She shook her head and walked past him, feeling his eyes on her hips, wondering if he watched her all the way across the porch, guessing that he did.
She was right. He watched her. Shook his head and looked again. Watched her body, thought of the intelligence he knew she possessed, wondered about the other things he sensed in her. He was drawn to her, fighting it back.
The garden was in shade now. Francesca moved through it with a dishpan done in cracked white enamel. She gathered carrots and parsley, some parsnips and onions and turnips.
When she entered the kitchen, Robert Kincaid was repacking the knapsacks, neatly and precisely, she noticed. Everything obviously had its place and always was placed in its place. He had finished his beer and opened two more, even though she was not quite done with hers. She tilted back her head and finished the first one, handing him the empty bottle.
“Can I do something?” he asked.
“You can bring in the watermelon from the porch and a few potatoes from the bucket out there.”
He moved so easily that she was amazed at how quickly he went to the porch and returned, melon under his arm, four potatoes in his hands. “Enough?”
She nodded, thinking how ghostlike he seemed. He set them on the counter beside the sink where she was cleaning the garden vegetables and returned to his chair, lighting a Camel as he sat down.
“How long will you be here?” she asked, looking down at the vegetables she was working on.
“I’m not sure. This is a slow time for me, and my deadline for the bridge pictures is still three weeks away. As long as it takes to get it right, I guess. Probably about a week.”
“Where are you staying? In town?”
“Yes. A little place with cabins. Something-or-other Motor Court. I just checked in this morning. Haven’t even unloaded my gear yet.”
“That’s the only place to stay, except for Mrs. Carlson’s; she takes in roomers. The restaurants will be a disappointment, though, particularly for someone with your eating habits.”
“I know. It’s an old story. But I’ve learned to make do. This time of year it’s not so bad; I can find fresh produce in the stores and at stands along the road. Bread and a few other things, and I make it work, approximately. It’s nice to be invited out like this, though. I appreciate it.”
She reached along the counter and flipped on a small radio, one with only two dials and tan cloth covering the speakers. “With time in my pocket, and the weather on my side…” a voice sang, guitars chunking along underneath. She kept the volume low.
“I’m pretty good at chopping vegetables,” he offered.
“Okay, there’s the cutting board, a knife’s in the drawer right below it. I’m going to fix a stew, so kind of cube the vegetables.”
He stood two feet from her, looking down, cutting and chopping the carrots and turnips, parsnips and onions. Francesca peeled potatoes into the sink, aware of being so close to a strange man. She had never thought of peeling potatoes as having little slanting feelings connected with it.
“You play the guitar? l saw the case in your truck.”
“A little bit. It keeps me company, not too much more than that. My wife was an early folkie, way before the music became popular, and she got me going on it.”
Francesca had stiffened slightly at the word wife. Why, she didn’t know. He had a right to be married, but somehow it didn’t fit him. She didn’t want him to be married.
“She couldn’t stand the long shoots when I’d be gone for months. I don’t blame her. She pulled out nine years ago. Divorced me a year later. We never had children, so it wasn’t complicated. Took one guitar, left the el cheapo with me.”
“You hear from her?”
“No, never.”
That was all he said. Francesca didn’t push it. But she felt better, selfishly, and wondered again why she should care one way or the other.
“I’ve been to Italy, twice,” he said. “Where you from, originally?”
“Naples.”
“Never made it there. I was in the north once, doing some shooting along the River Po. Then again for a piece on Sicily.”
Francesca peeled potatoes, thinking of Italy for a moment, conscious of Robert Kincaid beside her.
Clouds had moved up in the west, splitting the sun into rays that splayed in several directions. He looked out the window above the sink and said, “God light. Calendar companies love it. So do religious magazines.”
“Your work sounds interesting,” Francesca said. She felt a need to keep neutral conversation going.
“It is. I like it a lot. I like the road, and I like making pictures.”
She noticed he’d said “making” pictures. “You make pictures, not take them?”
“Yes. At least that’s how I think of it. That’s the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living. When I’m finished with that bridge we saw today, it won’t look quite like you expect. I’ll have made it into something of my own, by lens choice, or camera angle, or general composition, and most likely by some combination of all of those.
“I don’t just take things as given; I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image. The magazine has its own style and demands, and I don’t always agree with the editors’ taste; in fact, most of the time I don’t. And that bothers them, even though they decide what goes in and what gets left out. I guess they know their readership, but I wish they’d take a few more chances now and then. I tell them that, and it bothers them.
“That’s the problem in earning a living through an art form. You’re always dealing with markets, and markets—mass markets—are designed to suit average tastes. That’s where the numbers are. That’s the reality, I guess. But, as I said, it can become pretty confining. They let me keep the shots they don’t use, so at least I have my own private files of stuff I like.
“And, once in a while, another magazine will take one or two, or I can write an article on a place I’ve been and illustrate it with something a little more daring than
“Sometime I’m going to do an essay called ‘The Virtues of Amateurism’ for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic passion than anything else. It’s a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don’t challenge them.
“Profit and subscriptions and the rest of that stuff dominate art. We’re all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.
“The marketing people are always talking about something called ‘consumers.’ I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.”
Francesca laughed quietly, thinking about safety and comfort.
“But I’m not complaining too much. Like I said, the traveling is good, and I like fooling with cameras and being out of doors. The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it’s not a bad song.”
Francesca supposed that, for Robert Kincaid, this was everyday talk. For her, it was the stuff of literature. People in Madison County didn’t talk this way, about these things. The talk was about weather and farm prices and new babies and funerals and government programs and athletic teams. Not about art and dreams. Not about realities that kept the music silent, the dreams in a box.
He finished chopping vegetables. “Anything else I can do?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s about under control.”
He sat at the table again, smoking, taking a drink of beer now and then. She cooked, sipping on her beer between tasks. She could feel the alcohol, even this small amount of it. On New Year’s Eve, at the Legion Hall, she and Richard would have some drinks. Other than that, not much, and there seldom was liquor in the house, except for a bottle of brandy she had bought once in some vague spasm of hope for romance in their country lives. The bottle was still unopened.
Vegetable oil, one and one-half cups of vegetables. Cook until light brown. Add flour and mix well. Add water,
