Free The Bridges Of Madison County by Robert James Waller Page A

wanted to watch you make your pictures. ‘Shoot,’ as you call it.”
    “Well, you’re about to see it, and you’ll find it pretty boring. At least other people generally do. It’s not like listening to someone practice the piano, where you can be part of it. In photography, production and performance are separated by a long time span. Today I’m doing production. When the pictures appear somewhere, that’s the performance. All you’re going to see is a lot of fiddling around. But you’re more than welcome. In fact, I’m glad you came.”
    She hung on those last four words. He needn’t have said them. He could have stopped with “welcome,” but he didn’t. He was genuinely glad to see her; that was clear. She hoped the fact she was here implied something of the same to him.
    “Can I help you in some way?” she asked as he pulled on his rubber boots.
    “You can carry that blue knapsack. I’ll take the tan one and the tripod.”
    So Francesca became a photographer’s assistant. He had been wrong. There was much to see. There was a performance of sorts, though he was not aware of it. It was what she had noticed yesterday and part of what drew her toward him. His grace, his quick eyes, the muscles along his forearms working. Mostly the way he moved his body. The men she knew seemed cumbrous compared to him.
    It wasn’t that he hurried. In fact, he didn’t hurry at all. There was a gazellelike quality about him, though she could tell he was strong in a supple way. Maybe he, was more like a leopard than a gazelle. Yes. Leopard, that was it. He was not prey. Quite the reverse, she sensed.
    “Francesca, give me the camera with the blue strap, please.”
    She opened the knapsack, feeling a little overcautious about the expensive equipment he handled so casually, and took out the camera. It said “Nikon” on the chrome plating of the viewfinder, with an “F” to the upper left of the name.
    He was on his knees northeast of the bridge, with the tripod low. He held out his left hand without taking his eye from the viewfinder, and she gave him the camera, watching his hand close about the lens as he felt it touch him. He worked the plunger on the end of the cord she had seen hanging out of his vest yesterday. The shutter fired. He cocked the shutter and fired again.
    He reached under the tripod head and unscrewed the camera on it, which was replaced by the one she had given him. While he fastened on the new one, he turned his head toward her and grinned. “Thanks, you’re a first-class assistant.” She flushed a little.
    God, what was it about him! He was like some star creature who had drafted in on the tail of a comet and dropped off at the end of her lane. Why can’t I just say “you’re welcome”? she thought. I feel sort of slow around him, though it’s nothing he does. It’s me, not him. I’m just not used to being with people whose minds work as fast as his does.
    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