Les Godasses Émile by Christie Cochrell

“It seemed very sad to see you going off in your new shoes alone.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to F. Scott

Mr. Morton needed a new pair of shoes. The hotel staff all agreed. The gangly, puppy-eyed American had been limping around Paris, alone and rather baffled by it all, charmed and dazzled but so awfully inept, not unlike Lambert Strether in the Parisian novel by Henry James aching with impressions and reverberations, hesitations and regrets. The pinching of his old, tiresome shoes made him (Morrie, as he was known back home) feel lame in actuality, as he’d come to feel lame in a much broader sense, though he was not nearly as old as he acted. Why had he brought his dress shoes, anyway? He knew he needed to find something comfortable with rubber soles that wouldn’t leave him stupidly immobilized, confined to his prosaic, if affordable, quarters. After only two days, he had to climb painfully up to his room on the third floor (unhelpfully referred to as the second) before hobbling back down to dinner and afterward to perch on the edge of the antiquated bathtub, soaking his sore feet while filling out the notes he scribbled during his wanders each day. The tub, which took up most of the bathroom, took forever to fill—and then the water was only ever lukewarm and slowly seeped out through the imperfectly sealed stopper.

Morrie was staying in a small hotel on the Left Bank, as he’d forever pictured himself doing—but as it turned out, the quarter of the famed Bohemians, the artists, writers, and philosophers, had only left him feeling gauche. (His puns—or bons mots—did give him occasional glimmers of satisfaction.) It didn’t help that all the hotel staff insisted on addressing him as “Mr.” all the time—keeping him in his place as an inglorious American, unfit to darken the doorstep of those hallowed precincts. That soubriquet repeatedly defined and downsized him.

“Yes, Mr. Morton,” the desk clerk with his iconic mustache à la Jean Rochefort had answered with that dismissive politeness when he’d reported the bathtub leak for the second time.

“You’d do well, Mr. Morton,” the snarky teenaged bellhop said, eyeing with great disdain the démodé American’s unwieldy leather brogues when the subject was broached, “to visit Les Godasses Émile on Rue xx . . .” Morrie hadn’t been able to decipher the street name, even when the young man repeated it, so had to find the address of the shoe store on his phone when he limped back up to his room after his cold breakfast.

The quest cheered him, though, that third morning, and then the store itself, and the fantastic shoes—the lightweight everyday sneakers said to be made from eucalyptus fiber just exactly what he needed for exploring boulevards and cobbled alleyways; museums, cemeteries, churches. For summoning the necessary confidence to make that long-overdue call that might just change his life—a feat unthinkable in his old graceless clodhoppers. His heart suddenly hammering away at the idea of seeing Clara again, maybe today; he didn’t even notice when the female clerk who’d helped him with the shoes (college student?—old crone?—he couldn’t possibly have said) returned his credit card to him with a small flourish and a smile, saying “Merci bien, Monsieur Morton.”

Morrie had fallen instantly for Clara Remy in a college class twenty-some years ago. “Paris in the 20s”—the beginning of their mutual fondness for the mythical Lost Generation, their longing to join the American writers who’d found artistic salvation in Paris, an escape from the dreary materialism and prohibitive morality back home. They’d both dreamed big and talked about heading for the glittering City of Lights and Love as soon as they possibly could. In Morrie’s version of the dream, they lived together there, a bright, impassioned life in an aesthetic atelier under a star-studded skylight, feeding baguette crumbs to the burbling French pigeons with their collars of smoky amethyst or sooty gray.

But he had failed, and Clara succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. He’d gone on being lost, lowercase L, a nondescript internal auditor for an Omaha bank, while she had found success in every way—lived in an airy two-bedroom apartment close to the Port de l’Arsenal, across the Seine from le Jardin des Plantes, and wrote full time now, as he’d told himself he would, back then, before being chucked head first into Accounting and then Control Methodology. Clara (as she’d written in long, enviable letters over the years) had had a blast working in one of the fancy Parisian fabric stores, fabrics for drapes, upholstery, “Fauteuils, canapés, banquettes, tentures murales”—toile de Jouy, period Chintz, Zimbabwe batiks—happily taking home samples and scraps, as they appealed, which added color and a very French je ne sais quoi to her ample space—and gave her material (pun intended) for her first, bestselling, novel. She’d married a composer whose father had studied with Ravel or Satie and so immersed herself as well in Paris’s musical world. The composer had died tragically and young, leaving Clara and their daughter, Mielle, a sizeable family fortune. Clara had found a fabulous agent, she’d gushed in her last Christmas letter, for her subsidiary rights and Gideon’s royalties.

Now, finally, Morrie was here, ready to take up where he’d left off all those years ago, to shed the mediocrity that had overcome him in the meantime. Though his friend’s male secretary (really?) let him know that she was not available today but could see him tomorrow around 2:00, he wasn’t short of things to keep him occupied. His heart—eager, impatient—could yet be distracted happily enough, and his new shoes would keep his wanderlusting feet contented, too. Before he saw Clara, he’d see more of Paris. He’d seek out every haunt he’d seen in print, in his mind’s eye.

