Blinding Light (2 page)

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.”

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.”

“I'm Sabra Wilmutt,” the woman said.

“I'm Jonquil J. Christ.”

Sabra's face looked suddenly slapped and lopsided. She said, “I don't get it.”

“The J is for Jesus.”

As Ava spoke, the reboarding announcement was made.

What does it matter? Ava's expression said to Steadman, who had heard it all. But Steadman had been attentive to the woman named Sabra, immersed in
Trespassing.
It was just this awful flight to get through, and after that they would never see any of them again.

A
IRBORNE ONCE MORE
, isolated and blindfolded, with the slipstream crackling at the airplane's windows and fizzing along the fuselage, the passengers were at last silenced. Steadman reflected on what they had said. They were boasting, of course, but because most boasting was bluff and lies, really they had given very little away. He took them to be lawyers, even the one who had sold his company, because of their affectations. Lawyers never volunteered the truth, because the truth was debatable, and this was why they could hold two opposing views in their head, and seemed capable of believing both, as they tossed out challenges and suppositions, speaking in irrelevancies calculated to throw you off. The merchandising of
Trespassing
was a wilderness of lawyers waving contracts. Challenge them with a tough question and they handed you a sandwich.

But he said to Ava, “What was that all about?” for the way she had called attention to herself among those strangers. Steadman had described in
Trespassing
how it was always a fatal mistake in travel to be conspicuous. The greatest travelers made themselves invisible. An invisible man was a man of power.

Ava just shrugged, pretending he was worked up over nothing. Yet she knew she was motivated by their breakup. Underlying her sarcasm was the suspicion that if the people found out that she was with Steadman the famous writer, he would have to take the blame for her behavior: her insolence was his insolence. Breaking up had liberated Ava and made her reckless and indifferent to his worry, helped her see what a baby he was—“and writing is your dolly.” She couldn't play with it, couldn't even touch it. He fussed with it in his room. And as time had passed the dolly had become more special, first a toy, then a fetish object, then a totem, and finally an idol that represented something approaching a deity. “Fucking writers,” Ava had begun saying.