The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  Tom nodded. He had heard it before. He was waiting for something profound and original from Dickie. Dickie was handsome. He looked unusual with his long, finely cut face, his quick, intelligent eyes, the proud way he carried himself regardless of what he was wearing. He was wearing broken-down sandals and rather soiled white pants now, but he sat there as if he owned the Galleria, chatting in Italian with the waiter when he brought their espressos.

  “Ciao!” he called to an Italian boy who was passing by.

  “Ciao, Dickie!”

  “He changes Marge’s traveler’s checks on Saturdays,” Dickie explained to Tom.

  A well-dressed Italian greeted Dickie with a warm handshake and sat down at the table with them. Tom listened to their conversation in Italian, making out a word here and there. Tom was beginning to feel tired.

  “Want to go to Rome?” Dickie asked him suddenly.

  “Sure,” Tom said. “Now?” He stood up, reaching for money to pay the little tabs that the waiter had stuck under their coffee cups.

  The Italian had a long gray Cadillac equipped with venetian blinds, a four-toned horn, and a blaring radio that he and Dickie seemed content to shout over. They reached the outskirts of Rome in about two hours. Tom sat up as they drove along the Appian Way, especially for his benefit, the Italian told Tom, because Tom had not seen it before. The road was bumpy in spots. These were stretches of original Roman brick left bare to show people how Roman roads felt, the Italian said. The flat fields to left and right looked desolate in the twilight, like an ancient graveyard, Tom thought, with just a few tombs and remains of tombs still standing. The Italian dropped them in the middle of a street in Rome and said an abrupt good-bye.

  “He’s in a hurry,” Dickie said. “Got to see his girlfriend and get away before the husband comes home at eleven. There’s the music hall I was looking for. Come on.”

  They bought tickets for the music hall show that evening. There was still an hour before the performance, and they went to the Via Veneto, took a sidewalk table at one of the cafés, and ordered americanos. Dickie didn’t know anybody in Rome, Tom noticed, or at least none who passed by, and they watched hundreds of Italians and Americans pass by their table. Tom got very little out of the music hall show, but he tried his very best. Dickie proposed leaving before the show was over. Then they caught a carrozza and drove around the city, past fountain after fountain, through the Forum and around the Colosseum. The moon had come out. Tom was still a little sleepy, but the sleepiness, underlaid with excitement at being in Rome for the first time, put him into a receptive, mellow mood. They sat slumped in the carrozza, each with a sandaled foot propped on a knee, and it seemed to Tom that he was looking in a mirror when he looked at Dickie’s leg and his propped foot beside him. They were the same height, and very much the same weight, Dickie perhaps a bit heavier, and they wore the same size bathrobe, socks, and probably shirts.

  Dickie even said, “Thank you, Mr. Greenleaf,” when Tom paid the carrozza driver. Tom felt a little weird.

  They were in even finer mood by one in the morning, after a bottle and a half of wine between them at dinner. They walked with their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing, and around a dark corner they somehow bumped into a girl and knocked her down. They lifted her up, apologizing, and offered to escort her home. She protested, they insisted, one on either side of her. She had to catch a certain trolley, she said. Dickie wouldn’t hear of it. Dickie got a taxi. Dickie and Tom sat very properly on the jump seats with their arms folded like a couple of footmen, and Dickie talked to her and made her laugh. Tom could understand nearly everything Dickie said. They helped the girl out in a little street that looked like Naples again, and she said, “Grazie tante!” and shook hands with both of them, then vanished into an absolutely black doorway.

  “Did you hear that?” Dickie said. “She said we were the nicest Americans she’d ever met!”

  “You know what most crummy Americans would do in a case like that—rape her,” Tom said.

  “Now where are we?” Dickie asked, turning completely around.

  Neither had the slightest idea where they were. They walked for several blocks without finding a landmark or a familiar street name. They urinated against a dark wall, then drifted on.

  “When the dawn comes up, we can see where we are,” Dickie said cheerfully. He looked at his watch. “’S only a couple of more hours.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s worth it to see a nice girl home, isn’t it?” Dickie asked, staggering a little.

