Shoes

People are looking at my shoes. That much I’m sure of. And they’ve been doing it for nearly a month. It’s very strange. I’ve never thought Parisians were shoe fetishists, but it’s happening several times a day. I notice shoes about as much as I notice anything else: I like to look at things and people in about equal measures. I don’t stare at shoes, except when I see five-inch stilettos, but then again the shoes women parisiennes wear make my feet hurt just looking at them. The men tend to wear nice shoes. They leave the running shoes to the tourists. They wear leather shoes as naturally with jeans as they do with a suit, though I haven’t seen so many suits recently or ties, for that matter, open collars being the right way this year. They don’t polish their shoes much. Or maybe they use dull polish: their shoes are not bright-and-shiny polished, but clean to look at and not often down at the heels. Nearly all the shoes are black. Still, I don’t really look at shoes. Maybe it has something to do with depth of field or peripheral vision, but I take them in, and that’s that. My shoes are making people do something entirely different. Maybe it’s also peripheral vision guiding them, but what happens, and it’s almost always the same, is puzzling. Someone coming towards me and probably taking me in the way anyone takes in other people in the crowd, suddenly looks down at my shoes, then looks me square in the face with a kind of startled look, as if I were wearing a clown’s boots. No such thing. My shoes are leather, but with a dull finish: they are boat shoes and brown. They are not common in Paris. But there are all kinds of other unaccustomed shoes in Paris, especially on the feet of Eastern Europeans whose clothing in general, unless they are rich and put together with two pins, as they French still sometimes say, looks shabby and somehow a bad copy of a poor model. My shoes are nicer than theirs. My foot is not particularly big, there’s nothing stuck to the soles, they have no holes, they’re not orange, they have no sequins: they are not in-your-face shoes. But even the Eastern Europeans don’t attract the face-to-shoe-to-face looks mes chaussures de voile inspire. It’s getting creepy. I’m wondering what’s the matter—and I thought nothing was the matter at all. I perch on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg with my feet out. The number of people doing the face-shoe-face boogie rises—and so it does when I do the same in the garden outside the Musée Rodin, the Tuileries, and the Parc de Monceau: different Arrondissements, rive droite, rive gauche, different times of the day, and the results are the same. This requires a solution and, in France, any solution begins with a theory. I theorize. My face does not match my shoes. Or, my shoes do not match my face. I Google “my shoes do not match my face” and do not get an exact match. But why should I? How do faces and shoes match? I have never thought about this before. Maybe they match in Paris. I accept both theories and think some more. Over the years that I have come to Paris, people have often told me that I do not look American. This is not always a compliment: they might mean German. (In the 2004 elections, John Kerry’s detractors claimed to think he “looked French.”) On occasion, café waiters and docents leading the tours of cathedrals, who unfailingly addressed people correctly in their native languages one after another, hesitated when they got to me. Maybe, I think, my face is ordinary enough—not too American, in other words—to blend into the crowd on the sidewalk. But my shoes must speak louder than I thought or Parisians are much more shoe-aware than I ever could have imagined.   The theory can be put to the test. I have a pair of black leather shoes, Italian loafers, soft as slippers with thin soles. They look swell, but I don’t want to walk far in them and have only worn them when I’ve gone out in the evening when it was dark and nobody noticed them. I figure I don’t have to beat my feet to death to see if these match my face any better. Off I go. I walk down a few busy boulevards. I find a bench and stretch my feet out. I lean against a tree and just stand there for a while. Inconclusive evidence. Not as many people stop and look as had when I wore the boat shoes, but still more than I had expected, what I had expected being zero. So switching to dressy shoes from casual ones made the difference? Or from brown shoes to black? Having neither casual black shoes nor dressy brown ones, I cannot complete the experiment. Back to the apartment to change my shoes, convinced there are mystères parisiens that I will never unravel, thinking that’s just as well, and trying to console myself that I can almost pass in Paris. © Joseph Lestrange