There have been times in my life when I’ve thought of becoming professionally involved with women’s feet. I’ve wondered what it might be like to be a chiropodist, a reflexologist, even, conceivably, a pedicurist.
But chiropody would have been no good because it involves looking at feet that have something wrong with them. There might be some satisfaction in improving them, in making them healthy again, but the daily grind of foot imperfections would have been intolerable.
Reflexology might have been better in that you would encounter a cross-section of feet, and some of these would no doubt be very attractive. But my observations tell me that the percentage of attractive feet in the world is remarkably small, and you’d still have to spend a lot of time feeling the pressure points on a lot of mundane, not to say downright ugly, feet.
A shoe-shop job would certainly have been appealing, especially if you were working in a place that sold really exotic footwear to really glamorous women. But the main problem there (apart from the obvious one that shoe-shop assistants obviously earn a pittance) was that I might like the job too much for my own good. Put me in a situation where I’m crouched on the floor with some gorgeous foot, helping its owner try on some beautiful creation in wonderful, soft red leather with black silk ankle straps and, frankly, I don’t know that I could keep up my professional manner.
All the above problems would apply to being a pedicurist and, besides, I think that most women are sufficiently aware of the intimate and sensual nature of the foot not to be all that keen to have some strange man fiddling around with their toes.
I’m sure that being a shoe designer, or even the right sort of shoemaker, would have fulfilled a lot of my needs. But I never had any talent for it. I’m a connoisseur not a creator, a willing member of the audience, but not a provider of the entertainment.
So I did what I did, this responsible but dull job I’ve spoken of. I was a manager, I suppose, a financial manager. There were people around me, of more or less equal status, who called themselves planners and analysts. Some called themselves executives. But if anybody outside of work ever asked me what I did for a living, I’d say I worked in an office. That was as much information as anybody needed, and certainly as much as I wanted to give.
I worked with a certain number of women. Some of them were attractive and some of them occasionally (very occasionally) wore FMs. I looked but I didn’t touch. I was appreciative but I kept it to myself. I wasn’t sure what the consequences would have been of having my colleagues know that I was a foot and shoe fetishist, but I didn’t want to find out.
There’s a story in Ali MacGraw’s autobiography about when she goes to model for Salvador Dali. She walks into his suite at the St Regis Hotel. She’s wearing a fake Chanel suit and flattened pearl ear-rings. The room’s full of strange ill-matched Spanish furniture, and Mozart is playing on a tiny transistor radio.
Immediately he asks her to take off all her clothes. She’s reluctant, a little scared, but she is a model after all. Dali is a major artist, she would certainly like to be immortalized, and even if the old guy is up to no good she reckons she’s young enough and strong enough to fight him off. She strips as requested.
He tells her to sit at one of the tables and he takes his place opposite her. She sits down on a wrought-iron chair, adopts a pose, shoulders back, head up. The metal strips of the chair press into her body. She is very uncomfortable. Dali stares hard at her. Well, yes, that’s all right, that’s what artists are supposed to do. He picks up a stick of charcoal, rolls it between his fingers and immediately drops it at her feet. She moves as though to pick it up. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t move. Hold the pose.’
She does as he tells her. He bends down to pick up the charcoal, goes on all fours, starts crawling around under the table. Poor old devil, she thinks. Then she becomes aware that something very strange is happening. At floor level, under the table where she can’t see, Salvador Dali, the great artist, is breathing a little heavily, is making a slurping noise, and is methodically sucking each of her toes in turn.
You see, if I’d been an artist it might all have been all right. Strange fetishistic stuff is fine if you’re a genius. It’s regarded as par for the course. And there are probably quite a few jobs, arty, trendy, creative, media-type jobs where nobody would bat an eyelid, where a fetish would be regarded as desirable and interesting; but I was never in one of those jobs and I never really wanted to be. Frankly, I was always glad to have a few secrets that I kept from the people I worked with, to have something that was uniquely and covertly mine.