She had no idea what he meant. All she knew was that he had pulled in a tether of some kind and wound it around both of them so tightly she would have suffocated had it not been for the vaulting freedom from herself she felt.
The night went on, and the great spiral dance continued. Robert Kincaid discarded all sense of anything linear and moved to a part of himself that dealt only with shape and sound and shadow. Down the paths of the old ways he went, finding his direction by candles of sunlit frost melting upon the grass of summer and the red leaves of autumn.
And he heard the words he whispered to her, as if a voice other than his own were saying them. Fragments of a Rilke poem, “around the ancient tower… I have been circling for a thousand years.” The lines to a Navajo sun chant. He whispered to her of the visions she brought to him—of blowing sand and magenta winds and brown pelicans riding the backs of dolphins moving north along the coast of Africa.
Sounds, small, unintelligible sounds, came from her mouth as she arched herself toward him. But it was a language he understood completely, and in this woman beneath him, with his belly against hers, deep inside her, Robert Kincaid’s long search came to an end.
And he knew finally the meaning of all the small footprints on all the deserted beaches he had ever walked, of all the secret cargoes carried by ships that had never sailed, of all the curtained faces that had watched him pass down winding streets of twilight cities. And, like a great hunter of old who has traveled distant miles and now sees the light of his home campfires, his loneliness dissolved. At last. At last. He had come so far… so far. And he lay upon her, perfectly formed and unalterably complete in his love for her. At last.
Toward morning, he raised himself slightly and said, looking straight into her eyes, “This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been failing toward you.”
When they came downstairs, the radio was still on. Dawn had come up, but the sun lay behind a thin cloud cover.
“Francesca, I have a favor to ask.” He smiled at her as she fussed with the coffeepot.
“Yes?” She looked at him. Oh, God, I love him so, she thought, unsteady, wanting even more of him, never stopping.
“Slip on the jeans and T-shirt you wore last night, along with a pair of sandals. Nothing else. I want to make a picture of you as you look this morning. A photograph just for the two of us.”
She went upstairs, her legs weak from being wrapped around him all night, dressed, and went outside with him to the pasture. That’s where he had made the photograph she looked at each year.
THE HIGHWAY AND THE PEREGRINE
Robert Kincaid gave up photograpby for the next few days. And except for the necessary chores, which she minimized, Francesca Johnson gave up farm life. The two of them spent all their time together, either talking or making love. Twice, when she asked, he played the guitar and sang for her in a voice somewhere between fair and good, a little uncomfortable, telling her she was his first audience. When he said that, she smiled and kissed him, then lay back upon her feelings, listening to him sing of whaling ships and desert winds.
She rode with him in Harry to the Des Moines airport, where he shipped film to New York. He always sent the first few rolls ahead, when it was possible, so the editors could look at what he was getting and the technicians could check to make sure his camera shutters were functioning properly.
Afterward he took her to a fancy restaurant for lunch and held her hands across the table, looking at her in his intense way. And the waiter smiled, just watching them, hoping he would feel that way sometime.
She marveled at the sense Robert Kincaid had of his ways coming to a close and the ease with which he accepted it. He could see the approaching death of cowboys and others like them, including himself. And she began to understand what he meant when he said he was at the terminus of a branch of evolution and that it was a dead end. Once, in talking about what he called “last things,” he whispered: “‘Never again,’ cried the High-Desert Master. ‘Never and never and never again.’” He saw nothing beyond himself along the branch. His kind was obsolete.
On Thursday they talked after making love in the afternoon. Both of them knew this conversation had to occur. Both of them had been avoiding it.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
She was silent, torn-apart silent. Then, “I don’t know,” softly.
“Look, I’ll stay here if you want, or in town, or wherever. When your family comes home, I’ll simply talk with your husband and explain how it lies. It won’t be easy, but I’ll get it done.”
She shook her head. “Richard could never get his arms around this; he doesn’t think in these terms. He doesn’t understand magic and passion and all those other things we talk about and experience, and he never will. That doesn’t necessarily make him an inferior person. It’s just too far removed from anything he’s ever felt or thought about. He has no way of dealing with it.”
“Are we going to let all of this go, then?” He was serious, not smiling.
“I don’t know that, either. Robert, in a curious way, you own me. I didn’t want to be owned, didn’t need it, and I know you didn’t intend that, but that’s what has happened. I’m no longer sitting next to you, here on the grass. You have me inside of you as a willing prisoner.”
He replied, “I’m not sure you’re inside of me, or that I am inside of you, or that I own you. At least I don’t want to own you. I think we’re both inside of another being we have created called ‘us.’
“Well, we’re really not inside of that being. We are that being. We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. Christ, we’re in love. As deeply, as profoundly, as it’s possible to be in love.
“Come travel with me, Francesca. That’s not a problem. We’ll make love in desert sand and drink brandy on balconies in Mombasa, watching dhows from Arabia run up their sails in the first wind of morning. I’ll show you lion country and an old French city on the Bay of Bengal where there’s a wonderful rooftop restaurant, and trains that climb through mountain passes and little inns run by Basques high in the Pyrenees. In a tiger preserve in south India, there’s a special place on an island in the middle of a huge lake. If you don’t like the road, I’ll set up shop somewhere and shoot local stuff or portraits or whatever it takes to keep us going.”
“Robert, when we were making love last night, you said something that I still remember. I kept whispering to you about your power—and, my God, you have that. You said, ‘I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.’ You were right. That’s what you feel; you feel the road inside of you. No, more than that, in a way that I’m not certain I can explain, you are the road. In the crack where illusion meets reality, that’s where you are, out there on the road, and the road is you.
“You’re old knapsacks and a truck named Harry and jet airplanes to Asia. And that’s what I want you to be. If your evolutionary branch is a dead end, as you say it is, then I want you to hit that end at full speed. I’m not sure you can do that with me along. Don’t you see, I love you so much that I cannot think of restraining you for a moment. To do that would be to kill the wild, magnificent animal that is you, and the power would die with it.”