I handled them for a long time, held them up to the light, placed them in various locations in my living room and bedroom to discover where they could be seen to their best advantage. They weren’t, of course, as appealing as the real thing, as Catherine’s real flesh, but as fetish objects they were more exciting than the majority of feet I had ever encountered.
Harold wasn’t very explicit about what he would do with the casts. The shoes weren’t going to be constructed around the plaster, he was making wooden lasts for that. Rather it seemed as though he wanted to have these models of Catherine’s feet in front of him as he designed and made a new pair of shoes, as a reminder of Catherine and as an inspiration.
Catherine and I still had no idea what kind of shoes Harold was going to come up with. We had both asked what he had in mind but he told us we would have to wait and see. He said it as though we were over-inquisitive children, and I think he took some pleasure in teasing us, in denying us gratification, and yet there was nothing frivolous in his approach to his craft.
I asked if he had any other shoes he could show us, some earlier examples of his work, but he said that all his shoes were now with their rightful owners. Didn’t he at least keep a few photographs or working drawings, I asked. Surely they’d have been good for drumming up business if nothing else. But Harold said he kept nothing. Once the shoes had been made he was finished with them. They had a life of their own, they went out into the world. He might occasionally see them in action, being worn by their owners, but at that point he was just a spectator, they were no longer his, he had no claim on them. As a confirmed archivist I found this detachment very peculiar, but I didn’t doubt that Harold was telling the truth.
Making this new pair of shoes for Catherine was a slow and painstaking business, and Harold was not going to be rushed. I knew better than to pester him but the anticipation was killing. I tried to imagine what he might be making but I didn’t want to fantasize too much in case my imaginings and expectations became so extreme that reality could never live up to them.
But the day finally arrived when Harold was ready to reveal his creation. We were summoned for eight in the evening and I took along a bottle of champagne, as though it might be a party or the launch of a ship. Harold accepted half a glass and then put it down absent-mindedly. His thoughts were elsewhere. For him there seemed to be a lot riding on this pair of shoes, more than I would have thought reasonable. After much prevarication, and what I took to be false modesty, Harold at last showed us the shoes, and they were truly glorious.
The back, sides, heels, all the basic form were styled like a traditional, if extraordinarily high-heeled, court shoe. They were elegant, classic and made of superbly malleable black kid. But there was nothing traditional about the toes of the shoes. They were made of black and white snakeskin, or, to be more accurate, each shoe had at its apex the head of a real snake, the eyes glassily black, the mouths wide open, fangs visible. But the snake heads weren’t mere adornment, they were part of the shoe’s structure, and the open jaws formed peep-toes, and when Catherine put the shoes on her lacquered nails were visible in the snake’s throat, the red varnish in rich contrast to the black and white diamonds of the snakeskin.
Catherine and I were speechless with admiration. She walked round the workshop in the shoes and it seemed as though she had grown in stature and voluptuousness. Her walk and her figure, her whole body were sensual and provocative, utterly carnal. I wanted to fuck her there and then, and there’s no greater compliment to a pair of shoes than that. More to the point, and as I could plainly see, they made Catherine want to be fucked there and then too. We both thanked and congratulated Harold. I toasted him and said he was a master, that these were the most exotic and wonderful shoes I’d ever seen.
‘I think we have a major success on our hands, Harold,’ Catherine agreed.
But Harold didn’t seem to share our enthusiasm. He looked profoundly melancholy. He hadn’t touched his champagne.
‘They’re good shoes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them. A lot of people would be delighted to have made them, but I know they’re only a partial success. I have to go back to the drawing board.’
Although I would have preferred Harold to be happy, I didn’t read too much into his dissatisfaction. He obviously cared deeply about his work, his standards were sky high, and I thought his sense of failure was only that of the true perfectionist. However sublime a creation might be, and these new shoes seemed utterly sublime to me, their creator might always have a sense that they were flawed and imperfect. That, I supposed, was what kept all artists and craftsmen going, the urge to try again, the desire to perfect the imperfectible. And, let’s face it, I was very happy for Harold to keep trying and failing if all his failures were going to be as magnificent as these. I was very happy indeed that he was going to be designing and making more shoes for Catherine.
