Charlotte and the foot fetish shoe salesman (“La Douleur Exquise!”)
Living in any major metropolitan city means running into some real weirdos on the streets, on the subway, or in any fast food restaurant after dark. If you’re a city person, especially a New Yorker, you get used to that kind of thing. Charlotte, however, was not expecting to meet such a weirdo in a high-end shoe store.
After Samantha brings the girls to the opening of a new restaurant with an intense S&M theme (think servers in leather harnesses and barely anything else), they get on the topic of fetishes. Samantha argues that everybody has a fetish; it’s just some people are just more upfront about them. Charlotte, for example, has a fetish for a beautiful pair of shoes…but the salesman she meets has a different kind of fetish.
When she spots a particularly pretty pair of shoes in the window of a store, the man inside insists she tries them on. She can’t resist, but when she hears they’re $400, she immediately tells him to take them off because she’s trying to save for a timeshare in the Hamptons. So he cuts the price down to $200.
But he wasn’t just being nice.
A few days later, she’s back in the same store checking out a new pair of slingbacks. This time, the salesman offers her an unbelievable deal: $500 shoes, for fre… if he can rub her “beautiful” feet. Obviously, she feels uncomfortable, but he’s offering a pair of $500 Italian leather slingbacks for free!
She tries to return them later when she realizes how weird it is, but he won’t accept them. Instead of her paying for them, he offers her a trade. All he wants is for her to try on six new styles that just came in, but when she sees how excited he’s getting while watching her, she’s immediately put off.
Charlotte may be a prude, and that behavior from a stranger could be very weird… Unless you’re into that kind of thing. No judgment.