Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  Here is J. G. Ballard on the subject:

  With the resources of video, you can build up quite a large library of images … I can imagine that, quite accidentally, you might get some obsessive, say, who finds himself collecting footage of women’s shoes whenever they’re shown (it doesn’t matter if it’s Esther Williams walking around a swimming pool with forties sound, or Princess Di) – he presses his button and records all this footage of women’s shoes … After accumulating two hundred hours of shoes, you might have a bizarre obsessive movie that’s absolutely riveting.

  You might. You might indeed. And I have tried, God knows I’ve tried, but it’s surprisingly hard. All too often the image has been and gone before you’ve reached for the remote control and pressed the record button. I am no techno freak, nevertheless my archive contained a certain amount of video material, and I sometimes edited together relevant images and, if I say so myself, some of the results weren’t bad.

  It was always a work in progress, but here’s one way it might have run. Fade in on Mickey Rourke sprawled on a bed stroking Kim Basinger’s feet in 91/2 Weeks, then cut to Dirk Bogarde doing the same with Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, but here they’re on the floor and he’s actually kissing them, then to Bull Durham where Kevin Costner is painting Susan Sarandon’s toenails, cut to Goldie Hawn in Overboard where her manservant is doing the same for her. Then the shot from Who’s That Girl, where Madonna’s just been transformed from the street urchin to the glamour puss and we see her for the first time in a spangly ball gown, and the camera starts at her feet then moves all the way up her body to her face, but in my version we do a freeze frame on the start of the shot, the first moment when Madonna’s feet fill the whole screen. Madonna, incidentally, has feet to die for. Cut to Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa, cut to the scene in The War of the Roses where Danny De Vito’s girlfriend starts to give him a foot job under the dinner table. Possibly then a collage of images from Single White Female where first we see the girls trying on and buying metal-heeled, black suede court shoes, several shots of these shoes pacing corridors, then finally (and not too credibly in my opinion) the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh kills Bridget Fonda’s boyfriend by driving one of the heels into his eye. Changing the pace, we have a brief shot of Katherine Helmond in Brazil wearing a leopardskin shoe on her head, an idea borrowed from Elsa Schiaparelli, then Alan Howard stroking Helen Mirren’s feet in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

  I could go on and on, but for now I’d end with the shot from Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, when Lya Lys, in a state of sexual arousal and frustration, sucks the toe of a statue of Christ. Her lips are a perfect shiny black against the white stone of the statue, and her eyes look glazed and orgasmic. It is one of the most truly pornographic images I know. The only problem with this, of course, is that it’s a man’s toe she’s sucking and that is well outside my range of interests.

  Quite early on with Catherine, after I’d been sucking her feet for a while, she decided to return the favour and took my big toe in her mouth and moved her lips back and forth over it in a perfect impersonation of fellatio. It was a thoughtful gesture, I suppose, but I was appalled. I had to tell her to stop. My feet and toes are probably better looking than a good many men’s but I couldn’t possibly let a woman suck them. It was a disgusting idea. As I said to Catherine, ‘I may be a fetishist but I’m not a sicko.’ At the time she believed me, but later she seemed to change her mind.

  Sixteen

  A moment came when I knew something was wrong. Catherine phoned me – a rare event in itself – and she wanted to meet. This wasn’t exactly breaking the rules, but it wasn’t the way we normally did things. I was the one who usually made the running. And then she said she wanted to meet on neutral territory. She suggested London Zoo.

  ‘As neutral as that,’ I said, and I feared the worst.

  It was a cool grey day and the zoo wasn’t crowded. We met by the aquatic birds of Europe and I saw at once it was worse than I could have expected. Catherine was wearing a pair of trainers. They were possibly very expensive and fashionable and loaded with statements about status and fitness and youth, but I was hearing a very different statement. She wanted to walk and talk.

  ‘I think it’s over,’ she said. ‘I think something’s happened.’

  I suppose it didn’t come as a complete surprise but that didn’t make it hurt any the less.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ I asked as coolly as I could.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but I know I can’t carry on like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. Either way I wanted to hear her name it, to spell it out, but at first she wouldn’t or couldn’t.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘I just ask myself, and I think you should ask yourself too, is this a sensible way for two adults to conduct their lives?’

  ‘For me it’s the only way,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not even sure if I believe that. But for me it’s not the only way.’

  ‘Lucky old you,’ I said. ‘Was it bringing Rosemary to your flat that did it?’

  ‘It didn’t help.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘It was just a one off. It was a variation. We tried it and you didn’t like it, so, fine, we won’t do it again.’

  ‘It wasn’t only that.’

  ‘Was it showing you the archive?’

  ‘The archive is pretty strange, you have to admit.’

  ‘OK, I’ll admit it if that helps. Was it Harold and his shoes?’

  ‘Harold’s pretty strange too.’

  ‘Creepy you said.’

  ‘Yes, he’s creepy, but he does make nice shoes.’

  ‘He does.’

