James T. Barker

816-835-9007

NYTimes

September 10, 2009

Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy

One Man and His Ugly Shoes

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

MY husband is wearing ugly shoes. Very ugly shoes.

At first, I didn’t notice. He had just returned from a business trip to New York, and there he stood, next to my desk, beaming.

“What?” I asked. “Is there something in my hair?”

He said nothing. Just kept smiling. He looked very happy.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, still smiling. Then he stuck out a toe and started stroking my calf.

I shrieked and recoiled in terror. “Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?” I asked. His feet were sheathed in some kind of creepy black rubberized gorilla-feet things. “Is that a Halloween costume?”

“They’re new,” he said. “It’s special ergonomic technology to simulate the experience of walking barefoot.” He had bought them after reading a book on the airplane about an isolated tribe of Mexican Indians who can run hundreds of miles barefoot.

He stopped briefly to lift a foot and give it a loving gaze, before adding in an awestruck tone, “They’ll make me run faster in marathons.”

“You’ve never run a marathon in your life,” I said.

“Well, now I can if I want to,” he said. Then, as he left the room, he called: “You should try them, too. They’re supposed to be good for lower back pain.”

I was not completely surprised by this sartorial twist. My husband has a history of making disturbing fashion choices. This dates at least to when I met him in the mid-1980s. He favored striped knit ties in those days.

I waited that one out, but it was followed by the era of the ponytail (circa 1994) and then an awkward cyber-geek eyeglasses period (1995-2000).

But gorilla shoes? (2009-??) I am not Dian Fossey.

Suddenly, a new and terrible thought occurred to me. Where was he lumbering off to, wearing those things? Surely he wasn’t thinking of leaving the house. ...

Part of me hoped — wanted desperately to believe, in fact — that he had just gone to stand in front of a full-length mirror. I imagined him admiring his sudden but striking resemblance to a hairy plant-eating primate who was in the process of rebuilding toe muscles weakened by decades of wearing sneakers. (“Our feet have atrophied,” he lectured, sternly. “Not mine,” I said.)

But another part of me suspected worse.

“Wait,” I called after him. “You’re not going outside in those, are you?”

In the distance, I heard a door slam.

Perhaps no one would see him and he would move through this devastating period quickly. There was a slim chance, after all, that he was wearing them only for work. As a tech reviewer with a broad mandate, he often tries out weird things for a week or two. Like Spanx for men. He did that recently, enSpanxed under his favorite black T-shirt — the one silk-screened with a rat drawn by Ed Roth, known as Big Daddy — and then life returned to normal.

But what if this was a symptom of something bigger? Something midlife-y?

There is a sort of man — perhaps you know one, maybe you’ve even been married to one for, say, 21 years — who seems at first glance to be outwardly unfazed by the onset of middle age. Even as many of his friends and colleagues start to exhibit the classic signs of a crisis — a two-seater convertible, dyed hair, or a sudden and inexplicable interest in surfing — this sort of man continues on, blithely and dependably, going to work, walking the dogs, making you coffee in the morning.

But then one day, you look closer. And you see he’s making a fashion statement that might actually be a telegram from the heart: “Help me,” it says. “Stop.” Had he sprouted a goatee or a mustache, or come home with a Sanskrit tattoo, I would have known immediately.

Of course, the science of Midlife-Crisis Detection is complicated in California, where I live, by our proximity to Hawaii. Many middle-aged men here veer tragically toward garish floral shirts (I’m not sure why I used the word “garish” there, because it’s redundant). You see a middle-aged man walking around in, say, Trenton, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and you know what you’re dealing with. But here? The wearer could simply be yet another blissed-out California dude.

Thankfully, my husband doesn’t own any Hawaiian shirts. He prefers guayaberas. The shirts are harmless, I guess, though sometimes he is mistaken for a dentist.

But at this moment I would have given anything for him to walk back into the room dressed like an orthodontist instead of wearing an obvious midlife crisis on his feet. In public.

Twenty minutes later, he returned, whistling.

“Where have you been?” I demanded.

“I went to the market to buy stuff for dinner,” he said. “And boy, do my feet feel great. I can practically feel my arches rebuilding with every step I take in these babies.”

“Never mind that,” I said, drawing the blinds. “Did anyone see you?”

He thought for a minute.

“Well, that guy who walks everywhere was there, and he came up to me to ask about the shoes,” he said. “And then, when I got to the checkout, I saw Stephanie — — ”

“Not the Stephanie who lives across the street?” I whispered, the blood draining from my face. She is my fashion idol.

“When she saw my shoes, she shrieked that I looked like a gorilla and she kind of jumped back — — ”

“You mean she recoiled in terror,” I said, correcting him.

“And then she said, really loudly, ‘Does Michelle know you’re wearing those?’ ”

I sat down. I covered my face with my hands.

“And then,” he continued happily, “the clerk got really excited. I think everybody’s going to be wearing them soon.”

He started beaming again. And I looked into his eyes, deeply, and saw the man I married 21 years ago. Knit ties, cyber-eyeglasses, gorilla shoes. Yeah, it was definitely the same guy.

“Sweetie?” he asked.

“Yes?” I said.

“They come in women’s sizes.”

“Don’t push it,” I said.

E-mail: slatalla@....