The Bridges of Madison County Read online

  He moved into the creek, then up the other bank. She went through the bridge with the blue knapsack and stood behind him, happy, strangely happy. There was energy here, a power of some kind in the way he worked. He didn’t just wait for nature, he took it over in a gentle way, shaping it to his vision, making it fit what he saw in his mind.

  He imposed his will on the scene, countering changes in light with different lenses, different films, a filter occasionally. He didn’t just fight back, he dominated, using skill and intellect. Farmers also dominated the land with chemicals and bulldozers. But Robert Kincaid’s way of changing nature was elastic and always left things in their original form when he finished.

  She looked at the jeans pulling themselves tight around his thigh muscles as he knelt down. At the faded denim shirt sticking to his back, gray hair over the collar of it. At how he sat back on his haunches to adjust a piece of equipment, and for the first time in ever so long, she grew wet between her legs just watching someone. When she felt it, she looked up at the evening sky and breathed deeply, listening to him quietly curse a jammed filter that wouldn’t unscrew from a lens.

  He crossed the creek again back toward the trucks, sloshing along in his rubber boots. Francesca went into the covered bridge, and when she came out the other end, he was crouched and pointing a camera toward her. He fired, cocked the shutter, and fired a second and third time as she walked toward him along the road. She felt herself grin in mild embarrassment.

  “Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I won’t use those anywhere without your permission. I’m finished here. Think I’ll stop by the motel and rinse off a bit before coming out.”

  “Well, you can if you want. But I can spare a towel or a shower or the pump or whatever,” she said quietly, earnestly.

  “Okay, you’re on. Go ahead. I’ll load the equipment in Harry—that’s my truck—and be right there.”

  She backed Richard’s new Ford out of the trees and took it up on the main road away from the bridge, turned right, and headed toward Winterset, where she cut southwest toward home. The dust was too thick for her to see if he was following, though once, coming around a curve, she thought she could see his lights a mile back, rattling along in the truck he called Harry.

  It must have been him, for she heard his truck coming up the lane just after she arrived. Jack barked at first but settled down right away, muttering to himself, “Same guy as last night; okay, I guess.” Kincaid stopped for a moment to talk with him.

  Francesca stepped out of the back porch door. “Shower?”

  “That’d be great. Show me the way.”

  She took him upstairs to the bathroom she had insisted Richard put in when the children were growing up. That was one of the few demands on which she had stood firm. She liked long hot baths in the evening, and she wasn’t going to deal with teenagers tromping around in her private spaces. Richard used the other bath, said he felt uncomfortable with all the feminine things in hers. “Too fussy,” were his words.

  The bath could be reached only through their bedroom. She opened the door to it and took out an assortment of towels and a washcloth from a cupboard under the sink. “Use anything you want.” She smiled while biting her lower lip slightly.

  “I might borrow some shampoo if you can spare it. Mine’s at the motel.”

  “Sure. Take your pick.” She set three different bottles on the counter, each partly used.

  “Thanks.” He tossed his fresh clothes on the bed, and Francesca noted the khakis, white shirt, and sandals. None of the local men wore sandals. A few of them from town had started wearing Bermuda shorts at the golf course, but not the farmers. And sandals… never.

  She went downstairs and heard the shower come on. He’s naked now, she thought, and felt funny in her lower belly.

  Earlier in the day, after he called, she had driven the forty miles into Des Moines and went to the state liquor store. She was not experienced in this and asked a clerk about a good wine. He didn’t know any more than she did, which was nothing. So she looked through the rows of bottles until she came across a label that read “Valpolicella.” She remembered that from a long time ago. Dry, Italian red wine. She bought two bottles and another decanter of brandy, feeling sensual and worldly.

  Next she looked for a new summer dress from a shop downtown. She found one, light pink with thin straps. It scooped down in back, did the same in front rather dramatically so the tops of her breasts were exposed, and gathered around her waist with a narrow sash. And new white sandals, expensive ones, flat-heeled, with delicate handiwork on the straps.