  “Sure it is. I like girls,” Tom said protestingly. “But it’s just as well Marge isn’t here tonight. We never could have seen that girl home with Marge with us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dickie said thoughtfully, looking down at his weaving feet. “Marge isn’t—”

  “I only mean, if Marge was here, we’d be worrying about a hotel for the night. We’d be in the damned hotel, probably. We wouldn’t be seeing half of Rome!”

  “That’s right!” Dickie swung an arm around his shoulder.

  DICKIE SHOOK HIS SHOULDER, roughly. Tom tried to roll out from under it and grab his hand, “Dickie-e!” Tom opened his eyes and looked into the face of a policeman.

  Tom sat up. He was in a park. It was dawn. Dickie was sitting on the grass beside him, talking very calmly to the policeman in Italian. Tom felt for the rectangular lump of his traveler’s checks. They were still in his pocket.

  “Passaporti!” the policeman hurled at them again, and again Dickie launched into his calm explanation.

  Tom knew exactly what Dickie was saying. He was saying that they were Americans, and they didn’t have their passports because they had only gone out for a little walk to look at the stars. Tom had an impulse to laugh. He stood up and staggered, dusting his clothing. Dickie was up, too, and they began to walk away, though the policeman was still yelling at them. Dickie said something back to him in a courteous, explanatory tone. At least the policeman was not following them.

  “We do look pretty cruddy,” Dickie said.

  Tom nodded. There was a long rip in his trouser knee where he had probably fallen. Their clothes were crumpled and grass-stained and filthy with dust and sweat, but now they were shivering with cold. They went into the first café they came to, and had caffe latte and sweet rolls, then several Italian brandies that tasted awful but warmed them. Then they began to laugh. They were still drunk.

  By eleven o’clock they were in Naples, just in time to catch the bus for Mongibello. It was wonderful to think of going back to Rome when they were more presentably dressed and seeing all the museums they had missed, and it was wonderful to think of lying on the beach at Mongibello this afternoon, baking in the sun. But they never got to the beach. They had showers at Dickie’s house, then fell down on their respective beds and slept until Marge woke them up around four. Marge was annoyed because Dickie hadn’t sent her a telegram saying he was spending the night in Rome.

  “Not that I minded your spending the night, but I thought you were in Naples and anything can happen in Naples.”

  “Oh-h,” Dickie drawled with a glance at Tom. He was making Bloody Marys for all of them.

  Tom kept his mouth mysteriously shut. He wasn’t going to tell Marge anything they had done. Let her imagine what she pleased. Dickie had made it evident that they had had a very good time. Tom noticed that she looked Dickie over with disapproval of his hangover, his unshaven face, and the drink he was taking now. There was something in Marge’s eyes when she was very serious that made her look wise and old in spite of the naïve clothes she wore and her windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout. She had the look of a mother or an older sister now—the old feminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men. La dee da! Or was it jealousy? She seemed to know that Dickie had formed a closer bond with him in twenty-four hours, just because he was another man, than she could ever have with Dickie, whether he loved her or not, and he didn’t. After a few mom
ents she loosened up, however, and the look went out of her eyes. Dickie left him with Marge on the terrace. Tom asked her about the book she was writing. It was a book about Mongibello, she said, with her own photographs. She told him she was from Ohio and showed him a picture, which she carried in her wallet, of her family’s house. It was just a plain clapboard house, but it was home, Marge said with a smile. She pronounced the adjective “Clabbered,” which amused Tom, because that was the word she used to describe people who were drunk, and just a few minutes before she had said to Dickie, “You look absolutely clabbered!” her speech, Tom thought, was abominable, both her choice of words and her pronunciation. He tried to be especially pleasant to her. He felt he could afford to be. He walked with her to the gate, and they said a friendly good-bye to each other, but neither said anything about their all getting together later that day or tomorrow. There was no doubt about it, Marge was a little angry with Dickie.