  We had arrived at the primates. The monkeys were throwing themselves at the wire fronts of their cages, playing to the gallery, showing off, mouths flapping with what you know is not laughter. Caged animals, the stuff of metaphor, the stuff of overworked imagery. Nature bound and perverted. I thought of the monkeyskin shoes Harold had made for Catherine. It was as if the whole zoo was a source of raw materials for shoemaking.

  ‘So it’s all got too strange and creepy for you, has it?’ I said.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’ve scared you?’

  ‘Something has.’

  ‘You know,’ I said sadly and calmly, ‘I’ll never find anyone who has feet as perfect as yours.’

  ‘That may or may not be true,’ she said. ‘But either way, so what? I mean, be real, what does it matter whether or not a woman has beautiful feet? What does it mean?’

  That could have got me very angry, but everything seemed to depend on staying cool, on remaining in control, of myself if not of the situation.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything at all,’ I said reasonably. ‘That’s the whole point. Beauty never does mean anything. Beauty is just a fact. It has no moral dimension. It has no consequence in itself. But in this case it has some consequences for me. I see a beautiful pair of feet and I want to act in a certain way. And that’s all that matters. The fact that it matters to me.’

  She turned away.

  ‘Don’t turn away,’ I said. ‘Would it do any good to say I love you?’

  ‘But you don’t,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t even know if you like me. You’re obsessed with my feet, but then, you’re obsessed with everybody’s feet.’

  ‘Not true!’ I protested, but she took no notice.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ she continued. ‘I’m not demanding the full-blown romantic love thing, but in general I don’t think you can love a person just for their feet, much less for their shoes.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think you can. Really. Look, I know this is no time to start quoting Spinoza …’

  ‘You’re going to quote Spinoza?’

  ‘Sort of. I did a course in college. It’s no big deal. It’s just that he says love is a d
esire for unification with the other. And I’ll buy that. It sounds like sense to me. You can be unified with a person. You can’t be unified with a foot or a shoe, can you?’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  She spread her hands in a gesture of denial, to say that if I didn’t understand something as simple as that, then I was even more stupid than she thought.

  ‘So you’re leaving because of Spinoza.’

  ‘I’m leaving because of me.’

  ‘OK, so let’s talk about you.’

  A regretful turn of the head, a stiffening of the body, a facial expression that said she knew all along it would have to come to this.

  ‘I have a problem,’ she said. ‘I think there are several problems I might have. But I’m so confused by all this stuff that I don’t know which of them is the real one.’

  ‘So talk me through the possibilities.’

  ‘OK. I’ve made a few notes.’

  I couldn’t believe it. She took a tiny, ringbound notepad from her pocket and opened it. I could see a lot of dense black writing slashed with arrows and crossings out, starred with asterisks, edged with doodles. She didn’t exactly read from it but she referred to it often.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘One: I have often thought of myself as a sexual adventurer, adventuress, whatever. And at first you were an adventure. A foot and shoe fetishist was a novelty. But fetishism isn’t an adventure in itself. In itself it’s just strange and obsessional and repetitive. Sometimes I think maybe I’m just bored with this particular adventure and it’s time to move on.’

  She said it in a detached way, as if reciting a case history or exploring a bit of character motivation in a film review.

  ‘But you only think that sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Sometimes I think, two: maybe I’m not as much of an adventuress as I thought I was. Maybe you’ve taken me too far, too fast. Maybe I only want to play at being an adventuress, only want to have little adventures. This stuff with the archive, this stuff with Rosemary, with Harold, with shoes in department stores, with pedicurists, with coming in my shoes, maybe you’re too serious, too extreme an adventure for me.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel that way to me,’ I said. ‘I think you’re a real adventuress all right.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘In that case we can come to option three: maybe what’s happened is that you’ve shown me that I’m even more of an adventuress than I thought I was. I’ve done things with you that I’ve never done with anybody else. It’s been scary but it’s also been pleasurable. And the scariest part is just how pleasurable. Maybe I’ve recognized that I could go all the way, whatever that means, could go a long way too far, and maybe I’m drawing back because I’m just sane enough to see how crazy I could be. If I carried on with you I don’t know where it would end.’

  I nodded, but I was agreeing with the theoretical position, not agreeing that this was necessarily the case with Catherine and me.

  ‘Or maybe there’s another answer,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m not really any sort of sexual adventuress at all. Maybe I really do want the full-blown romantic love thing. And I realize this is going to sound dumb to you, but maybe I do want to be loved for myself.’

  I was tempted to go all philosophical and sixth form on her and ask how she defined ‘self’, but I thought better of it.

  Catherine said, ‘But again, either way, whichever way, it makes no difference. Either way, I’m calling it off. Don’t phone me. Don’t try to see me. If you really want to hate me, just think of me as a stupid, scared woman who simply got cold feet.’

  Seventeen

  At first I was very good. I was decent and I behaved myself. I respected Catherine, her needs and her feelings, and I did exactly as she asked. I stayed away, didn’t bother her, didn’t phone, however much I wanted to. And phoning was the least of what I wanted to do. I wanted to beg and scream, throw tantrums, camp on her doorstep until she saw the error of her ways. But I knew that none of that would do me any good; it would only confirm to her that she’d made no error at all. So I behaved myself.