  In the afternoon she fixed stuffed peppers, filling them with a mixture of tomato sauce, brown rice, cheese, and chopped parsley. Then came a simple spinach salad, corn bread, and an apple-sauce soufflé for dessert. All of it, except the soufflé, went into the refrigerator.

  She hurried to shorten her dress to knee length. The Des Moines Register had carried an article earlier in the summer saying that was the preferred length this year. She always had thought fashion and all it implied pretty weird, people behaving sheeplike in the service of European designers. But the length suited her, so that’s where the hem went.

  The wine was a problem. People around here kept it in the refrigerator, though in Italy they never had done that. Yet it was too warm just to let it sit on the counter. Then she remembered the spring house. It was about sixty degrees in there in the summer, so she put the wine along the wall.

  The shower shut off upstairs just as the phone rang. It was Richard, calling from Illinois.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carolyn’s steer’ll be judged on Wednesday. Some other things we want to see next day. Be home Friday, late.”

  “All right, have a good time and drive carefully.”

  “Frannie, you sure you’re okay? Sound a little strange.”

  “No, I’m fine. Just hot. I’ll be better after my bath.”

  “Okay. Say hello to Jack for me.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that.” She glanced at Jack sprawled on the cement of the back porch floor.

  Robert Kincaid came down the stairs and into the kitchen. White button-down–collar shirt, sleeves rolled up to just above the elbow, light khaki slacks, brown sandals, silver bracelet, top two buttons of his shirt open, silver chain. His hair was still damp and brushed neatly, with a part in the middle. And she marveled at the sandals.

  “I’ll just take my field duds out to the truck and bring in the gear for a little cleaning.”

  “Go ahead. I’m going to take a bath.”

  “Want a beer with your bath?”

  “If you have an extra one.”

  He brought in the cooler first, lifted out a beer for her, and opened it, while she found two tall glasses that would serve as mugs. When he went back to the truck for the cameras, she took her beer and went upstairs, noted that he had cleaned the tub, and then ran a high, warm bath for herself, settling in with her glass on the floor beside her while she shaved and soaped. He had been here just a few minutes before; she was lying where the water had run down his body, and she found that intensely erotic. Almost everything about Robert Kincaid had begun to seem erotic to her.

  Something as simple as a cold glass of beer at bath time felt so elegant. Why didn’t she and Richard live this way? Part of it, she knew, was the inertia of protracted custom. All marriages, all relationships, are susceptible to that. Custom brings predictability, and predictability carries its own comforts; she was aware of that, too.

  And there was the farm. Like a demanding invalid, it needed constant attention, even though the steady substitution of equipment for human labor had made much of the work less onerous than it had been in the past.

  But there was something more going on here. Predictability is one thing, fear of change is something else. And Richard was afraid of change, any kind of change, in their marriage. Didn’t want to talk about it in general. Didn’t want to talk about sex in particular. Eroti
cism was, in some way, dangerous business, unseemly to his way of thinking.

  But he wasn’t alone and really wasn’t to blame. What was the barrier to freedom that had been erected out here? Not just on their farm, but in the rural culture. Maybe urban culture, for that matter. Why the walls and the fences preventing open, natural relationships between men and women? Why the lack of intimacy, the absence of eroticism?

  The women’s magazines talked about these matters. And women were starting to have expectations about their allotted place in the grander scheme of things, as well as what transpired in the bedrooms of their lives. Men such as Richard—most men, she guessed—were threatened by these expectations. In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time.

  Women saw no contradiction in that. Men did. The locker rooms and stag parties and pool halls and segregated gatherings of their lives defined a certain set of male characteristics in which poetry, or anything of subtlety, had no place. Hence, if eroticism was a matter of subtlety, an art form of its own, which Francesca knew it to be, it had no place in the fabric of their lives. So the distracting and conveniently clever dance that held them apart went on, while women sighed and turned their faces to the wall in the nights of Madison County.

