The Gorgeous Girls by Marie Wilson Page A

naked foot, he came.
    If only the rule-enforcing librarian here were prim and proper Marian the Librarian. She might understand how I feel. I’m certain the Music Man quite dashed her morals to kingdom cum on one of those ladders that move about old library shelves on wheels.
    The man in the suit leans into his book, his face within licking distance of its pages. Okay, so fucking in that room upstairs isn’t possible, but fondling each other beneath the table while pretending to study is.
    I dare not look at him. Behind me, a Staff Only door clangs open and shut at regular intervals. A stairwell, perhaps? Jam the door. Ram the cock. Bang the dude. Wham, bam, thank you, man.
    But wait. He’s getting up to leave. He exits as swiftly as he entered. I glance at the book he left behind.
A
Moveable Feast
, Hemingway’s account of his Paris years.
    The young man on the fifth floor stops moving, and all is silent, quiet as a library should be. He gets up, dishevelled and sticky, and walks away.
    But Pinstripe returns for his book, which I am now reading. Politely he asks for it and politely I hand it over. He turns to go. Then, as if the other sandal had dropped, he turns back and asks me if I would consider meeting him for a drink that evening. “The Library Bar at the Royal York Hotel. Six-ish?”
    â€œYes,” I answer, wiggling my toes in my black leather Miracle boots.

ROSE
    Oh, both my shoes are shiny new . . .
    â€”Dorothy Parker

    When I was a girl, I would sometimes fill my bed with shoes. I’d line them up at night beside my eight-year-old self and fall asleep. I welcomed them into my bed at night to protect my soul, just as their tough leather protected my soles by day.
    A couple of years ago I bought twenty pairs of shoes at an estate sale, all but two of them high-heeled, pointy-toed splendours. Their owner had died a month before. I never knew her, but on sunny summer days I used to see her getting into her lipstick-red convertible. She had big, puffed-up hair atop a big, puffed-up body that was invariably clothed in black baby-doll dresses. Her jewellery was oversized and clangy and caught my eye with flashes of sunlight on gold. Perhaps that’s why I never noticed her feet or what she had on them. But, oh, those shoes!
    I was in her apartment the day of the sale selecting a number of large, radiant rhinestone earrings when a woman called out from the basement. “The ruby-red slippers!”
    I swiftly made my way downstairs to lay my eyes on the fabled red shoes. They were glowing in the dim light on the feet of some Dorothy wannabe.
    Her feet were too big for them, so I was spared the embarrassment of having to beg. I swooped in and casually picked up the crimson-sequined pair before the four other shoppers could blink an eye. I went on to look through four large boxes filled to the brim with still more shoes in clear plastic bags, all cousins and sisters and aunts of the ruby reds. Every glittery toe and spiked heel was in mint condition.
    Colourful sequined shoes dot my living room, breaking the monotony, posing heel-to-heel atop door ledges and side-by-side on windowsills and bookshelves in their glittery artfulness. Were their original owner alive to witness this display, she might disapprove of their naked, de-bagged, dust-gathering lollygagging.
    But I’d like to think that the Mistress of the Shoes is now joyously wondering why she’d rarely let these babies out to breathe and pose and cavort, to kiss rhinestone to sequin, to dance shiny heel to scuffed sole.
    â€œAh,” she might lament, “shoes as art!” To hell with looking pretty in dazzling but body-warping shoes—shoes that lead the eye up to shapely calves that lead the eye up farther to an hourglass figure, if only one could achieve such a thing!
    Her daughter told me that her mother had custom-made outfits that matched each and every pair of shoes. I saw some of these