“The narcissism of minor differences,” Steadman said.
He had become fascinated by her disagreeable opinions and ignorant evasions. She believed she was delightfully eccentric, like her New York boyfriend, while he knew she was simply annoying. He realized that it was a relief for Charlotte to see someone else battling him, but couldn’t she tell how pathetic the woman was?
She looked up, though her fingers still clutched at Charlotte’s neck.
“Freud,” Steadman said. “He was from Vienna.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“And the quote’s from Civilization and Its Discontents.”
“I know.”
“You read it?”
With a wave of her hand, “So long ago.”
Harmless affectations, white lies; and if she always surrounded herself with people like Charlotte, she would never be found out. More serious was her continual gossip. She had gotten close to a mutual friend, a man Steadman had met a few times but who was closer to Charlotte, a business associate to whom she had introduced Vickie. And Vickie, the passenger, the floater, was now a friend of the man. He saw her regularly, he confided in her.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, Charlie,” Vickie said, and giggled, and then told them both the secrets the man had divulged to her: of his wife’s past, his children’s problems, his financial worries, his weaknesses as a businessman — weaknesses, she suggested, that she and Charlotte might easily exploit.
She spoke in the tone a person might use when offering a special gift to a lucky, much-valued friend, giving them the secrets and letting them share the information, which made them powerful, too. The confidences were beyond gossip: they had the effect of reducing and emasculating the man, and created the illusion — as some betrayals did — of making the listener stronger.
Charlotte was delighted, rapt, as Vickie went on leaking.
“The key to his marriage? He married his mother. She makes all the decisions. You gotta wonder about their sex life.”
Steadman found himself more interested than he should have been. But pondering what was being divulged, he became wary, for here was the indiscreet woman in his own household, a confidante of his secretive and dissatisfied wife. At some point in the future he would be talked about that way. You gotta wonder…
Seeing Charlotte with this woman friend, he perceived aspects of her personality that had been hidden from him before. She laughed hard at Vickie’s small smutty asides. She was delighted by her confidences, her betrayals, her gossip; she asked for more. Vickie brought out a dismissive, philistine side of Charlotte, one that was also tinged with mendacity. She was untruthful because she was snobbish, aggressive, competitive, mean.
And Steadman noticed that half the time he was either ignored or belittled by the woman, whom he had begun to dislike as much as he disliked the weak aspects of Charlotte’s personality that the woman patronized.
The days of Vickie’s visit went by slowly, but it served to show Steadman a different, much more dismaying Charlotte: heartier, cruder, easily won over, more comfortable with this woman than she had ever been with him, a woman he could never love and yet one that seemed more self-sufficient than he had previously imagined. Now, having seen her together with her friend, he knew for certain that their marriage was over — was surer than if Vickie had been a man enjoying his wife in a week of adultery. Charlotte would be all right; for her, the break would be painless.
He was hurt, humiliated by the failure, felt deceived, yet he knew that the failure was as much his fault as hers. His pride was injured; he knew he looked conspicuous, a bit of a fool, someone people pitied or tried to ignore.
The marriage had been a straightforward declaration, a contract, the binding part of the ceremony lasting minutes, a simple affirmation. The divorce was a lengthy agony strung out over many months, a set of legal questions with no clear answers, a tedious and painful disentangling that was like major surgery after a car crash, a messy amputation.
In the first remorseful months of his divorce, a bitter time of private pain, Trespassing was published, with its dedication (“To my wife”) withdrawn. No acknowledgments page was included, though there were many times just before publication when he had fantasized writing a dense paragraph of small print to be inserted at the end of the text, under the title “No Thanks”:
To my ex-wife, Charlotte, who was too busy to finish reading this book in draft, eat me! To the many foundations that turned down my requests for financial assistance, fuck you! To the MacArthur Foundation, which did not consider me a genius but saw genius in a thousand preening mediocrities and rewarded their tedious efforts with absurd sums of money, eat my dust! Up yours! to my editor, who seldom returned my phone calls, and Piss off! to my bank, when at a crucial stage of the writing it refused me a loan. To all the people who told me not to go on my journey, or said they could not see the point of this book, or belittled the title, or said the text was too long, go fuck yourself!…
He had had no help at all, had only obstacles and stupidities to contend with. “Be careful!” people said when he set off. Were any words more unhelpful or antagonistic? The difficulty of writing the book had reflected the difficulties he’d had in taking the long, dangerous trip. Sometimes the imagining of such a list of no-thanks late at night had soothed his mind and helped him get to sleep in his empty bed.
The reviews were good, approving, and numerous. “A new kind of travel book,” and as something different in a market that craved novelty, the book’s sales were brisk, the film and TV rights sought after and bid upon, as the book itself became more widely noticed. His idea of trespassing from country to country without a passport was the basis of a “major motion picture,” a board game, a ghostwritten sequel, a licensed book by another author from the point of view of a woman, and a popular television series, which inspired the merchandising. The Trespassing line of outdoor clothing became a bigger brand than The North Face and Patagonia, because the catalogue also retailed the TOG line of luxury accessories. The high-end items were the moneymakers — titanium sunglasses, watches, and knives. The knives alone occupied one division in the company and seven pages of the catalogue — folding knives, camp knives, bowie knives, some with staghorn or abalone shell or mastodon ivory handles (one or two designs with the rubric “Limited to 50 Pieces”), and each, in the hollow of the guard, embossed with the Trespassing logo. People who did not know Steadman’s name and who had never read his book coveted the sunglasses and watches and knives. And the unexpected profits, fabulous even to his wealthy Vineyard friends, allowed him to buy and expand the up-island house, giving it the size and look of a chateau, complete with perimeter walls and orchards and garden statuary.
Although he had been careful to exclude any mention of her, Charlotte was associated with the book, and many people believed she had been partly responsible for it. That she was given some credit for it angered Steadman more than anything else, for he had conceived and written the book alone. The fact was that she had hindered him; he had overcome that and ignored her dismissals. The success of the book was a relief and a pleasure. He told himself — and for a long time believed this was true — that if he never wrote anything else, he would be happy being a one-book wonder. It was a good book, big and solid, that inspired a new generation of risk-taking travelers.