The Movie Star's Shoe

There are a lot of rats in Los Angeles County; they find it very hospitable.  I don’t mean the metaphorical ones who drive Porsches and dwell in cliffside houses in Pacific Palisades, but big, brown Norway rats that slink around the fringes of bushes in the ocean-front parks and skulk across the damp Santa Monica sand, snuffling their whiskers in the breeze to catch a whiff of greasy French fries and chicken nuggets as they fall through the wide wooden planks of the Pier.

As a transplanted New Yorker I had never thought about rats sharing our Southern California paradise until our neighbor Debbie told me how relieved she was that Jean Pierre, another neighbor, was having his twenty-foot tall Washingtonia filifera palms pruned.  Not understanding, I asked why.  “Ask the tree guy when he gets here” she replied knowingly. 

Later that day I had a long discussion with the man pruning the trees; he told me that rats like to live in untidy palms, the ones with the dead fronds hanging down; they enjoyed the protection from the elements and the close food source that unwary humans provide.  To forestall this, the trees must be pruned twice yearly.  Chilled, I spent the entire rest of the day grateful for Jean Pierre’s garden diligence.

            That night sitting at an outside table at The Blue Plate Oysterette, watching the sun slip behind the forty-foot King Palms lining Ocean Avenue, I idly (and mistakenly) relayed the conversation to my husband, Jamie.  I say ‘mistakenly’ because for the next three years - until we returned to the East Coast - every time we passed a palm tree he’d grab my arm and yell “Rat!”  At first it creeped me out, but since I never once saw a rat, eventually I concluded that there couldn’t possibly be rats in all of them.  Nevertheless, those invisible rodents remained secreted inside a small, dark sliver of my mind.

Still rat-less, weeks later, in mid-July we were lying on our bed watching the 11 o’clock news when I heard a thwack. I turned to Jamie.  “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“A smacking noise outside, like a bird hit the window.”

“So maybe a bird hit the window.”

“Jame, it’s . . . what, 11:20; what bird flies at that time of night?”

“Maybe it’s a bat.”

“Oooooh, do we have bats here?”

“Maybe it’s a rat jumping out of Jean Pierre’s palm tree.  Remember what the tree guy said.”

“Ewwwwwwwww.” 

“He’s coming to get you!”  Jamie grabbed my arm.  This time I did shriek.  What if the much anticipated, palm-tree-rodent had finally arrived?  He laughed.  “If you really want to know, look out the window.”

Ours is a very small house, a turn-of-the-century bungalow, set on a tiny, subdivided plot of land enclosed by a wrought-iron gate, barely ten feet away from the house across the paved path called a walk-street.  If that long-expected rat had appeared, he was sprawled on the porch roof, really close, maybe three feet away from the mattress.  I slid Spencer, our marmalade tabby, off my lap and faced the windows; approaching warily, I poked one finger tentatively through the blinds. Spencer padded after me eagerly, no doubt intrigued at the prospect of escaping through the window and seeing a rat.  I turned to plop him, squirming, on Jamie’s stomach and returned to the window.

Peering through the slats, I saw that something sat in the center of the pitched porch roof; it was sleek-looking with a long slender growth from one end, too sleek-looking to be a rat, even in overly groomed LA.   And while it was kind of rodenty in color, it appeared to have a red stomach.   Could it be a bloody rat? 

Grabbing the long blue plastic back scratcher I had gotten from a float-rider at the Fourth of July parade, I yanked at the blind cord, then slid up the window sash and leaned out.  I poked at the object with the scratcher.  With a clunking noise, it rolled over and displayed more of its red stomach.  Feeling somewhat safer - rats don’t generally clunk and roll - I leaned out further and tried to drag it toward me with the curled end of the scratcher.  It turned and clunked again, this time toward the edge.  Leaning out so far I feared tumbling out to join it on the small rooftop, I swatted again.  This time it caught.  I reeled it in.  It was a brown alligator Christian Louboutain stiletto.

Once I had the window closed, I sat on the rug examining my catch as it dangled expensively from the scratcher’s curved end.  It caught the light dully on its sable matte finish.  I lifted it gently and placed it beside me on the sea grass patterned carpet.  It gleamed; it was a left pump, its sole smooth and crimson, not yet scratched from use.  

I knew this shoe.  I had wanted a pair like this but saleswomen in every shoe department from Barney’s to Saks had sighed unctuously and inquired why I had not visited them sooner.  After all, it was the most important shoe of the collection and my size, six, was the most common in all of LA.    Covetously, I slid my bare foot inside my foundling’s cool newness.  Actually it was such a big shoe I could have inserted both of my feet. I hobbled around to Jamie’s side of the bed.  “Look at this.”