The snake shoes were great for sex. Catherine and I went home, and on this occasion there was no time for contemplation. I put my tongue inside the snake’s mouth to lick Catherine’s toes. She would walk round her flat, naked but for the shoes, an act that rapidly led to more bouts of sex. I assumed Harold would be delighted by all this, not that we told him precisely what use we made of his shoes, there seemed no need to, obviously he already knew. What else were his kind of shoes for?
I was aware that this was not the usual relationship that existed between shoe wearer and shoemaker. Given that even the best shoes are often machine made, the wearer seldom has any sense of the maker’s identity. In this case we obviously had a precise sense of Harold’s personality, and in a strange way Harold Wilmer became a real if distant presence in the sex that Catherine and I had together.
For that reason, among others, over the next few weeks I found myself thinking often about Harold and his work. I knew he was making another pair of shoes for Catherine and although I wondered exactly what he was up to, I no longer had any anxiety about what he would produce. I knew they would be extraordinary and magnificent. It was like looking forward to a surprise party.
When a couple of weeks had passed and I hadn’t heard from him I decided to call in at the shop, not because I wanted to harass him, but because I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer.
The shop was open so I entered. Harold was sitting immobile at his workbench, one hand up to his brow as though he might be shading his eyes from the light, but I could tell that in reality he was weeping. I was embarrassed. I felt I was intruding.
‘Is this a bad time?’ I asked. ‘Shall I come back later?’
He raised his head, looked at me and said, ‘It’ll be exactly the same later. Now that Ruth’s dead I just don’t …’
‘Ruth?’ I asked.
‘Ruth, the woman I used to make shoes for, the red and black ones that first brought you in here.’
‘The one you said was a special customer?’
‘Yes. But she was a lot more than that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Now she’s gone, I just don’t care about anything very much any more.’
I hoped that wasn’t literally true. I hoped he wasn’t trying to tell me that he’d stopped caring about his craft, that he wasn’t going to make any more shoes. I wasn’t selfish enough to ask him that directly, but there seemed no point in trying to be discreet. So I said, ‘Tell me about Ruth. Who was she exactly?’
‘She was a whore,’ Harold replied. ‘And I’m not speaking metaphorically. She got paid very well for having sex with strange men. She was very good, I understand, well worth the extra. And I made her shoes for her. She always said she could charge even more when she was wearing shoes I’d made.’
He smiled wryly and I wasn’t sure whether or not I ought to smile back.
‘We weren’t attached,’ he said. ‘We weren’t lovers. I never made love to her. That would have spoiled everything, although everything’s spoiled anyway.
‘I know it’s absurd to fall in love with a prosti
tute. It’s a thankless task. It’s madness. There’s no possible joy in it. The woman you love sells herself to other men. She will tell you that she’s only selling her body, but you know it’s more complex than that. It really isn’t possible for anyone to constantly have sex with unknown men, day after day, night after night, in hotel rooms, in rented flats, in the backs of cars, without losing something vital. I don’t know what you’d call that something, but sooner or later it just disappears. It trickles away.
‘I got angry with her sometimes but I never tried to change her, never tried to make her stop. There were times when I’d want to hurt someone, her or her clients. But I never did. I just kept on making shoes for her to be fucked in, and the only one who got hurt was me.’
‘How did Ruth die?’ I asked. I feared the worst: suicide or drugs or Aids, something lurid and dramatic.
‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘Banal, yes?’
‘No, not banal,’ I said.
‘She was the only person in the world I ever needed, the only person who ever needed me.’
‘Hey, Harold,’ I said. ‘Catherine and I need you. We need you to carry on making shoes.’
