The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Shoes? Sandals?” he asked the man in the shop.

  The man didn’t sell shoes.

  Tom put on his own shoes again and walked across the road to the post office, intending to leave his clothes with his suitcases, but the post office door was locked. He had heard of this in Europe, places closing from noon to four sometimes. He turned and walked down a cobbled lane which he supposed led toward the beach. He went down a dozen steep stone steps, down another cobbled slope past shops and houses, down more steps, and finally he came to a level length of broad sidewalk slightly raised from the beach, where there were a couple of cafés and a restaurant with outdoor tables. Some bronzed adolescent Italian boys sitting on wooden benches at the edge of the pavement inspected him thoroughly as he walked by. He felt mortified at the big brown shoes on his feet and at his ghost-white skin. He had not been to a beach all summer. He hated beaches. There was a wooden walk that led half across the beach, which Tom knew must be hot as hell to walk on, because everybody was lying on a towel or something else, but he took his shoes off anyway and stood for a moment on the hot wood, calmly surveying the groups of people near him. None of the people looked like Richard, and the shimmering heat waves kept him from making out the people very far away. Tom put one foot out on the sand and drew it back. Then he took a deep breath, raced down the rest of the walk, sprinted across the sand, and sank his feet into the blissfully cool inches of water at the sea’s edge. He began to walk.

  Tom saw him from a distance of about a block—unmistakably Dickie, though he was burnt a dark brown and his crinkly blond hair looked lighter than Tom remembered it. He was with Marge.

  “Dickie Greenleaf?” Tom asked, smiling.

  Dickie looked up. “Yes?”

  “I’m Tom Ripley. I met you in the States several years ago. Remember?”

  Dickie looked blank.

  “I think your father said he was going to write you about me.”

  “Oh, yes!” Dickie said, touching his forehead as if it was stupid of him to have forgotten. He stood up. “Tom what is it?”

  “Ripley.”

  “This is Marge Sherwood,” he said. “Marge, Tom Ripley.”

  “How do you do?” Tom said.

  “How do you do?”

  “How long are you here for?” Dickie asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Tom said. “I just got here. I’ll have to look the place over.”

  Dickie was looking him over, not entirely with approval, Tom felt. Dickie’s arms were folded, his lean brown feet planted in the hot sand that didn’t seem to bother him at all. Tom had crushed his feet into his shoes again.

  “Taking a house?” Dickie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said undecidedly, as if he had been considering it.

  “It’s a good time to get a house, if you’re looking for one for the winter,” the girl said. “The summer tourists have practically all gone. We could use a few more Americans around here in winter.”

  Dickie said nothing. He had reseated himself on the big towel beside the girl, and Tom felt that he was waiting for him to say good-bye and move on. Tom stood there, feeling pale and naked as the day he was born. He hated bathing suits. This one was very revealing. Tom managed to extract his pack of cigarettes from his jacket inside the raincoat, and offered it to Dickie and the girl. Dickie accepted one, and Tom lighted it with his lighter.

  “You don’t seem to remember me from New York,” Tom said.

  “I can’t really say I do,” Dickie said. “Where did I meet you?”

  “I think— Wasn’t it at Buddy Lankenau’s?” It wasn’t, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.

  “Oh,” said Dickie, vaguely. “I hope you’ll excuse me. My memory’s rotten for America these days.”

  “It certainly is,” Marge said, coming to Tom’s rescue. “It’s getting worse and worse. When did you get here, Tom?”

  “Just about an hour ago. I’ve just parked my suitcases at the post office.” He laughed.

  “Don’t you want to sit down? Here’s another towel.” She spread a smaller white towel beside her on the sand.

  Tom accepted it gratefully.

  “I’m going in for a dip to cool off,” Dickie said, getting up.

  “Me too!” Marge said. “Coming in, Tom?”

  Tom followed them. Dickie and the girl went out quite far—both seemed to be excellent swimmers—and Tom stayed near the shore and came in much sooner. When Dickie and the girl came back to the towels, Dickie said, as if he had been prompted by the girl, “We’re leaving. Would you like to come up to the house and have lunch with us?”

  “Why, yes. Thanks very much.” Tom helped them gather up the towels, the sunglasses, the Italian newspapers.

  Tom thought they would never get there. Dickie and Marge went in front of him, taking the endless flights of stone steps slowly and steadily, two at a time. The sun had enervated Tom. The muscles of his legs trembled on the level stretches. His shoulders were already pink, and he had put on his shirt against the sun’s rays, but he could feel the sun burning through his hair, making him dizzy and nauseous.

  “Having a hard time?” Marge asked, not out of breath at all. “You’ll get used to it, if you stay here. You should have seen this place during the heat wave in July.”

  Tom hadn’t breath to reply anything.

  Fifteen minutes later he was feeling better. He had had a cool shower, and he was sitting in a comfortable wicker chair on Dickie’s terrace with a martini in his hand. At Marge’s suggestion, he had put his swimming outfit on again, with his shirt over it. The table on the terrace had been set for three while he was in the shower, and Marge was in the kitchen now, talking in Italian to

  the maid. Tom wondered if Marge lived here. The house was certainly big enough. It was sparsely furnished, as far as Tom could see, in a pleasant mixture of Italian antique and American bohemian. He had seen two original Picasso drawings in the hall.

