The handsome actor who was identified with the TV dramatization of Steadman’s book often made statements about travel, risk, and heroism — even about writing, with enormous confidence, even when Steadman could do almost no writing himself. As a stand-in for the reclusive Steadman, the actor was now and then employed as a motivational speaker, using the challenges of his television experiences making the show — most of it was filmed in Mexico — as his text. He did so portentously, in the tone of a seasoned traveler, as though he were responsible for the book. And Trespassing had spawned so many imitators it created a genre, inspiring a sort of travel of which this Ecuador trip was typicaclass="underline" a leap in the dark. Before Trespassing there had been travel of this kind but few persuasive books about it. Steadman had made it an accessible narrative, popularized it, given it drama. He had succeeded in making the world seem dangerous and difficult again, full of unpredictable people and narrow escapes, a debauch of experience, as in an earlier age of travel.
The merchandising that came later astonished him. Just the notion of it seemed weird, especially since he had not published any other book. A man he despised at the agency that had promoted it and sold it had said to him: “Don’t write anything else, or if you do, make it another Trespassing. Don’t you see what you’ve done? By not writing another book you’ve made yourself into a brand.”
After Steadman licensed the name, it was more than a name; it was a logo, a lifestyle, a clothing line that was expressly technical, a range of travel gear, of sunglasses and accessories — knives, pens, lighters. The leather jacket had been the first piece of merchandise, and as a signature item it was still selling. The luggage came later. The clothing changed from year to year. The newest line was watches (“timepieces—‘watches’ does not describe them”), some of them very expensive: chronometers for divers, certified for two hundred meters; a model with a built-in altimeter for pilots; many for hikers; one in gold and titanium. The licensed brand was Trespassing Overland Gear. The motto, a line from the book, was “Cross borders — don’t ask permission.”
How popular was all this? He knew a great deal from the revenue, which seemed to him vast and unspendable, but he often wondered what sort of people bought the stuff, because he so seldom went out and he avoided using any of it himself. Now he saw that the clothes on that woman behind him with his book on her lap were from the catalogue; and the man next to her, the others around her, all of them wore travel outfits bearing the TOG logo of a small striding figure in a signature leather jacket.
Merchandising and relicensing the name produced such a large and regular income that Steadman had long since stopped writing for money. He wanted only to produce another book worthy of his first one, but fiction — as brave an interior journey as Trespassing had been a global one. He had started writing the book, and spoke of it as work in progress, but for years he had regarded it privately as work in stoppage. What he published now, the occasional magazine articles and opinion pieces, were merely to remind the world that he was still alive, and this reminder was a way of promising another book.
Steadman liked to think he was in the middle of his career. But he knew that for an American writer there is no middle. You were a hot new author and then you were either an old hand or else forgotten. He was somewhere deep in the second half and wishing he were younger. Everything he had gladly done in the early part of his career he now avoided: the readings, the signings, the appearances, the visits to colleges and bookstores, the posed photographs and interviews, the favors to editors, the sideshows at book festivals — he refused them all and wanted the opposite, silence, obscurity, and remoteness. His refusals created the impression of snooty contempt; his brusque deflecting ironies were taken to be bad temper. Simply saying no, he was seen as grumpy, uncooperative, a snob. He did not want to convey to these strangers how desperate he was. Having all that merchandising money somehow made it worse.
Rather than agreeing to interviews and public appearances to correct the false impression that readers had of him, he withdrew even further; and in seclusion, without the envious mockery of journalists and profile writers, he began to suspect that he might have written better — that he could do better. He was hardly thirty when he wrote Trespassing. The book was full of hasty judgments, but why tidy it now? He was known as a travel writer, but he felt sure that fiction writing was his gift. Because so much of Trespassing had been fiction — embroidered incidents, improved-upon dialogue, outright invention — he knew he had a great novel in him. There was still time to finish the book that would prove this.
He had started writing it. Ava had praised it; they were lovers then, sharing their lives. In the course of their breakup she told him frankly that she hadn’t liked what he had read to her after all. The novel in progress was a reflection of him: selfish, suffocating, manipulative, pretentious, incomplete, and sexless.
“Writing is your dolly. You just sit around playing with it.”
This same woman, listening naked in their bed to him reading part of a chapter, had once said, “It’s genius, Slade.”
“You’re probably one of the few writers in America who can afford to treat writing as your dolly.”
He protested, ranting like a man in a cage. Instead of consoling him, Ava said, “You are such a fucking diva.” He was demoralized for the moment. He told himself he would be better when she was completely out of his life. He took work for magazines — his factual story-chasing journalism had always been resourceful and vivid, even shocking. He said, “I write it with my left hand.” The novel was what mattered to him. Yet what editor ever said, “Write us some fiction”? His struggle to continue his novel wrecked his relationship with Ava.
“You’re just selfish,” they both said.
When their love was gone, replaced by indifference and boredom, a new Ava was revealed — or, not a new Ava, but perhaps the essential woman: ambitious, sarcastic, resilient, demanding, predatory, sensual, much funnier and more resourceful than she had been as his lover. Her intelligence made these traits into weapons.
The delay in Miami proved her toughness. In the lounge, seated in the crossfire of intrusive questions and small talk, most of it from nearby passengers, expressing their impatience by gabbling, Steadman kept himself customarily stone-faced and silent, wearing the implacable mask he had fashioned for himself over the years of his withdrawal.
“On a tour?” one of the men said.
He was a big man, as bulky as his own Trespassing duffel bag, in his late thirties. His badly slouching posture made him seem slovenly and arrogant, and his anger gave him an overbearing and elbowing confidence. Steadman had noticed that he demanded more space than anyone else, an extra seat here in the lounge for his briefcase, his arms on both armrests, his bulgy duffel filling the overhead rack. Walking confidently on kicking feet toward the plane, he filled the jetway, pulling his valise on wheels that trapped people behind him, even his wife, who remained talking on a cell phone until the plane took off, and was on it again, urgently, saying, “I’ll send you all the bumf with a packet of swatches.”
Steadman took his time, and at last he said, “Are you?”
“For want of a better word,” the man said, and looked up, hearing his wife say, “Hack?”
A dark scruffy man, bug-eyed and with spiky hair, was arguing with a clerk at the check-in desk, saying in an insistent German accent, “But that is falsch. I am on the list — Manfred Steiger. I am American.”