Footsucker

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 he 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.