  Marge came out on the terrace with her martini. “That’s my house over there.” She pointed. “See it? The square-looking white one with the darker red roof than the houses just beside it.”

  It was hopeless to pick it out from the other houses, but Tom pretended he saw it. “Have you been here long?”

  “A year. All last winter, and it was quite a winter. Rain every day except one for three whole months!”

  “Really!”

  “Um-hm.” Marge sipped her martini and gazed out contentedly at her little village. She was back in her bathing suit, too, a tomato-colored bathing suit, and she wore a striped shirt over it. She wasn’t bad-looking, Tom supposed, and she even had a good figure, if one liked the rather solid type. Tom didn’t, himself.

  “I understand Dickie has a boat,” Tom said.

  “Yes, the Pipi. Short for Pipistrello. Want to see it?”

  She pointed at another indiscernible something down at the little pier that they could see from the corner of the terrace. The boats looked very much alike, but Marge said Dickie’s boat was larger than most of them and had two masts.

  Dickie came out and poured himself a cocktail from the pitcher on the table. He wore badly ironed white duck trousers and a terra cotta linen shirt the color of his skin. “Sorry there’s no ice. I haven’t got a refrigerator.”

  Tom smiled. “I brought a bathrobe for you. Your mother said you’d asked for one. Also some socks.”

  “Do you know my mother?”

  “I happened to meet your father just before I left New York, and he asked me to dinner at his house.”

  “Oh? How was my mother?”

  “She was up and around that evening. I’d say she gets tired easily.”

  Dickie nodded. “I had a letter this week saying she was a little better. At least there’s no particular crisis right now, is there?”

  “I don’t think so. I think your father was more worried a few weeks ago.” Tom hesitated. “He’s also a little worried because you won’
t come home.”

  “Herbert’s always worried about something,” Dickie said.

  Marge and the maid came out of the kitchen carrying a steaming platter of spaghetti, a big bowl of salad, and a plate of bread. Dickie and Marge began to talk about the enlargement of some restaurant down on the beach. The proprietor was widening the terrace so there would be room for people to dance. They discussed it in detail, slowly, like people in a small town who take an interest in the most minute changes in the neighborhood. There was nothing Tom could contribute.

  He spent the time examining Dickie’s rings. He liked them both: a large rectangular green stone set in gold on the third finger of his right hand, and on the little finger of the other hand a signet ring, larger and more ornate than the signet Mr. Greenleaf had worn. Dickie had long, bony hands, a little like his own hands, Tom thought.

  “By the way, your father showed me around the Burke-Greenleaf yards before I left,” Tom said. “He told me he’d made a lot of changes since you’ve seen it last. I was quite impressed.”

  “I suppose he offered you a job, too. Always on the lookout for promising young men.” Dickie turned his fork round and round, and thrust a neat mass of spaghetti into his mouth.

  “No, he didn’t.” Tom felt the luncheon couldn’t have been going worse. Had Mr. Greenleaf told Dickie that he was coming to give him a lecture on why he should go home? Or was Dickie just in a foul mood? Dickie had certainly changed since Tom had seen him last.

  Dickie brought out a shiny espresso machine about two feet high, and plugged it into an outlet on the terrace. In a few moments there were four little cups of coffee, one of which Marge took into the kitchen to the maid.

  “What hotel are you staying at?” Marge asked Tom.

  Tom smiled. “I haven’t found one yet. What do you recommend?”

  “The Miramare’s the best. It’s just this side of Giorgio’s. The only other hotel is Giorgio’s, but—”

  “They say Giorgio’s got pulci in his beds,” Dickie interrupted.

  “That’s fleas. Giorgio’s is cheap,” Marge said earnestly, “but the service is—”

  “Nonexistent,” Dickie supplied.

  “You’re in a fine mood today, aren’t you?” Marge said to Dickie, flicking a crumb of gorgonzola at him.

  “In that case, I’ll try the Miramare,” Tom said, standing up. “I must be going.”

  Neither of them urged him to stay. Dickie walked with him to the front gate. Marge was staying on. Tom wondered if Dickie and Marge were having an affair, one of those old, faute de mieux affairs that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious from the outside, because neither was very enthusiastic. Marge was in love with Dickie, Tom thought, but Dickie couldn’t have been more indifferent to her if she had been the fifty-year-old Italian maid sitting there.

  “I’d like to see some of your paintings sometime,” Tom said to Dickie.

  “Fine. Well, I suppose we’ll see you again if you’re around,” and Tom thought he added it only because he remembered that he had brought him the bathrobe and the socks.

  “I enjoyed the lunch. Good-bye, Dickie.”

  “Good-bye.”

  The iron gate clanged.

  8

  Tom took a room at the Miramare. It was four o’clock by the time he got his suitcases up from the post office, and he had barely the energy to hang up his best suit before he fell down on the bed. The voices of some Italian boys who were talking under his window drifted up as distinctly as if they had been in the room with him, and the insolent, cackling laugh of one of them, bursting again and again through the pattering syllables, made Tom twitch and writhe. He imagined them discussing his expedition to Signor Greenleaf, and making unflattering speculations as to what might happen next.