It was supposed to be something of a joke, an attempt to make him feel needed without sounding too sentimental, and maybe it worked.
‘Just before you arrived that first day,’ he said, ‘I was seriously contemplating suicide. I still think about it. It feels like a real option. But you came into the shop, asked about the shoes, and I thought possibly, just possibly, there might be some point carrying on. And possibly, just possibly there is. So long as I can carry on making shoes, practising my art, having someone like Catherine to wear them, then maybe …’
I tried to make light of what he was saying. I’d never wanted to be beholden to Harold Wilmer in the first place; now it looked as though he was trying to make me responsible for whether he lived or died.
Nevertheless, I found myself saying, ‘Hey, Harold, you can’t commit suicide until you’ve made Catherine at least another hundred pairs of shoes.’
Harold gave a wispy, resilient little smile and told me to come back in a week with Catherine when he’d have a brand new pair of shoes to show us.
Eleven
There have been times in my life when I’ve thought of becoming professionally involved with women’s feet. I’ve wondered what it might be like to be a chiropodist, a reflexologist, even, conceivably, a pedicurist.
But chiropody would have been no good because it involves looking at feet that have something wrong with them. There might be some satisfaction in improving them, in making them healthy again, but the daily grind of foot imperfections would have been intolerable.
Reflexology might have been better in that you would encounter a cross-section of feet, and some of these would no doubt be very attractive. But my observations tell me that the percentage of attractive feet in the world is remarkably small, and you’d still have to spend a lot of time feeling the pressure points on a lot of mundane, not to say downright ugly, feet.
A shoe-shop job would certainly have been appealing, especially if you were working in a place that sold really exotic footwear to really glamorous women. But the main problem there (apart from the obvious one that shoe-shop assistants obviously earn a pittance) was that I might like the job too much for my own good. Put me in a situation where I’m crouched on the floor with some gorgeous foot, helping its owner try on some beautiful creation in wonderful, soft red leather with black silk ankle straps and, frankly, I don’t know that I could keep up my professional manner.
All the above problems would apply to being a pedicurist and, besides, I think that most women are sufficiently aware of the intimate and sensual nature of the foot not to be all that keen to have some strange man fiddling around with their toes.
I’m sure that being a shoe designer, or even the right sort of shoemaker, would have fulfilled a lot of my needs. But I never had any talent for it. I’m a connoisseur not a creator, a willing member of the audience, but not a provider of the entertainment.
So I did what I did, this responsible but dull job I’ve spoken of. I was a manager, I suppose, a financial manager. There were people around me, of more or less equal status, who called themselves planners and analysts. Some called themselves executives. But if anybody outside of work ever asked me what I did for a living, I’d say I worked in an office. That was as much information as anybody needed, and certainly as much as I wanted to give.
I worked with a certain number of women. Some of them were attractive and some of them occasionally (very occasionally) wore FMs. I looked but I didn’t touch. I was appreciative but I kept it to myself. I wasn’t sure what the consequences would have been of having my colleagues know that I was a foot and shoe fetishist, but I didn’t want to find out.
There’s a story in Ali MacGraw’s autobiography about when she goes to model for Salvador Dali. She walks into his suite at the St Regis Hotel. She’s wearing a fake Chanel suit and flattened pearl ear-rings. The room’s full of strange ill-matched Spanish furniture, and Mozart is playing on a tiny transistor radio.
Immediately he asks her to take off all her clothes. She’s reluctant, a little scared, but she is a model after all. Dali is a major artist, she would certainly like to be immortalized, and even if the old guy is up to no good she reckons she’s young enough and strong enough to fight him off. She strips as requested.