  10

  For three or four days they saw very little of Marge except down at the beach, and she was noticeably cooler toward both of them on the beach. She smiled and talked just as much or maybe more, but there was an element of politeness now, which made for the coolness. Tom noticed that Dickie was concerned, though not concerned enough to talk to Marge alone, apparently, because he hadn’t seen her alone since Tom had moved into the house. Tom had been with Dickie every moment since he had moved into Dickie’s house.

  Finally Tom, to show that he was not obtuse about Marge, mentioned to Dickie that he thought she was acting strangely.

  “Oh, she has moods,” Dickie said. “Maybe she’s working well. She doesn’t like to see people when she’s in a streak of work.”

  The Dickie-Marge relationship was evidently just what he had supposed it to be at first, Tom thought. Marge was much fonder of Dickie than Dickie was of her.

  Tom, at any rate, kept Dickie amused. He had lots of funny stories to tell Dickie about people he knew in New York, some of them true, some of them made up. They went for a sail in Dickie’s boat every day. There was no mention of any date when Tom might be leaving. Obviously Dickie was enjoying his company. Tom kept out of Dickie’s way when Dickie wanted to paint, and he was always ready to drop whatever he was doing and go with Dickie for a walk or a sail or simply sit and talk. Dickie also seemed pleased that Tom was taking his study of Italian seriously. Tom spent a couple of hours a day with his grammar and conversation books.

  Tom wrote to Mr. Greenleaf that he was staying with Dickie now for a few days, and said that Dickie had mentioned flying home for a while in the winter, and that probably he could by that time persuade him to stay longer. This letter sounded much better now that he was staying at Dickie’s house than his first letter in which he had said he was staying at a hotel in Mongibello. Tom also said that when his money gave out he intended to try to get himself a job, perhaps at one of the hotels in the village, a casual statement that served the double purpose of reminding Mr. Greenleaf that six hundred dollars could run out, and also that he was a young man ready and willing to work for a living. Tom wanted to convey the same good impression to Dickie, so he gave Dickie the letter to read before he sealed it.

  Another week went by, of ideally pleasant weather, ideally lazy days in which Tom’s greatest physical exertion was climbing the stone steps from the beach every afternoon and his greatest mental effort trying to chat in Italian with Fausto, the twenty-three-year-old Italian boy whom Dickie had found in the village and had engaged to come three times a week to give Tom Italian lessons.

  They went to Capri one day in Dickie’s sailboat. Capri was just far enough away not to be visible from Mongibello. Tom was filled with anticipation, but Dickie was in one of his preoccupied moods and refused to be enthusiastic about anything. He argued with the keeper of the dock where they tied the Pipistrello. Dickie didn’t even want to take a walk through the wonderful-looking little streets that went off in every direction from the piazza. They sat in a café on the piazza and drank a couple of Fernet-Brancas, and then Dickie wanted to start home before it became dark, though Tom would have willingly paid their hotel bill if Dickie had agreed to stay overnight. Tom supposed they would come again to Capri, so he wrote that day off and tried to forget it.

  A letter came from Mr. Greenleaf, which had crossed Tom’s letter, in which Mr. Greenleaf reiterated his arguments for Dickie’s coming home, wished Tom success, and asked for a prompt reply as to his results. Once more Tom dutifully took up the pen and replied. Mr. Greenleaf’s letter had been in such a shockingly businesslike tone—really as if he had been checking on a shipment of boat parts, Tom thought—that he found it very easy to reply in the same style. Tom was a little high when he wrote the letter, because it was just after lunch and they were always slightly high on wine just after lunch, a delicious sensation that could be corrected at once with a couple of espressos and a short walk, or prolonged with another glass of wine, sipped as they went about their leisurely afternoon routine. Tom amused himself by injecting a faint hope in this letter. He wrote in Mr. Greenleaf’s own style:

  . . . If I am not mistaken, Richard is wavering in his decision to spend another winter here. As I promised you, I shall do everything in my power to dissuade him from spending another winter here, and in time—though it may be as long as Christmas—I may be able to get him to stay in the States when he goes over.