  There was something in the mind of Robert Kincaid that understood all of this, implicitly. She was sure of that.

  Walking into the bedroom, toweling off, she noted it was a little after ten. Still hot, but the bath had cooled her. From the closet she took the new dress.

  She pulled her long black hair behind her and fastened it with a silver clasp. Silver earrings, large hooped ones, and a loose-fitting silver bracelet she also had bought in Des Moines that morning.

  The Wind Song perfume again. A little lipstick on the high-cheekboned, Latin face, the shade of pink even lighter than the dress. Her tan from working outdoors in shorts and midriff tops accented the whole outfit. Her slim legs came out from under the hem looking just fine.

  She turned first one way, then the other, looking at herself in the bureau mirror. That’s about as good as I can do, she thought. And then, pleased, said half out loud, “It’s pretty good, though.”

  Robert Kincaid was working on his second beer and repacking the cameras when she came into the kitchen. He looked up at her.

  “Jesus,” he said softly. All of the feelings, all of the searching and reflecting, a lifetime of feeling and searching and reflecting, came together at that moment. And he fell in love with Francesca Johnson, farmer’s wife, of Madison County, Iowa, long ago from Naples.

  “I mean”—his voice was a little shaky, a little rough—“if you don’t mind my boldness, you look stunning. Make-’em-run-around-the-block-howling-in-agony stunning. I’m serious. You’re big-time elegant, Francesca, in the purest sense of that word.”

  His admiration was genuine, she could tell. She reveled in it, bathed in it, let it swirl over her and into the pores of her skin like soft oil from the hands of some deity somewhere who had deserted her years ago and had now returned.

  And, in the catch of that moment, she fell in love with Robert Kincaid, photographer-writer, from Bellingham, Washington, who drove an old pickup truck named Harry.

  Room to Dance Again

  On that Tuesday evening in August of 1965, Robert Kincaid looked steadily at Francesca Johnson. She looked back in kind. From ten feet apart they were locked in to one another, solidly, intimately, and inextricably.

  The telephone rang. Still looking at him, she did not move on the first ring, or the second. In the long silence after the second ring, and before the third, he took a deep breath and looked down at his camera bags. With that she was able to move across the kitchen toward the phone hanging on the wall just behind his chair.

  “Johnson’s…. Hi, Marge. Yes, I’m fine. Thursday night?” She calculated: He said he’d be here a week, he came yesterday, this is only Tuesday. The decision to lie was an easy one.

  She was standing by the door to the porch, phone in her left hand. He sat within touching distance, his back to her. She reached out with her right hand and rested it on his shoulder, in the casual way that some women have with men they care for. In only twenty-four hours she had come to care for Robert Kincaid.

  “Oh, Marge, I’m tied up then. I’m going shopping in Des Moines. Good chance to get a lot of things done I’ve been putting off. You know, with Richard and the kids gone.”

  Her hand lay quietly upon him. She could feel the muscle running from his neck along his shoulder, just back of his collarbone. She was looking down on the thick gray hair, neatly parted. Saw how it drifted over his collar. Marge babbled on.

  “Yes, Richard called a little while ago…. No, the judging’s not till Wednesday, tomorrow. Richard said it’d be late Friday before they’re home. Something they want to see on Thursday. It’s a long drive, particularly in the stock truck…. No, football practice doesn’t start for another week. Uh-huh, a week. At least that’s what Michael said.”

  She was conscious of how warm his body felt through the shirt. The warmth came into her hand, moved up her arm, and from there spread through her to wherever it wanted to go, with no effort— indeed, with no control—from her. He was still, not wanting to make any noise that might cause Marge to wonder. Francesca understood this.

  “Oh, yes, that was a man asking directions.” As she guessed, Floyd Clark had gone right home and told his wife about the green pickup he had seen in the Johnsons’ yard on his way by yesterday.