He tells her to sit at one of the tables and he takes his place opposite her. She sits down on a wrought-iron chair, adopts a pose, shoulders back, head up. The metal strips of the chair press into her body. She is very uncomfortable. Dali stares hard at her. Well, yes, that’s all right, that’s what artists are supposed to do. He picks up a stick of charcoal, rolls it between his fingers and immediately drops it at her feet. She moves as though to pick it up. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t move. Hold the pose.’
She does as he tells her. He bends down to pick up the charcoal, goes on all fours, starts crawling around under the table. Poor old devil, she thinks. Then she becomes aware that something very strange is happening. At floor level, under the table where she can’t see, Salvador Dali, the great artist, is breathing a little heavily, is making a slurping noise, and is methodically sucking each of her toes in turn.
You see, if I’d been an artist it might all have been all right. Strange fetishistic stuff is fine if you’re a genius. It’s regarded as par for the course. And there are probably quite a few jobs, arty, trendy, creative, media-type jobs where nobody would bat an eyelid, where a fetish would be regarded as desirable and interesting; but I was never in one of those jobs and I never really wanted to be. Frankly, I was always glad to have a few secrets that I kept from the people I worked with, to have something that was uniquely and covertly mine.
Twelve
It is a short step from being a student of one’s own life to being its curator; hence my archive. I feel ready to talk about my archive now. Fetishists, I understand, tend to be great accumulators, great keepers of files and samples, photographs and cuttings, and I was no exception. My archive was large and impressive and I did from time to time feel the urge to share it with someone. I can’t think of any circumstances in which I’d have brought a man to look at it. It was the sort of place I’d only bring a woman, and even then only the right sort of woman, someone like Catherine, although I knew there was nobody exactly like her.
Let’s imagine you were such a woman. Let’s imagine I had invited you to my house to see my archive. How would it be? It would be much like this. We would go by taxi to the small terraced house in West London where I live. We would enter the hall and I would probably invite you into the living room and offer you a drink. At first all you’d see would be a bachelor’s place, a moderately expensive hi-fi, a cheap colour TV, a few items of chrome and leather furniture that some people would probably consider a bit naff and dated. It would not look like the obvious place for a collection of sexual exotica. It would seem far too mundane and o
rdinary. You might notice the Allen Jones print on the wall and that would be a clue, but even so it would all seem surprisingly homely. You would be reassured or disappointed depending on your disposition. (Catherine, when I finally persuaded her to come to my house, was taut with nervousness.) I wouldn’t try to force you into anything. Only after a drink or two, and only if you were still sure you wanted to press on, would I invite you down to the cellar where the archive was kept.
I would carefully open the group of locks that secures the cellar door. I would turn on the staircase lights, warm but not too bright, and as we descended you’d see more pictures on the walls: a Helmut Newton photograph, that you might recognize from White Women, showing a pair of manacled feet in supremely glossy red high heels. You would notice working drawings by shoe designers, some Warhol shoe sketches, and a large medical drawing of a foot blown up from Gray’s Anatomy.
At the bottom of the stairs we would stand together in a small cluttered workroom or office. You would see the rows of books and magazines all relating to my interest, books like Rétif de la Bretonne’s Contemporaines, John F. Oliver’s Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, Rossi’s The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe in several editions, magazines like Heels and Hose, Footsie, Instep. You would see filing cabinets bulging with photographs and newspaper clippings, and of course you would see my many, many scrapbooks.
I began making these in very early adolescence. I would look through fashion magazines, occasionally through softcore pornography. I would see shoes or bare feet that appealed to me and I would cut out the photograph and stick it in my scrapbook. I imagine a lot of boys do that sort of thing. Sometimes I would cut out the entire image to show the woman’s face, body and clothes. But all too often I found the face, body and clothes quite unerotic, quite irrelevant and a positive distraction from the shoes and feet. In those cases I would simply cut the woman off at mid-calf. This seemed a harmless enough activity, and it brought with it certain satisfactions. Yet I was aware that I was not master of my own fate. I was relying on the editorial control of the people producing the magazines. I decided to seize the means of production.
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