  Tom had to smile as he wrote it, because he and Dickie were talking of cruising around the Greek islands this winter, and Dickie had given up the idea of flying home even for a few days, unless his mother should be really seriously ill by then. They had talked also of spending January and February, Mongibello’s worst months, in Majorca. And Marge would not be going with them, Tom was sure. Both he and Dickie excluded her from their travel plans whenever they discussed them, though Dickie had made the mistake of dropping to her that they might be taking a winter cruise somewhere. Dickie was so damned open about everything! And now, though Tom knew Dickie was still firm about their going alone, Dickie was being more than usually attentive to Marge, just because he realized that she would be lonely here by herself, and that it was essentially unkind of them not to ask her along. Dickie and Tom both tried to cover it up by impressing on her that they would be traveling in the cheapest and worst possible way around Greece, cattleboats, sleeping with peasants on the decks and all that, no way for a girl to travel. But Marge still looked dejected, and Dickie still tried to make it up by asking her often to the house now for lunch and dinner. Dickie took Marge’s hand sometimes as they walked up from the beach, though Marge didn’t always let him keep it. Sometimes she extricated her hand after a few seconds in a way that looked to Tom as if she were dying for her hand to be held.

  And when they asked her to go along with them to Herculaneum, she refused.

  “I think I’ll stay home. You boys enjoy yourselves,” she said with an effort at a cheerful smile.

  “Well, if she won’t, she won’t,” Tom said to Dickie, and drifted tactfully into the house so that she and Dickie could talk alone on the terrace if they wanted to.

  Tom sat on the broad windowsill in Dickie’s studio and looked out at the sea, his brown arms folded on his chest. He loved to look out at the blue Mediterranean and think of himself and Dickie sailing where they pleased. Tangiers, Sofia, Cairo, Sevastopol . . . By the time his money ran out, Tom thought, Dickie would probably be so fond of him and so used to him that he would take it for granted they would go on living together. He and Dickie could easily live on Dickie’s five hundred a month income. From the terrace he could hear a pleading tone in Dickie’s voice, and Marge’s monosyllabic answers. Then he heard the gate clang. Marge had left. She had been going to stay for lunch. Tom shoved himself off the windowsill and went out to Dickie on the terrace.

  “Was she angry about something?” Tom asked.

  “No. She feels kind of left out, I suppose.”

  “We certainly tried to include her.”

  “It isn’t just t
his.” Dickie was walking slowly up and down the terrace. “Now she says she doesn’t even want to go to Cortina with me.”

  “Oh, she’ll probably come around about Cortina before December.”

  “I doubt it,” Dickie said.

  Tom supposed it was because he was going to Cortina, too. Dickie had asked him last week. Freddie Miles had been gone when they got back from their Rome trip: he had had to go to London suddenly, Marge had told them. But Dickie had said he would write Freddie that he was bringing a friend along. “Do you want me to leave, Dickie?” Tom asked, sure that Dickie didn’t want him to leave. “I feel I’m intruding on you and Marge.”

  “Of course not! Intruding on what?”

  “Well, from her point of view.”

  “No. It’s just that I owe her something. And I haven’t been particularly nice to her lately. We haven’t.”

  Tom knew he meant that he and Marge had kept each other company over the long, dreary last winter, when they had been the only Americans in the village, and that he shouldn’t neglect her now because somebody else was here. “Suppose I talk to her about going to Cortina,” Tom suggested.

  “Then she surely won’t go,” Dickie said tersely, and went into the house.

  Tom heard him telling Ermelinda to hold the lunch because he wasn’t ready to eat yet. Even in Italian Tom could hear that Dickie said he wasn’t ready for lunch, in the master-of-the-house tone. Dickie came out on the terrace, sheltering his lighter as he tried to light his cigarette. Dickie had a beautiful silver lighter, but it didn’t work well in the slightest breeze. Tom finally produced his ugly, flaring lighter, as ugly and efficient as a piece of military equipment, and lighted it for him. Tom checked himself from proposing a drink: it wasn’t his house, though as it happened he had bought the three bottles of Gilbey’s that now stood in the kitchen.