Steadman did not in the least resemble the author of Trespassing. This was odd, for that person was falsely fixed in readers’ minds as only a one-book author can be, a monochrome in one dimension. This man, the trespasser, was his book. The book was all that was known. The mentions of him in the press described someone Steadman scarcely recognized, which was another reason that for years he had stayed at home.
His fame disgusted him, not because it was hollow and cheaply won — he had earned it, he had craved it — but because as more time passed he felt unworthy. There was just that one book, the chronicle of a reckless stunt, and where was his second? His self-disgust made him cynical and envious, his inaction shamed him. He collected the names and studied the lives of one-book Americans — Salinger gone to seed in New Hampshire, Ralph Ellison teaching literature in New Jersey, Jim Powers drunk and frail in Minnesota. Steadman understood their anger and bitterness. They were not forgotten, but they had been abandoned.
People hardly talked about them anymore. If you didn’t produce another book, you were as good as dead. That same sudden obscurity befell Steadman; he realized it when the phone stopped ringing and the talk ceased. Once he had pleaded to be left alone; then, years later, he had his wish and he was at sea. There was no need to hide, no one to hide from. Who cared? As the Vineyard had grown in popularity, his own fame had slipped, and it had gotten to the point where, though the title Trespassing was well known, his own name was not linked to it. The book was associated with the TV series, the bad film, the branding of the outdoor clothing line and the licensed accessories — waterproof watches, footwear, binoculars, sunglasses. His own name was forgotten, or perhaps — suggested by Sabra in Ecuador and her referring to him as a “legendary has-been”—Steadman was thought to be dead.
In old age most writers fell silent and existed without force, in a precious obscurity indistinguishable from death. Mute, aged, feeble, unremembered, they were little more than moth-eaten ornaments, wheeled out for prizes, for ceremonies, the indignities of being patronized for giving keynote speeches and getting honorary doctorates, the ridiculous robes and unwearable medals, the pompous tributes of philistines who served merely to remind an indifferent public that such forgotten fogies were still alive. You saw them looking like tramps or mad uncles, with wild hair, twitching fingers, baggy trousers. Old writers were uglier and crazier-looking and smellier than other civilians — shuffle-hurrying to the men’s room after the ceremony, and the next thing you knew they were actually dead.
In his first years of seclusion Steadman had wanted to write a novel as original and strange as his travel book. But all he wrote were magazine pieces, travel stories that were the opposite of Trespassing, the opposite of what he wished his writing to be. And he told himself that he had another writing life, which was more real to him for being his secret. He was confident in his own ideas — the unwritten books, the stories that were just jotted notes, the sheaf of false starts. There was time for them — why spoil a good idea by being hasty? He didn’t want to rush his book. He wrote nothing substantial.
So much of writing was pure silence, forethought, meditation, a kind of Zen, summoning the mood, achieving the mastery to begin; and writing poorly — the false start — was more damaging to an idea than not writing at all. So Steadman reasoned. He despised the vanity of writers who raced into print; he loathed looking at their clumsy sentences and upholstered paragraphs. He hated hearing them talk. “I’m doing a novel.” This paltry bookmaking merely repeated the banalities of the past; and Steadman swore that if he could not write something new — a novel so original as to be disturbing, in language coined for the purpose and ringing with reality, a book as powerful as Trespassing but an inner journey — well, then he would not write fiction at all and only volunteer for pieces if they interested him.
Then he stopped writing the pieces, and in the years before traveling to Ecuador he did nothing but live in obscurity, doodling at his desk on the Vineyard. He remained on the seasonal party list, a sought-after guest because he so seldom showed up. Parties and tennis and the water preoccupied the summer people, for whom the Vineyard was the greatest summer camp on earth. These people were cliquey and gossipy like campers, too. “How’s the book coming along?” he was sometimes asked, and he smiled and said, “Slowly. It’s only been twenty years.”
Publishing nothing because he refused to write badly conveyed the impression of virtue and made him self-important for a while. A writer’s obliquest boast was that he or she, so tormented and blocked, was not writing. But eventually people stopped inquiring. Much worse than their gauche questions about his work was their tactless not-asking, like people made awkward by a bereavement, pretending to demonstrate their concern by not commenting on the deceased. He avoided the parties for embarrassments like these. And he hated himself for his delay in writing another book. Or was delay the word? Perhaps he had nothing to write. He had had one book in him. He had been young, like Salinger and Ellison, and now he was middle-aged and depleted, perhaps kidding himself that he had anything more to give.
Yet he could not be calm, did not have the stomach for this. Not writing now seemed to him the crudest form of self-denial, a kind of mutilation.
He had changed, he was older, he was better read; he saw that Trespassing had been a marketable mythographic idea. It was a young man’s book, but now — he had never thought this would happen — he was neglected and ignored. To succeed in society you had to stay the same. That was also true of the most vulgar success in publishing: you had to stay true to the brand and repeat yourself. What had made him timid about writing the confessional novel he had planned for so many years was that it bore no relation to Trespassing; it was against the rules.
For years all he had ever heard from editors and publishers, and especially from the agency that sold merchandising rights, was “Give us another Trespassing.”
As time had passed he had become somewhat self-conscious about the success of his book — doubted its integrity precisely because it had been a success. What he had regarded as an achievement now seemed like a fluke. The only book they wanted was the very book he refused to write. So he did nothing, and he might as well have been dead.
The Vineyard was the perfect place to be dead. Except for the summer months it was an island of natives, exiles, and castaways. The off-season population was divided between millionaires and menials — the rich who were allowed to stay and the tenacious land-poor gentry who actually ran the island, through a network of obscure relationships, support systems, and productive rivalries. Being a wealthy summer resident on the Vineyard simply meant having a house on a piece of land; but the house was little more than a ticket to live there, and only a season ticket in most cases. On the Vineyard money was not a significant factor in acquiring power. Money didn’t even buy influence, because only influence mattered, and it could not be bought. An almost Asiatic system of loyalty and dependence, trust and cooperation, got things done, and without it life was impossible in any season. Your name mattered most. Everyone was known, or at least knowable. The oldest families, the most deferred to, the ones with power and influence, were by no means wealthy, though some still owned land. In every respect, as the years had passed, the Vineyard had become more and more like an island in the South Seas — inbred, enigmatic, with complex alliances and unsolvable issues of land and power — like many of the destinations in Trespassing.