Cheese fondue goes again centuries. Meals historians level to an ur-version within the “Iliad,” through which a lady “as honest as a goddess” mixes collectively wine, barley meal and crumbs of goat’s-milk cheese from a bronze grater. However chocolate fondue is fashionable, invented within the Nineteen Sixties at Chalet Suisse in New York, by Konrad Egli, a Swiss chef removed from house. For years I used to be satisfied that Laura and I had dined that summer time at Chalet Suisse, underneath its barnlike beams as somber as church pews. However the restaurant was shuttered by then, and Laura, who for many years saved a meticulous diary, might discover no file of that meal.

Reminiscence, the good trickster. Was I with another person? Did it even occur? I keep in mind it so vividly, the style of sweetness hoarded as if it’d by no means come once more, and that heavy, transfiguring richness. How one thing so ridiculous might provide you with a lot pleasure.

The subsequent morning, I confirmed up in Midtown, able to work. The sneakers had been prototypes, shipped from Spain, with straps minimize so thick, I needed to jam them by means of the buckles. I waited in a again room till summoned, then got here tottering out on the little showroom runway, a grey hassock surrounded by gross sales reps from malls. After I stopped to pose, I bent one knee, as I’d been instructed, with the ankle cocked so they might see solely the skin of the shoe. The reps jabbed their ballpoint pens at my heels and scratched notes on clipboards. They by no means regarded up.

Quickly, I began to listen to whispers. “The toes are too skinny,” somebody muttered. Behind the door, the sneakers piled up, ripped off my toes and flung in a nook as I tugged on the following ones. On the finish of the afternoon, the lady who employed me stated gently that I needn’t come again. She paid me $100 in money and let me decide a pair of rejected sneakers to maintain. I didn’t perceive that they’d been shortly glued collectively and had been just for present. I selected brilliant inexperienced suede flats with witchy toes, as a result of I used to be attempting to be an attention-grabbing, surprising particular person, and I wore them for per week, hobbling, the pores and skin rubbing off the tops of my toes, till sooner or later on the sidewalk the picket soles peeled clear away.