The Bridges of Madison County / Мосты округа Мэдисон. Роберт Джеймс Уоллер
untouched, even though it was empty now and had turned to meadow grass.
The first serious lines were just beginning to show on her face in the photograph. His camera had found them. Still, she was pleased with what she saw. Her hair was black, and her body was full and warm, filling out the jeans just about right. Yet it was her face at which she stared. It was the face of a woman in love with the man taking the picture.
She could see him clearly also, down the flow of her memory. Each year she ran all of the images through her mind, remembering everything, forgetting nothing. He was tall and thin and hard, and he moved like the grass itself, without effort, gracefully. His silver-gray hair hung well below his ears and nearly always looked disheveled, as if he had just come in from a long sea voyage through a stiff wind and had tried to brush it into place with his hands.
His narrow face, high cheekbones, and hair falling over his forehead set off light blue eyes that seemed never to stop looking for the next photograph. He had smiled at her, saying how fine and warm she looked in early light, asked her to lean against the post, and then moved around her in a wide arc, shooting from knee level, then standing, then lying on his back with the camera pointed up at her.
She had been slightly embarrassed at the amount of film he used but pleased by the amount of attention he paid to her. She hoped none of the neighbors were out early on their tractors. Though on that particular morning she hadn't cared too much about neighbors and what they thought.
He shot, loaded film, changed lenses, changed cameras, shot some more, and talked quietly to her as he worked, always telling her how good she looked to him and how much he loved her. “Francesca, you're incredibly beautiful.” Sometimes he stopped and just stared at her, through her, around her, inside of her.
Her nipples were clearly outlined where they pressed against the cotton T-shirt. She had been strangely unconcerned about that, about being naked under the shirt. More, she was glad of it and was warmed knowing that he could see her breasts so clearly down his lenses. Never would she have dressed this way around Richard. He would not have approved.
Robert had asked her to arch her back ever so slightly, and he had whispered then, “Yes, yes, that's it, stay there.” That was when he had taken the photograph at which she now stared. The light was perfect, that's what he had said – “cloudy bright” was his name for it – and the shutter clicked steadily as he moved around her.
He was lithe; that was the word she had thought of while watching him. At fifty-two his body was all lean muscle, muscle that moved with the kind of intensity and power that comes only to men who work hard and take care of themselves.
She looked at the picture again, studied it. “I did look good,” she thought, smiling to herself at the mild self-admiration. “I never looked that good before or after. It was him.” And she took another sip of brandy while the rain went on.
Robert Kincaid was a magician of sorts, who lived within himself. Francesca had sensed as much immediately on a hot, dry Monday in August 1965, when he stepped out of his truck onto her driveway. Richard and the children were at the Illinois State Fair[105], exhibiting the prize steer[106] that received more attention than she did, and she had the week to herself.
She had been sitting on the front porch swing[107], drinking iced tea, watching the dust from under a pickup coming down the county road. The truck was moving slowly, as if the driver were looking for something, stopped just short of her lane, then turned up it toward the house. Oh, God, she had thought. Who's this?
She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a faded blue work-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, shirttail out[108]. Her long black hair was fastened up by a tortoiseshell comb her father had given her when she left the old country. The truck rolled up the lane and stopped near the gate to the wire fence[109] surrounding the house.
Francesca stepped off the porch and walked unhurriedly through the grass toward the gate. And out of the pickup came Robert Kincaid, looking like some vision from a never-written book called An Illustrated History of Shamans.
His military-style shirt was tacked down to his back with perspiration; there were wide, dark circles of it under his arms. The top three buttons were undone, and she could see tight chest muscles just below the plain silver chain around his neck. Over his shoulders were wide orange suspenders, the kind worn by people who spent a lot of time in wilderness areas.
He smiled. “I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for a covered bridge out this way[110], and I can't find it. I think I'm lost.” He wiped his forehead and smiled again.
His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen. Ways that rearrange the molecular space between male and female.
The ways are simple; we have made them seem complicated. Francesca sensed this without knowing she was sensing it, sensed it at the level of her cells. And there began the thing that would change her forever.
A car went past on the road, trailing dust behind it, and honked. Francesca waved back at Floyd Clark's brown arm sticking out of his Chevy[111] and turned back to the stranger. “You're pretty close. The bridge is only about two miles from here.” Then, after twenty years of living the close life, a life demanded by a rural culture, Francesca Johnson surprised herself by saying, “I'll be glad to show it to you, if you want.”
Why she did that, she never had been sure. A young girl's feelings rising like a bubble through water and bursting out, maybe, after all these years. She was not shy, but not forward, either. The only thing she could ever conclude was that Robert Kincaid had drawn her in somehow, after only a few seconds of looking at him.
He was obviously taken aback, slightly, by her offer. But he recovered quickly and with a serious look on his face said he'd appreciate that. She picked up the cowboy boots she wore for farm chores and walked out to his truck, following him around to the passenger side.
“Just take me a minute to make room for you; lots of gear 'n'[112] stuff in here[113].” He mumbled mostly to himself as he worked, and she could tell he was a little flustered, and a little shy about the whole affair.
He was rearranging canvas bags and tripods, a Thermos bottle and paper sacks. In the back of the pickup were an old brown suitcase and a guitar case, both dusty and battered, both tied to a spare tire with a piece of clothesline rope.
He mumbled and sorted and stuffed paper coffee cups and banana peels into a brown grocery bag that he tossed into
“Okay, I think you can squeeze in there now.” He held the door, closed it behind her, then went around to the driver's side and with a peculiar, animal-like grace stepped in behind the wheel. He looked at her, just a quick glance, smiled slightly, and said, “Which way?”
“Right.” She motioned with her hand. He turned the key, and the engine started. Bouncing, the truck moved along the lane toward the road.
He leaned over and reached into the glove compartment[114], his forearm accidentally brushing across her lower thigh. Looking half out the windshield and half into the compartment, he took out a business card and handed it to her. “Robert Kincaid, Writer-Photographer.” His address was printed there, along with a phone number.
“I'm out here on assignment for National Geographic,” he said. “You familiar with the magazine?”
“Yes.” Francesca nodded, thinking, Isn't everybody?
“They're doing a piece on covered bridges, and Madison County, Iowa, apparently has some interesting ones. I've located
Ярмарка штата Иллинойс
бычок-рекордсмен
качели на крыльце
с незаправленным подолом рубашки
проволочная ограда
где-то здесь, в этих краях
«Шевроле», марка автомобиля
and
здесь полно всякого барахла the truck box when he was finished. Finally he removed a blue-and-white ice chest and put that in the back as well. In faded red paint on the green truck door was printed “Kincaid Photography, Bellingham, Washington.”
бардачок автомобиля