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 applesauce 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. Eroticism 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 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.