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 desire 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.