  Catherine’s detailed consideration of her possible reasons for ending our relationship didn’t make much impression on me. All or any of it might or might not have been true, but what difference did it make? However you looked at it there was something about me, or about me together with her, that she didn’t like and didn’t want. Not being able to put her finger precisely on the reason was neither here nor there. She simply didn’t like things as they were. That was hard on me because I was perfectly happy, ecstatically happy, with things as they were, as they had been. The archive, the department store, Harold, Rosemary, it was all just fine with me. There was no point saying, let’s work it out, let’s try to make things different, since I absolutely didn’t want things to be any different.

  As for whether, as I had so rashly stated, I loved Catherine, well, I thought by any number of criteria I probably did. Maybe I didn’t want to be unified with her à la Spinoza, but I certainly wanted to be with her. I wanted to be with her because she had perfect feet, and when I was with her I could partake of them. And you might say I only loved her for her feet but, as previously discussed, you have to love somebody for one reason or another, and in my book having perfect feet is a better reason than most. And if I did love her, it wasn’t simply because she possessed the feet, it was because of what she did with them, what she let me do with them, how she presented them.

  But something had changed in the presentation, and it wasn’t only the trainers. A couple of days after our outing to the zoo the postman brought a package containing all the pairs of shoes Harold had made for Catherine. She had sent them back. I had bewilderingly mixed feelings about that. Of course I wanted to have the shoes. They were glorious and exquisite works of art, and few people in the world were better equipped to appreciate them than I was. They would become a treasured part of the archive. But, as I had always said, as Harold had agreed, shoes without feet in them are only half alive, and these particular shoes, in the absence of their perfect wearer, were intensely melancholy reminders of what had been and gone. There was no way I would ever be able to ask some other woman to wear them, so they were destined never to have a full life at all. Their presence in the archive would cause me some pain, but the idea of Catherine keeping the shoes and wearing them as she participated in some new adventures with somebody else would have been far worse. I wanted them safe with me.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t think I could just put them straight into the archive. I thought I had a duty to offer to give them back to Harold. Even though they had been his freely given gift, I still felt that he had some rights over them. So I went along to his shop at the end of a working day, feeling obligated to make the offer, but passionately hoping it was an offer he’d refuse. And, of course, I had to explain the reason I was making the offer, that Catherine had ended our relationship. I did my confused best to make him understand something that I barely understood myself. His reaction was extreme and unexpected. His face sagged as though it was caving in on itself. He started to bawl like a child and beat his fists against his workbench.

  ‘Hey, Harold, it’s not that bad,’ I said, thinking it was absurd that I had to comfort him for what was supposed to be my own grief. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘They happen to me all the time,’ Harold said. ‘First Ruth gets taken away from me, and now Catherine. It’s just not fair. It’s not right. If I don’t have anyone to make shoes for, I’m not sure I have any reason to live.’

  I didn’t like the renewed talk of suicide, and neither did I like the way he seemed to be thinking of his Ruth and my Catherine as equivalents. I said, ‘Come on, Harold. I think you’re overreacting a little here.’

  But he didn’t think so at all. He was inconsolable, and my desire to console him was only partial. If anything, I had imagined that he might try to console me. I let him bawl a little longer. It was a while before he was able to pull himself together, and when he did h
e asked, ‘Did she leave you for another man?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Harold. ‘Sometimes being left for someone else can make it easier. At least that way you can channel all your anger and hatred in one specific direction.’

  Harold appeared to be speaking with an authority I didn’t imagine him to have. He didn’t look like much of a player in the world of feeling, and I certainly didn’t agree with him. My anger didn’t need any channelling, didn’t need any focus, and if Catherine had left me for someone else I was sure I’d have felt a hundred times worse.

  ‘No, she didn’t leave me for anyone else,’ I confirmed.

  ‘At least, that’s what she told you.’

  I wasn’t going to go down that path, so I asked him what I’d come to ask: did he want me to give back the shoes he’d made for Catherine. To my relief he didn’t. He said it was the process that was important to him, not the finished product. I couldn’t agree with that either, although it didn’t matter now whether or not Harold and I saw eye to eye.

  I noticed there was a work in progress on his bench, a shoe Catherine would never wear, a design he would never finish. The raw materials consisted of a length of what looked like fox fur, a strip of razor wire and some high heels carved out of bone. I could just about imagine what kind of shoes Harold would have made out of these materials, and yet I knew that if he had completed the work it would have exceeded all my expectations.

  I left Harold as I had seen him once or twice before, slumped at his workbench, head in hands, distress and misery oozing from him. Even though I resented his usurpation of what I thought was my own personal loss, I still felt that I had taken much more from him than I could ever possibly give back, something much bigger and more personal than the shoes he’d made. I left him, left the shop. I couldn’t think when or in what circumstances I would ever see him again.