He’d been particularly fond of the displaced American writers Fitzgerald and Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Henry James, of course—poor dazzled Lambert Strether, whose crisis (or cris de coeur) came during the eating of a perfect small Parisian omelette before being called back to his staid New England life. So, he set out to find all the places they’d immortalized.

He passed the house where Ernest Hemingway and his first wife had called on Gertrude Stein, where, as A Moveable Feastdescribed it, “she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly, and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum, except there was a big fireplace, and it was warm and comfortable, and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.” (Heaven!)

He visited the sacred bookstore the writers had haunted. Shakespeare and Company, the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach, at 12 rue de l’Odéon. “On a cold, windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.” (Parfait.) He came away with many, many books.

 He’d hoped to prowl through the Delacroix Museum on rue Furstenberg and sit in its enclosed garden, jotting down every captivating detail in his Moleskine—the artist’s atelier the keystone of a little story he had found by chance in an obscure journal and been enchanted by. He was dismayed to find it closed for year-long renovations, so instead, he managed to find a table at the historic Café de Flore and sat imagining the famous novelists sitting and writing there over the years. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Hemingway sometimes, Capote, Durrell—then he himself, Morrie, writing now every day, maybe, maybe with Clara, who’d be in his life again tomorrow afternoon. For real, this time. They’d write and write, fulfilled, in love, with all the Paris haunts around them charmingly, vivid, as in the passage he had underlined three times in Hemingway’s Paris memoir.

“In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered. The goat-herd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot.” To catch the goat’s milk, while the all-observant writer went back to his writing.

***

It didn’t take even an hour to discover that it had all been a pipe dream.

The Clara he knew had been completely renovated, too. Closed to access as absolutely as the Delacroix Museum. As the Paris where Morrie was just “Mr.” to all.

Her mind on her lofty creations the whole time, which she described to him in breathy prose while he tried to summon some sort of interest—her latest neurotic heroine, her daughter Mielle’s lessons at the Paris Opera ballet school, the CD she was issuing of Gideon’s late Messe Solonnelle (“reworking Berlioz in fascinating ways”).

Focused on the alluring view of Paris treetops out the breathless floor-to-ceiling window in the room she called “the library,” Morrie had tipped over his fragile coffee cup with gilded lip and ruined two antique lace doilies and the copy of one of her older books which Clara had just lengthily inscribed for him. She hadn’t been able to hide her flash of annoyance, to convincingly brush aside his stuttering and overdone apologies for his clumsiness. (Once again, truly gauche.)

“I’m so sorry,” she said, as he made excuses to cut the visit short, without getting—or wanting, in the end—to tell her what it was he’d hoped to retrieve from her, to come away with after all the unfulfilling years. And clearly without meaning it, like those false air kisses, faux politesse, she added as she held the door open for him to leave, “I’m really sad to see you go.”

He guessed he’d end up in one of her slick novels, the sad and foolish figure of a disappointed man turning in the wrong direction in his dumb, ill-fitting shoes as he came out of the apartment building onto the bustling Bassin d’Arsenal sidewalk. Alone, among the couples and the families walking there.

So now, he told himself, thoroughly crushed, he might well not ever even find that perfect omelette. Not find any of all the things he’d hoped to find. Never escape being that gormless Mr. Morton to the lordly staff of his dinky hotel on an unremarked corner of the (J’ar)Rive Gauche. Not even the J.D. he’d been christened by an overly curt father and had, since he was twelve, refused to use.

Angry at fate and suddenly aware that his new shoes had been pinching his toes since he’d bought them (he’d told himself he could make do with the half-size too small that was the only one in stock), he formed a valiant resolve. He’d go back to the shoe store, unusually gutsy for him, and exchange or at least replace the pair he’d stupidly chosen, telling himself they would be fine.

He vaguely recognized the clerk who had helped him before. Before. But everything was different now.

“Monsieur Morton,” she welcomed him, smiling with the face of Chagall’s muse, Bella, from the painting Les Amoureux (which he remembered reading had been auctioned in 2017 by Sotheby’s for $28.5 million). A face open and sweet, one you just liked instinctively.

This time, he saw the sales assistant, felt her fingers on his foot (a kind of Cinderella story in reverse?), and heard her in charmingly French-tinged English granting him entry to a sacred realm. Allowing him equal footing, he thought, punning delightedly again.

The words so long repressed came over him, the possibility of writing something fine and true. It occurred to him that “godasses,” the word for common shoes, was close, so close, to goddesses, like the one standing here waiting to know what he liked best, what she could bring him from their immense store. (His book might be an adult fairy tale with shoe store princesses, society dragons.)

“Morrie,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Solange,” the goddess offered back.

Paris was his again—and possibility. As had happened to the newly awakened Strethers in The Ambassadors, “Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river.” For they were there, that day, and days ahead, maybe a whole lifetime ahead, Morrie and bright Solange (his petit shoe-fleur, his very own endearment for this dear companion, twisting the traditional chou-fleur), together eating crêpes in a café beside the Seine—beurre et sucre, sometimes with lemon or Grand Marnier; ham, egg, and Gruyère—after walking and walking for hours on end, past old familiar haunts, in the new shoes that almost made him dance.