I stayed the night, and the next morning, early, a little hungover, a little shamefaced, having received no offer of breakfast, I said goodbye. We exchanged telephone numbers, but I couldn’t tell if Catherine was being anything other than polite.
At some point in the night I had asked her whether this was the sort of thing she did very often, allowing herself to be picked up in the street by strange men. It was a crass question, I know.
‘What do you want me to say?’ she demanded. ‘That I’ve never done anything remotely like this before, not once, not ever. That you’re so special, so attractive, so charismatic, that I was driven to do something dangerous and out of character that I’d never normally do.’
Now, I am sufficiently versed in the arts and science of courtship to realize that it’s no good simply telling a woman that she has perfect feet, the feet you’ve been looking for all your life, feet that you could happily spend the rest of your life contemplating, adoring, worshipping. You just can’t do that, certainly not on a first date. It just scares them away, and I was determined that Catherine should not be scared.
Given the strange, unlikely way we had got together, neither of us had any right to expect anything from the other. The situation, the transaction, had all the features of a brief and singular encounter, a one-night stand, but I knew from the very beginning that I wanted it to be much more than that. It is not every day you encounter the perfect feet of your dreams, and when you do, you aren’t inclined to let them skip away so easily.
I stood on the threshold of her flat, about to let myself out. She stood at the other end of the hall, across an expanse of marble tiles, and it was quite clear that she was not about to kiss me goodbye. She had a chaste blue robe wrapped around her, but she was barefoot. I saw nothing chaste in that. I half-slid, half-pounced the length of the hall, and threw myself at her feet. I gave them a final ravish before I left. Above me I heard her give a small, dry laugh, and at the time I chose to believe her laughter was not unkind.
Five
I think it’s important to say right away that I perceive myself as a serious person. I read newspapers. I follow politics. I try to keep up with the new books and films, plays and exhibitions. In my interactions with the world, in my job (which is dull but responsible), in my tastes and opinions and beliefs, I would say that I’m a substantial and complete and serious person. Yet I can see that there is something profoundly unserious about being a foot and shoe fetishist.
Certain sexual obsessions, let us say an addiction to pain, either given or received, a taste for violation of the self or others, a compulsive attraction towards children or animals or faeces, these things carry with them a sense of scale, of drama, of awful consequence, that a love of feet and shoes simply does not.
This is a paradox and occasionally a problem. Here I am, this serious person, seriously obsessed with something that most people are unable to take seriously. Tell people you are obsessed with bondage, with cottaging, with prostitutes and see them react. They may express surprise or shock or disapproval, and this expression may be real or feigned, it may be only an attempt to hide their true feelings, it may be a conditioned response, but either way there is a definite response. They look at you as though you’re talking about something risky and edgy and, yes, serious. But tell them you’re a foot fetishist and they giggle. For them it’s a joke, it’s funny, it’s not serious sex. Yet for me it is. For me it is the only kind of serious sex.
For a long time I wasn’t sure whether I was a fetishist or a partialist. This is an important distinction. A partialist is someone who likes, who is attracted to a nice pair of feet or shoes; he enjoys them and they add to his sexual pleasure, but they are not necessary for that pleasure, whereas a true fetishist needs the shoes or feet in order to derive any sexual pleasure at all. The presence of the fetish object is a necessary precondition before sexual activity can even take place.
Personally I’m quite sure that I could make love to a woman who had ordinary or even unattractive feet, or to a woman who was wearing dreary or ugly shoes (so in that sense it might be argued that I’m not a true fetishist at all); but why should I? The bottom line is I really don’t think I could be bothered to make love to a woman whose feet I didn’t find attractive. There are enough pairs of attractive feet and shoes in the world that you simply don’t need to force yourself to make love to someone who doesn’t possess them.
I didn’t always feel this way. I wasn’t always like this. It has all been slide and slippage, a slow ascent or descent, I’m not sure which, on some sexual escalator, or a rudderless drift downstream over treacherous waters, a path of least resistance, not that I would ever have wanted to resist.
I was once more or less orthodox in my relations with women. I went out on dates. I went to parties. I met women in the course of my work and my social life. I talked to them, went out with them, enjoyed their company, went to bed with them, had fun sometimes, was serious about them sometimes. It was OK, but it was rarely more than OK. It was usually not quite right. I never found exactly what I was looking for, because for a long time I didn’t know what I was looking for, and even when I did know there was a time when I wasn’t prepared to admit it.
I had always known that I was attracted to women who had good feet. I knew I liked women who wore good shoes. I knew I liked them a lot, a lot more than I liked women who didn’t have good feet, who didn’t wear good shoes. But I tried to pretend that feet and shoes weren’t my only interests. And to some extent that wasn’t entirely a pretence. I liked women with good breasts and good legs and good minds too. These things were attractive and appealing. I could even see that they were desirable, but they were never necessary. And if anyone had asked me how I felt about feet and shoes I would have said I felt fine about them. I would have been prepared to admit to being a partialist, even though a part of me always wanted to admit to something more.
There was no road to Damascus experience about it, no crucial moment, no trauma. I simply decided to concentrate and focus. I gradually realized I’d had enough of all that relationship nonsense. I knew I couldn’t go on the way I had been, seeing women who didn’t quite hit the spot, so I decided to take the plunge. I decided to go to hell in a shoe box. I would stop pretending. I would stop being a partialist. I’d go the whole hog and throw myself into proper foot and shoe fetishism. I would stop looking for a woman with a good personality or a good complexion. I would not be averse to these things, but they would be only peripheral pleasures. Feet were what really mattered.
You might think that in doing this I had abandoned a part of my humanity, that being a fetishist involved some kind of demeaning bondage. Wrong. What I felt I had abandoned was all the dead wood, the window dressing. I was getting down to essentials, and for me it was a supreme liberation. When I met a woman, a prospective sexual partner, there would be no more conversations about what films we’d seen, what music we liked, what hopes and plans we had for the future, where we liked to spend our holidays. There would be no more worries about where the relationship was ‘going’. All I needed was a woman with a great pair of feet. She didn’t even need to have great shoes. I’d be only too happy to provide those for her. It seemed to me that my decision, my admission, would make life much easier for all concerned.