Intrigued by the news broadcast, he ignored me.  I removed the shoe from my foot and waved it in front of his face.  “Jame, look at this.  It wasn’t a rat; it was a shoe on the roof, a brand-new Louboutain.”

He glanced up distractedly and nodded. 

Perching on the edge of the mattress I twirled the shoe by its five-inch spike heel.  “How would this get here?” I mused.  “It’s expensive.  It’s alone and they come in pairs.  It’s big, too, look . . . size . . . oooh, eleven.  Wow.  And, anyway, they can’t fly, so how . . .” My voice trailed off.

Jamie looked up from the Marie Callendar commercial and jerked his head to the right.  “Her,” he said.

“Her who?”

He looked at me intently and spoke slowly, punctuating his words with a pointing index finger. “Her - across the walk-street.”  Then, just before he returned his face to the TV screen, he added, “And they can fly, by the way.”

Her Across the Walk-Street was an Oscar-winning actress known to the tabloids as America’s Sweetheart, a Chiclet-toothed girl-next-door, who earned tens of millions of dollars for every movie she made, regardless of how badly they bombed – and lately, several of them had.  While she and her manager-husband owned the bungalow opposite ours, they rarely stayed there, since they also had an estate in Malibu and another in the Palisades.   Being America’s Sweetheart paid handsomely.

After waiting for the next commercial to begin, I asked, “What are you talking about? What does Tessa have to do with a size eleven flying Louboutain?”

“It’s her shoe.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have met some of its relatives.”

“You can’t have; it’s here alone.”

Jamie shook his head, as if amazed by my naïveté.  “More distant relatives, then - a red Jimmy Choo, a black Givenchy, and . . . I am pretty sure the first one was a crème Manolo.  And they all knew how to fly, although some didn’t land too well; I thought the last one was gonna break the living room window.”

My lips formed a little “o”.  He tapped my chin and grinned.  “Close your mouth or you may catch the next one.”

It transpired that our neighbor - America’s Sweetheart – possessed the interpersonal communication skills of a thirteenth century Mongol.  Whenever she didn’t get her way - say, Jared, her husband, came home too late or stayed on the phone too long – she threw a screaming tantrum.  “Threw” appeared to be the operative word, too, because a shoe most often accompanied the shrieking verbal complaint; her right arm wound back and hurled – although with less precision than enthusiasm, admittedly, since no one had yet seen Jared with a black eye.  And as our house sat immediately opposite theirs on the narrow walk-street, the shoes landed most often on our porch. 

I was amazed at Jamie’s story.  “When does this happen?  Where have I been?”

“I don’t know where you are - work, Debbie’s, school.  It happens at all different times.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

He shrugged. “I didn’t really think about it.”

“Where are they?”

Jamie swigged his Diet Coke and jerked a thumb in the direction of Jennifer’s house while he swallowed.  “I gave ‘em back; what do you think, I kept ‘em?”

“How?” I envisioned his knocking on the door and bowing, ‘Your shoe, madam’ like some Post Modern Hollywood Sir Walter Raleigh.

“Usually I leave them on their front steps on my way to work in the morning.”

“Really?”

He stared.  “What else should do with them?”

I considered.  Fill them with lemonade and freeze them, making shoe-shaped granitas.  Plant them with dill and tarragon for a fashionista herb garden. Amusing, yes, but highly impractical, and nothing that my husband would have ever come up with.

“I don’t know.  I just . . . wondered.”

“Yeah, well, wonder it down to the front door and I’ll drop it off on my way out tomorrow.”

“Okay.  I guess.”  I carried the shoe to the narrow staircase and descended into the inky darkness as the late night music of a Law & Order rerun blared behind me. 
I wasn’t sure I wanted to return the shoe, although I certainly couldn’t articuate a reason for keeping it, except maybe contagion, as two Yale psychologists had called it - when people believe that they can capture the reflected glory of a celebrity by touching an object that the star touched, like at those Hollywood auctions Julien’s in Beverly Hills was always promoting.  This shoe was my little brush with celebrity, except in this case said celebrity’s Us Magazine life had been found wanting.  Stars!  They’re just like us!  They feed their kids and phone their therapists and argue with their spouses, but their neighbors have to help them finding their matching shoes after they have thrown them across courtyards.

A tiny part of me wanted to feel morally superior and be sorry for Tess; while I couldn’t quite manage that, I did think that, despite the great clothes and red-carpet events, it must be weird to be her. She may well do all those real-people things but she does them with an aging Sober Life Coach rolling along behind her, clutching a map and guiding her hand. 

No, she is nothing like me.  I teach high school English and worry about rats in palm trees, not rats clutching cameras, waiting patiently for the unflattering shot that will define me to all of America.

I sat in the dark until I no longer felt anything at all, then I opened the door gently, tiptoed across the paving stones, and lay the shoe on the doormat.