The Bridges Of Madison County (7 page)

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 deed 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 jungle 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.

He walked over, tilted each one, and lit it, while she snapped off the overhead light. It was dark now, except for the small flames pointing straight upward, barely fluttering on a windless night. The plain kitchen had never looked this good.

The music started again. Fortunately for both of them, it was a slow rendition of “Autumn Leaves.”

She felt awkward. So did he. But he took her hand, put an arm around her waist, she moved into him, and the awkwardness vanished. Somehow it worked in an easy kind of way. He moved his arm farther around her waist and pulled her closer.

She could smell him, clean and soaped and warm. A good, fundamental smell of a civilized man who seemed, in some part of himself, aboriginal.

“Nice perfume,” he said, bringing their hands in to lie upon his chest, near his shoulder.

“Thank you.”

They danced, slowly. Not moving very far in any direction. She could feel his legs against hers, their stomachs touching occasionally.

The song ended, but he held on to her, hummed the melody that had just played, and they stayed as they were until the next song began. He automatically led her into it, and the dance went on, while locusts complained about the coming of September.

She could feel the muscles of his shoulder through the light cotton shirt. He was real, more real than anything she’d ever known. He bent slightly to put his cheek against hers.

During the time they spent together, he once referred to himself as one of the last cowboys. They had been sitting on the grass by the pump out back. She didn’t understand and asked him about it.

“There’s a certain breed of man that’s obsolete,” he had said. “Or very nearly so. The world is getting organized, way too organized for me and some others. Everything in its place, a place for everything. Well, my camera equipment is pretty well organized, I admit, but I’m talking about something more than that. Rules and regulations and laws and social conventions. Hierarchies of authority, spans of control, long-range plans, and budgets. Corporate power; in ‘Bud’ we trust. A world of wrinkled suits and stick-on name tags.

“Not all men are the same. Some will do okay in the world that’s coming. Some, maybe just a few of us, will not. You can see it in computers and robots and what they portend. In older worlds, there were things we could do, were designed to do, that nobody or no machine could do. We run fast, are strong and quick, aggressive and tough. We were given courage. We can throw spears long distances and fight in hand-to-hand combat.

“Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn’t require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness. All you need are sperm banks to keep the species going, and those are coming along now. Most men are rotten lovers, women say, so there’s not much loss in replacing sex with science.

“We’re giving up free range, getting organized, feathering our emotions. Efficiency and effectiveness and all those other pieces of intellectual artifice. And with the loss of free range, the cowboy disappears, along with the mountain lion and gray wolf. There’s not much room left for travelers.

“I’m one of the last cowboys. My job gives me free range of a sort. As much as you can find nowadays. I’m not sad about it. Maybe a little wistful, I guess. But it’s got to happen; it’s the only way we’ll keep from destroying ourselves. My contention is that male hormones are the ultimate cause of trouble on this planet. It was one thing to dominate another tribe or another warrior. It’s quite another to have missiles. It’s also quite another to have the power to destroy nature the way we’re doing. Rachel Carson is right. So were John Muir and Aldo Leopold.

“The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if we’re not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there’s still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on. We have to somehow sublimate those male hormones, or at least get them under control.

“It’s probably time to put away the things of childhood and grow up. Hell, I recognize it. I admit it. I’m just trying to make some good pictures and get out of life before I’m totally obsolete or do some serious damage.”

Over the years, she had thought about what he’d said. It seemed right to her, somehow, on the surface of it. Yet the ways of him contradicted what he said. He had a certain plunging aggressiveness to him, but he seemed to be able to control it, to turn it on and then let go of it when he wanted. And that’s what had both confused and attracted her– incredible intensity, but controlled, metered, arrowlike intensity that was mixed with warmth and no hint of meanness.

On that Tuesday night, gradually and without design, they had moved closer and closer together, dancing in the kitchen. Francesca was pressed close against his chest, and she wondered if he could feel her breasts through the dress and his shirt and was certain he could.

He felt so good to her. She wanted this to run forever. More old songs, more dancing, more of his body against hers. She had become a woman again. There was room to dance again. In a slow, unremitting way, she was turning for home, toward a place she’d never been.

It was hot. The humidity was up, and thunder rolled far in the southwest. Moths plastered themselves on the screens, looking in at the candles, chasing the fire.

He was falling into her now. And she into him. She moved her cheek away from his, looked up at him with dark eyes, and he kissed her, and she kissed back, longtime soft kissing, a river of it.

They gave up the pretense of dancing, and her arms went around his neck. His left hand was on her waist behind her back, the other brushing across her neck and her cheek and her hair. Thomas Wolfe talked about the “ghost of the old eagerness.” The ghost had stirred in Francesca Johnson. In both of them.

Sitting by the window on her sixty-seventh birthday, Francesca watched the rain and remembered. She carried her brandy into the kitchen and stopped for a moment, staring at the exact spot where the two of them had stood. The feelings inside of her were overwhelming; they always were. Strong enough that over the years she had dared do this in detail only once a year or her mind somehow would have disintegrated at the sheer emotional bludgeoning of it all.

Her abstinence from her recollections had been a matter of survival. Though in the last few years, the detail was coming back more and more often. She had ceased trying to stop him from coming into her. The images were clear, and real, and present. And so far back. Twenty-two years back. But slowly they were becoming her reality once again, the only one in which she cared to live.

She knew she was sixty-seven and accepted it, but she could not imagine Robert Kincaid being nearly seventy-five. Could not think of it, could not conceive of it or even conceive of the conceiving of it. He was here with her, right in this kitchen, in his white shirt, long gray hair, khaki slacks, brown sandals, silver bracelet, and silver chain around his neck. He was here with his arms around her.

She finally pulled back from him, from where they stood in the kitchen, and took his hand, leading him toward the stairs, up the stairs, past Carolyn’s room, past Michael’s room, and into her room, turning on a small reading lamp by the bed.

Now, all these years later, Francesca carried her brandy and walked slowly up the stairs, her right hand trailing behind her to bring along the memory of him up the stairs and down the hallway into the bedroom.