  What was he doing here? He had no friends here and he didn’t speak the language. Suppose he got sick? Who would take care of him?

  Tom got up, knowing he was going to be sick, yet moving slowly because he knew just when he was going to be sick and that there would be time for him to get to the bathroom. In the bathroom he lost his lunch, and also the fish from Naples, he thought. He went back to his bed and fell instantly asleep.

  When he awoke groggy and weak, the sun was still shining and it was five-thirty by his new watch. He went to a window and looked out, looking automatically for Dickie’s big house and projecting terrace among the pink and white houses that dotted the climbing ground in front of him. He found the sturdy reddish balustrade of the terrace. Was Marge still there? Were they talking about him? He heard a laugh rising over the little din of street noises, tense and resonant, and as American as if it had been a sentence in American. For an instant he saw Dickie and Marge as they crossed a space between houses on the main road. They turned the corner, and Tom went to his side window for a better view. There was an alley by the side of the hotel just below his window, and Dickie and Marge came down it, Dickie in the white trousers and terra cotta shirt, Marge in a skirt and blouse. She must have gone home, Tom thought. Or else she had clothes at Dickie’s house. Dickie talked with an Italian on the little wooden pier, gave him some money, and the Italian touched his cap, then untied the boat from the pier. Tom watched Dickie help Marge into the boat. The white sail began to climb. Behind them, to the left, the orange sun was sinking into the water. Tom could hear Marge’s laugh, and a shout from Dickie in Italian toward the pier. Tom realized he was seeing them on a typical day—a siesta after the late lunch, probably, then the sail in Dickie’s boat at sundown. Then aperitifs at one of the cafés on the beach. They were enjoying a perfectly ordinary day, as if he did not exist. Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to-five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn’t as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way he spent his time, and having his own house with a good-natured maid who probably took care of everything for him. And money besides to take trips, if he wanted to. Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and of self-pity.

  Dickie’s father had probably said in his letter the very things that would set Dickie against him, Tom thought. How much better it would have been if he had just sat down in one of the cafés down at the beach and struck up an acquaintance with Dickie out of the blue! He probably could have persuaded Dickie to come home eventually, if he had begun like that, but this way it was useless. Tom cursed himself for having been so heavy-handed and so humorless today. Nothing he took desperately seriously ever worked out. He’d found that out years ago.

  He’d let a few days go by, he thought. The first step, anyway, was to make Dickie like him. That he wanted more than anything else in the world.

  9

  Tom let three days go by. Then he went down to the beach on the fourth morning around noon, and found Dickie alone, in the same spot Tom had seen him first, in front of the gray rocks that extended across the beach from the land.

  “Morning!” Tom called. “Where’s Marge?”

  “Good morning. She’s probably working a little late. She’ll be down.”

  “Working?”

  “She’s a writer.”

  “Oh.”

  Dickie puffed on the Italian cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself? I thought you’d gone.”

  “Sick,” Tom said casually, tossing his rolled towel down on the sand, but not too near Dickie’s towel.

  “Oh, the usual upset stomach?”

  “Hovering between life and the bathroom,” Tom said, smiling. “But I’m all right now.” He actually had been too weak even to leave the hotel, but he had crawled around on the floor of his room, following the patches of sunlight that came through his windows, so that he wouldn’t look so white the next time he came down to the beach. And he had spent the remainder of his feeble strength studying an Italian conversation book that he had bought in the hotel lobby.

  Tom went down to the water, went confidentl
y up to his waist and stopped there, splashing the water over his shoulders. He lowered himself until the water reached his chin, floated around a little, then came slowly in.

  “Can I invite you for a drink at the hotel before you go up to your house?” Tom asked Dickie. “And Marge, too, if she comes. I wanted to give you your bathrobe and socks, you know.”

  “Oh, yes. Thanks very much, I’d like to have a drink.” He went back to his Italian newspaper.

  Tom stretched out on his towel. He heard the village clock strike one.

  “Doesn’t look as if Marge is coming down,” Dickie said. “I think I’ll be going along.”

  Tom got up. They walked up to the Miramare, saying practically nothing to each other, except that Tom invited Dickie to lunch with him, and Dickie declined because the maid had his lunch ready at the house, he said. They went up to Tom’s room, and Dickie tried the bathrobe on and held the socks up to his bare feet. Both the bathrobe and the socks were the right size, and, as Tom had anticipated, Dickie was extremely pleased with the bathrobe.

  “And this,” Tom said, taking a square package wrapped in drugstore paper from a bureau drawer. “Your mother sent you some nosedrops, too.”

  Dickie smiled. “I don’t need them anymore. That was sinus. But I’ll take them off your hands.”

  Now Dickie had everything, Tom thought, everything he had to offer. He was going to refuse the invitation for a drink, too, Tom knew. Tom followed him toward the door. “You know, your father’s very concerned about your coming home. He asked me to give you a good talking to, which of course I won’t, but I’ll still have to tell him something. I promised to write him.”