A Chocolate Fondue to Remember

Cheese fondue goes back centuries. Food historians point to an ur-version in the “Iliad,” in which a woman “as fair as a goddess” mixes together wine, barley meal and crumbs of goat’s-milk cheese from a bronze grater. But chocolate fondue is modern, invented in the 1960s at Chalet Suisse in New York, by Konrad Egli, a Swiss chef far from home. For years I was convinced that Laura and I had dined that summer at Chalet Suisse, under its barnlike beams as somber as church pews. But the restaurant was shuttered by then, and Laura, who for decades kept a meticulous diary, could find no record of that meal.

Memory, the great trickster. Was I with someone else? Did it even happen? I remember it so vividly, the taste of sweetness hoarded as if it might never come again, and that heavy, transfiguring richness. How something so ridiculous could give you so much joy.

The next morning, I showed up in Midtown, ready to work. The shoes were prototypes, shipped from Spain, with straps cut so thick, I had to jam them through the buckles. I waited in a back room until summoned, then came tottering out on the little showroom runway, a gray hassock surrounded by sales reps from department stores. When I stopped to pose, I bent one knee, as I’d been instructed, with the ankle cocked so they could see only the outside of the shoe. The reps jabbed their ballpoint pens at my heels and scratched notes on clipboards. They never looked up.

Soon, I started to hear whispers. “The feet are too skinny,” someone muttered. Behind the door, the shoes piled up, ripped off my feet and flung in a corner as I tugged on the next ones. At the end of the afternoon, the woman who hired me said gently that I needn’t come back. She paid me $100 in cash and let me pick a pair of rejected shoes to keep. I didn’t understand that they had been quickly glued together and were only for show. I chose bright green suede flats with witchy toes, because I was trying to be an interesting, unexpected person, and I wore them for a week, hobbling, the skin rubbing off the tops of my feet, until one day on the sidewalk the wooden soles peeled clean away.