Steadman thought: You went away to be alone — or, in his and Ava’s case, on a deliberate self-assigned mission — and you discovered your traveling companions to be the very people you were hoping to flee, the ones you most disliked. In this case, young overequipped couples — rich, handsome, heedless, privileged, undeserving, and profoundly lazy in a special selfish way — from this generation of small-minded entrepreneurial emperors. And most of them were dressed in his clothes.
“God, how I loathe these people,” Ava whispered to Steadman.
For one thing, they boasted of hating books and hardly read newspapers. Trespassing didn’t count, because it wasn’t new and was better known from movies and TV — Steadman was aware that some of the most obnoxious people seemed to love it for its lawlessness, its self-indulgent rule-breaking, and its tone of boisterous intrusion. I've only read one real book in my life — yours, such people wrote him. That alone was enough, but it was also an indication that you couldn’t tell them anything. They didn’t listen, they didn’t have to — they ran the whole world now. You turned me into a world traveler.
The thing was to shut them down as quickly as possible.
Steadman had learned that, in an interview, if you fell silent and watched and waited instead of answering, people volunteered more detail. In this instance another man, a bystander, offered the detail.
“It’s quote-unquote adventure travel,” that man said.
“Eco-porn,” Ava said. “Eco-chic. Voyeurism must be such a wet dream for you.”
That man winced, but the man named Hack said, “We’re traveling together. Didn’t you see our T-shirts?”
He unbuttoned his khaki safari shirt, revealing the lettering on his T-shirt: The Gang of Four.
“Until they finish the renovation on our house,” the second man was saying. “We’re reconfiguring the interior of a lovely old Victorian. We’ve got twelve thousand square feet. It’s on an acre in a lovely part of San Francisco. Sea Cliff? Robin Williams lives nearby, and so do Hack and Janey.”
“Marshall Hackler — call me Hack,” said the big slouching man, inviting a handshake with his carelessly thrust out arm.
And Janey was apparently the woman on the cell phone. She just flapped her fingers and turned away, but another woman who had been listening — she was pretty, bright-eyed, the one holding the paperback of Trespassing, in a bush vest and green trousers, dressed for a safari — smiled and said, “Ecuador. A year ago it was Rwanda. We were the last people in there before the Africans massacred the people on that tour. We had the same guide. He was almost killed. No one can go now. We were incredibly lucky.”
The woman speaking on the cell phone broke off and said, “We’re whole-hoggers. We want it all.”
“Janey’s doing the interior. But we’re reconfiguring the outside, too. Swales. Berms. I’ve got the footprint and the plans with me — still working out siting of the lap pool. Downstream we’ll be putting in a guesthouse and sort of meld it with the landscaping.”
Hack put his arm around the man and said, “This guy actually wrote a book.”
Dismissing this with a boastful smile, the man said, “For my sins,” then took a breath and added, “Anyway, I sold my company and got into hedge funds. This was — oh, gosh — before the NASDAQ tanked in — what? Last April?”
Steadman leaned toward him, saying nothing, smiling his obscure smile at the self-conscious “oh, gosh.”
“And I got in the high eight figures.”
Hack said, “So he said to me, ‘Let’s get jiggy wid it.’ ’Cause he’s an A-player. He’s a well-known author, too.”
At the mention of “high eight figures”—what was that, tens of millions, right? — Ava barked loudly, as though at an outrage, and the woman in the Trespassing vest glanced over her cell phone and said, “Do keep it down. I’m talking.”
“Wood worked for two solid years for that payday,” the other woman said, looking up from Steadman’s book.
His name was Wood?
Janey, Hack’s wife, was saying in a wiffling English accent into her cell phone, “It seems frightful. But in point of fact, single people spend a disproportionate amount of time in the loo. The laboratory, as you might say.”
Both couples were dressed alike, mostly in Trespassing clothes from the catalogue: trousers with zip-off legs that turned them into shorts, shirts with zip-off sleeves, reversible jackets, thick socks, hiking shoes, floppy hats, mesh-lined vests, and fanny packs at their waists.
Seeing them, Steadman wanted to say: I give away ten percent of my pretax profits from catalogue sales to environmental causes. How much do you contribute?
“This has something like seventeen pockets,” the woman with the book said, patting her vest, seeing that Ava was staring at it — but Ava was staring at the TOG logo. She slapped it some more. “These gussets are really useful. And check out this placket.”
And when Ava’s gaze drifted to the woman’s expensive watch — it was the Trespassing Mermaid — she said, “It’s a chronometer. Titanium. Certified for like a billion meters. That’s your vacuum-release valve,” and twisted it. “We dive — Janey doesn’t but she snorkels.” The woman on the phone turned away at the mention of her name and kept chewing on the phone. “We’re hoping to do some in the Galápagos.”
Steadman was so delighted to hear that they were going in the opposite direction he did not tell them that snorkeling there was strictly regulated, but encouraged her instead. The man he took to be her husband was going through the sectioned-off pockets of his own padded vest. He brought out a folded map and his boarding pass and a wallet that looked like a small parcel, with slots for air tickets, dollar bills, and pesos. The wallet, too, was a Trespassing accessory.
“What I love about American money is its tensile strength. It’s the high rag content. Leave a couple of bucks in a bathing suit and never mind. All you have to do is dry it out. It actually stands up to a washer-dryer.”
“You mean you can launder it?” Ava said.
Janey, the young woman with the English accent, said “Ta very mooch for now” and “By-yee” and snapped her phone off, and collapsing it, she turned it into a small dark cookie. The other woman reached into another expensive catalogue item, the Trespassing Gourmet Lunch Tote, a padded food satchel with a cooler compartment. She handed her husband a wrapped sandwich.
“We always bring our own,” Hack said, chewing between bites. “It’s smoked turkey with provolone and tomato and an herbed vinaigrette dressing.”
Noting that the man said “herbed,” Ava frowned and turned away, and the woman looked up from her book and offered Ava half a sandwich, saying that she had plenty. Ava’s tight smile meant “no thanks.” Tapping the cover of Trespassing, Hack put his arm around the woman and said, “That must be one hell of a read.”
The woman said, “It’s awesome.”
“Like how?”
“Like in its, um, modalities. In its, um, tropes.”
“You’ve been reading it for weeks and ignoring me.”
“I read real slow when I’m liking something.”
“So who wrote it?”
Steadman, who had been listening closely, braced himself, putting on his most implacable face.
The woman said, “This, like, you know, legendary has-been. The outdoor-gear freak. He’s more a lifestyle than a writer.” Then, “You guys married?”
Hearing “legendary has-been,” Ava shut her eyes and smiled in anger. As for the question, everything about it, too, was wrong. The “you,” the “guys,” the very word “married.”