Matti put his ear against the door and listened for a long time. The ticking of the large wall clock (an employee gift from Koor Industries years ago) came from inside the room, very faint in the silence. He bent down, peeked through the keyhole, and his eye came up against a dark spot that must have been the key stuck in the lock from the other side of the door. “Margie!” he called, shuddering slightly from the unfamiliar sound of his own voice. Then quietly, “Margie? Are you there?” He waited, gazing down at the pointed toes of the new black patent leather shoes Margie had talked him into buying.

As he stood there, captivated by the glimmer of his shoes, that incident in the shoe store with Margie a week ago suddenly forced itself on him, compelling him to recall and recount its every detail, now of all times: how he and Margie had taken a taxi to the store at the north end of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv (his car was in the shop), how Margie’s feet hurt from the new shoes she’d just bought and insisted on wearing immediately, how they’d looked for a pharmacy to buy Band-Aids, paid and left the box on the counter, gone back to the pharmacy again (and the argument that had ensued at a street bench on which Margie collapsed, over whether to go back to the pharmacy where they’d left the Band-Aids or buy new ones at a closer pharmacy; and the beads of sweat on Margie’s chin when she barked, “It’s pennies, Matti! Those Band-Aids cost pennies, for God’s sake!”) and then the taxi. No, actually before the taxi and before the pharmacy, they’d stopped for ice cream. She didn’t like hers (pistachio), had been tempted by the pale green color but after a few licks she wanted to throw it away. And then the taxi. Margie’s long, brown thigh slung distractedly over his, and what she said while she gazed out the window, not at him. “I love taking cabs so much. Being driven. I wish this would never end,” she’d said, and all at once Matti felt so abandoned, but he didn’t respond, simply tried to quell the buds of displeasure and disappointment inside himself, even though he did not fully understand what she meant, and privately wondered whether to be hurt by her absentmindedness, which projected such anonymity, or to just let it be, to just leave it.

He remembered her protruding kneecap when she’d placed her leg on his thigh in the taxi and rubbed her sore heels. Margie’s sharp, bronzed kneecap with the thick scar from when she’d fallen off her bike at age seven. He remembered how she’d told him about that fall, when she’d rolled down the street with the bike. She was lying on the side of the road, her arms and knees bleeding, and when a woman walked by and wanted to help, she’d told her, “Don’t do me any favors.” There was enormous wonder in him now at that “Don’t do me any favors,” which she’d recounted to him with both disgust and pride. It was a completely different species of wonder, so much deeper than the previous one, from two years ago, when she’d told him the bike story and his wonderment had been somehow tempered with bemusement.

And then there was the men’s shoe store. The grooms’ store, to be precise. And the salesclerk, at once obsequious and indifferent, who had aroused a strange loathing in Matti. The moment of embarrassment when he took his shoes off and discovered a hole in one sock, which he put his hand over. How he’d been embarrassed in front of Margie and how she’d suddenly put her arms around him (a moment earlier she’d been completely absorbed in her broken thumb nail, and he’d felt clumsy and superfluous in the store’s fragrant air), put her lips on his neck and whispered, “I saw your shame.”

Just then the clerk came over with those patent leather shoes, the ones Margie had seen in the window before they’d walked in and had clapped her hands delightedly. He’d given her a sideways glance, suspicious yet enchanted by her childish excitement (“Matti, don’t say ‘childish’ any time you don’t understand something,” she’d once scolded him), and as they’d walked through the store’s automatic doors he’d told her, “You . . . Anyone can buy you with all that glittery stuff, just like the Indians,” but she didn’t hear, she was already talking to the salesclerk, who treated her with esteem, having figured out instantly who had the power and who made the decisions in this couple.

Was that what irritated him so much when he rejected the shoes, pushed the box back at the clerk, laced up his own shoes, and stormed out of the shop? Margie was in no hurry to follow. Not in any real hurry. He remembered the moments he’d spent standing outside, next to a glass recycling bin, slightly embarrassed by himself, almost choking from the way she’d hurt him by not hurrying out after him. He repeated to himself over and over again what he planned to say to her, or rather to hurl at her: “I’m not a doll that you dress up in flashy shoes, do you understand?” Each time he recited the line and reached the crescendo—“understand?”—with its rhetorical, echoing question mark, he felt the blood pulsing in his temples. Pulsing, that was the word. What the hell was she doing in the store all that time? He was so astonished when she finally emerged and walked slowly toward him, smiling and dragging her injured feet on the sidewalk as if nothing had happened (by this point her heels were hanging off the edge of the shoes and the Band-Aids were tattered and almost completely falling off), linked her arm with his and said: “Let’s go see Harry Potter.”

And he bought the black patent leather shoes. In the end. He bought them. Went back the next morning to that disgusting shop, bought them without trying them on, and went straight home with the box. “There’s probably a special section of hell for idiots like me,” he told her when they sat on the balcony drinking coffee, the empty shoe box between them and the black shoes on his feet. Margie leaned over to the shoes, polished them with the hem of her skirt and held them up to her face, straining to see her nose reflected in the lacquer. “Stop rehashing it, Matti. You just wanted to make me happy, what’s the big deal?” she said.