  “A photographer? Gosh, I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. Could have been.” The lies were coming easier now.

  “He was looking for Roseman Bridge…. Is that right? Taking pictures of the old bridges, huh? Oh, well, that’s harmless enough.

  “Hippie?” Francesca giggled and watched Kincaid’s head shake slowly back and forth. “Well, I’m not sure what a hippie looks like. This fellow was polite. He only stayed a minute or two and then was gone…. I don’t know whether they have hippies in Italy, Marge. I haven’t been there for eight years. Besides, like I said, I’m not sure I’d know a hippie if I saw one.”

  Marge was talking on about free love and communes and drugs she’d read about somewhere. “Marge, I was just getting ready to step into my bath when you called, so I’d better run before the water gets cold…. Okay, I’ll call soon. ‘Bye.”

  She disliked removing her hand from his shoulder, but there was no good excuse not to remove it. So she walked to the sink and turned on the radio. More country music. She adjusted the dial until the sound of a big band came on and left it there.

  “ ‘Tangerine,’ ” he said.

  “What?”

  “The song. It’s called ‘Tangerine.’ It’s about an Argentinian woman.” Talking around the edges of things again. Saying anything, anything. Fighting for time and the sense of it all, hearing somewhere back in his mind the faint click of a door shutting behind two people in an Iowa kitchen.

  She smiled softly at him. “Are you hungry? I have supper ready whenever you want.”

  “It was a long, good day. I wouldn’t mind another beer before I eat. Will you have one with me?” Stalling, looking for his center, losing it moment by moment.

  She would. He opened two and set one on her side of the table.

  Francesca was pleased with how she looked and how she felt. Feminine. That’s how she felt. Light and warm and feminine. She sat on the kitchen chair, crossed her legs, and the hem of her skirt rode up well above her right knee. Kincaid was leaning against the refrigerator, arms folded across his chest, Budweiser in his right hand. She was pleased that he noticed her legs, and he did.

  He noticed all of her. He could have walked out on this earlier, could still walk. Rationality shrieked at him. “Let it go, Kincaid, get back on the road. Shoot the bridges, go to India. Stop in Bangkok on the way and look up the silk merchant’s daughter who knows every ecstatic secret the old ways can teach. Swim naked with her at dawn in j
ungle pools and listen to her scream as you turn her inside out at twilight. Let go of this”—the voice was hissing now—“it’s outrunning you.”

  But the slow street tango had begun. Somewhere it played; he could hear it, an old accordion. It was far back, or far ahead, he couldn’t be sure. Yet it moved toward him steadily. And the sound of it blurred his criteria and funneled down his alternatives toward unity. Inexorably it did that, until there was nowhere left to go, except toward Francesca Johnson.

  “We could dance, if you like. The music’s pretty good for it,” he said in that serious, shy way of his. Then he quickly tacked on his caveat: “I’m not much of a dancer, but if you’d like to, I can probably handle it in a kitchen.”

  Jack scratched at the porch door, wanting in. He could stay out.

  Francesca blushed only a little. “Okay. But I don’t dance much, either… anymore. I did as a young girl in Italy, but now it’s just pretty much on New Year’s Eve, and then only a little bit.”

  He smiled and put his beer on the counter. She rose, and they moved toward each other. “It’s your Tuesday night dance party from WGN, Chicago,” said the smooth baritone. “We’ll be back after these messages.”

  They both laughed. Telephones and commercials. Something there was that kept inserting reality between them. They knew it without saying it.

  But he had reached out and taken her right hand anyway, in his left. He leaned easily against the counter, legs crossed at the ankles, right one on top. She rested beside him, against the sink, and looked out the window near the table, feeling his slim fingers around her hand. There was no breeze, and the corn was growing.

  “Oh, just a minute.” She reluctantly removed her hand from his and opened the bottom right cupboard. From it she took two white candles she had bought in Des Moines that morning, along with a small brass holder for each candle. She put them on the table.