After I tracked down Catherine and spoke to her on the phone, when I put the idea in her mind that perhaps I wasn’t the murderer after all, that Harold was, she knew exactly how to find him and she did so. Catherine is no fool. She put two and two together and realized that I was likely to be telling the truth, that Harold might indeed have killed Kramer, and subsequently she managed to convince Harold to turn himself in and make a full confession. She took him along to the police where he told them everything, much more than I could have. They believed him, and shortly thereafter someone made a phone call to Crawford, and that was the only reason he decided that I hadn’t committed the murder.
Those are the bare bones of the story, and I have probably spent too much time trying to put flesh on them. I realized it was unreasonable of me but I was angry and upset to learn that Catherine and Harold had seen each other in my absence. I felt betrayed. I thought they had no connection except through me, and I wanted it to remain that way. I picture them in Harold’s workshop, or later in some secret unknown place, Catherine arriving, Harold proffering the latest pair of shoes. I can see his leathery old hands slipping some flimsy, exotic creation on to Catherine’s perfect foot. I see her walking across the room, turning, posing, wheeling on tiptoe. I know that all this must have really happened.
Of course, I see a powerful erotic element here, and sometimes my vision of the scene takes on a pornographic, fantastical aspect. Then I visualize Catherine being naked, except for the shoes, displaying herself, showing herself to Harold. Sometimes his involvement is simply voyeuristic, he simply watches and is appreciative. But other times he touches, strokes, kisses, penetrates. And she reciprocates, runs her hands, lips, feet, over Harold’s old, small, sagging body.
I don’t know if that really happened or not. Catherine won’t tell me and perhaps I should be grateful not to know, but there are times when it seems all too likely. For Catherine it would have been just another adventure, and if Harold really was sexually involved with her that would give him much more reason for killing Kramer.
And I wonder sometimes how Catherine got him to con fess to the murder. I have asked her, and she tells me she appealed to his better nature, but I know that’s just an evasive joke. I can easily envisage a number of perverse scenarios; the two of them together, naked, in bed, or on the floor, or in a hotel, or out of doors, Catherine in tortuously high heels egging him on, apparently for some sort of weird sexual gratification. ‘Did you ever kill a man, Harold? Did you strip him naked? Did you mutilate the body? Did you carve your trade mark in his chest?’ And Harold says yes, he did, he did all that and more, and he did it for her because he was in love with her. And perhaps Catherine is filled with horror and immediately disentangles herself from his embrace, but it seems equally likely that she’d wait until he’d finished, until the old bones and the old flesh had concluded their business. And then she tells him the game is up, that she knows everything, that she’ll blow the whistle if he doesn’t turn himself in.
Or perhaps none of that happened at all, perhaps he was simply so besotted with Catherine, so in thrall to her, that all she needed to do was tell him to confess and he would immediately obey.
But even as these thoughts first occurred to me, I knew that in one sense none of it really mattered. I didn’t enjoy thinking of Catherine with Harold, but I knew that for her it was just another sexual adventure, quite a colourful one, managing to sleep with the fetishist and the creator of the fetish objects, with the murderer and the victim, but it was no more than an adventure. It was not love.
Besides, how could I feel resentful towards her? She saved me in more ways than one. I owed her everything. I knew I was still in love with her, and the weird thing was, I was no longer only in love with her feet.
Thirty-two
It is 1966 in California and a group of young male student volunteers are sitting in a darkened lecture theatre on a distant part of the campus waiting for the slide show to begin. They have all stated that they are heterosexuals and that they are not foot or shoe fetishists. They have signed the appropriate forms, received a small cash payment, and they sit in their seats, their genitals wired up to electrical devices that measure the degree of their sexual arousal.
The projector kicks into life and the first slide appears; a picture of a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Then a slide of a slingback, then of a patent leather thigh boot. This goes on for some time. The guys giggle and get restless. Is this really what they’ve been brought here for? Then things get better. A new set of slides appears; a naked woman, Playboy-style, big breasted, air-brushed, not the girl next door. More giggles now, but of a different sort; they start to enjoy themselves and the display of naked female flesh continues till the end of the session when the projector dies, and the lights are switched on again. No word of explanation is forthcoming from the research staff as they unhook the electrical devices and tell the boys to come back next week for more of the same.
Once they’ve gone, the psychologists running the experiment, Rachman and Hodgson as they are known in the literature, scrutinize each subject’s arousal chart. They are as predicted: nothing when the shoes appear on the screen, but the moment the naked women appear there’s lots of vigorous, boyish arousal. Well, thinks Rachman, that could be changed.
Time passes. The students attend the weekly sessions, and on each occasion it’s the same procedure; sitting there wired up, looking at footwear followed by cheesecake. A few of the guys have started to find this whole thing totally ridiculous. There are strange things happening on every campus in America but this feels stranger than most. Still, the process isn’t arduous, it seems perfectly harmless and the money is worth having. Besides, the number of sessions is finite. The last session soon arrives. The students go into the lecture theatre and are appropriately blasé as they get wired up and take their seats for a final session of the same old thing. But this time there’s a surprise.
The room dims, the projector starts, and the slides of women’s shoes duly appear. But that’s all there is. This time the naked babes don’t put in an appearance. The students watch a slide show that consists entirely of women’s shoes. A couple of the guys make loud complaints but Rachman and Hodgson check the arousal meters and they see that five of the guys are every bit as aroused as they would be by watching slides of naked women. Five brand-new fetishists have been created. In some quarters this would be called a success.
I don’t find this piece of research particularly reassuring. It seems to suggest that there’s nothing very profound or deep-rooted about fetishism. Fetishists, it appears, can be created from scratch in no time at all. Fetishism, the experiment seems to imply, is just a form of conditioning, no more complex or crucial than being swayed by a TV commercial.
You see an ad on TV. It tells you that you need some new product. You never knew you needed it, but that’s because you’d never been told that you did. Now that you’ve been told, you know that you want it. It has become an object of desire, separate from all the rest of the world of objects. It has become a fetish. You have become a fetishist. If it works with soap powders and cars and tampons, then why shouldn’t it work with shoes and feet or any other damn thing? As I have said, I think we are all fetishists, but when I said it before I was only talking about sex and these days I think sex isn’t even the half of it.