down and seeing Lotte Lenya's feet on the ends of my ankles, in that part she played, Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. All those shoes need now is knives in the toes.

What I like to see, looking down at my feet, is something that reminds me of Bette Davis stepping out of her stateroom in Now Voyager, after the big makeover. You know the shot, her trim little ankles, her divine shoes. The dress and hat didn't hurt, either, but that's a discussion for another day. I went into a shoe store, The Velvet Slipper in Peddler's Village, a couple of years ago and explained my requirements. The young woman seemed to understand, and produced a couple of retro-looking pairs. I settled on a pair of peep-toe sling-back stacked leather wedge-heeled Chie Miharas, bone-color, lightly trimmed in burnt orange. Divine. They don't start to hurt until I've been standing around in them for at least an hour.

I'm almost ready for a second pair of Chie Miharas. Nieman Marcus has some I really like, if I could only dig up the money somewhere, purple and blue with thick cork platform soles and heels. Maybe I'll stick up a Seven-Eleven. The thing about Chie Mihara is that her shoes are never on the cutting edge of trendiness, so that they don't date right away, and yet they always look perfectly in fashion. If I were going to the Edgar dinner I might wish that she made evening shoes, but she doesn't, not really. On the other hand I'm not really going.