the talented mr. ripley | patricia highsmith
notes:
“He’s twenty-five.” So am I, Tom thought, Dickie was probably having the time of his life over there. An income, a house, a boat. Why should he want to come home? Dickie’s face was becoming clearer in his memory:
ink drawings. Fascinating, some of them.” Tom had never seen them, but he could see them now, precise draftsman’s drawings
he said, just because Mr. Greenleaf wanted him to say that.
Do you really think you might be able to arrange it? Say, this fall?” It was already the middle of September. Tom stared at the gold signet ring with the nearly worn-away crest on Mr. Greenleaf’s little finger. “I think I might.
Slowly he took off his jacket and untied his tie, watching every move he made as if it were somebody else’s movements he was watching. Astonishing how much straighter he was standing now, what a different look there was in his face.
What should he do this afternoon? Go to some art exhibits, so he could chat about them tonight with the Greenleafs?
Here he chuckled. A friendly, personal chuckle generally worked wonders.
Mr. Greenleaf said in a voice that promised good martinis, a gourmet’s dinner, and a bed for the night in case he got too tired to go home.
“No, I’m from Boston,” Tom said. That was true.
Tom told her that he was working for an advertising firm called Rothenberg, Fleming, and Barter. When he referred to it again, he deliberately called it Reddington, Fleming, and Parker. Mr. Greenleaf didn’t seem to notice the difference.
Several times Tom got up with his drink and strolled to the fireplace and back, and when he looked into the mirror he saw that his mouth was turned down at the corners.
a thin drip of a young man
(his given name was, of all things, Marcellus)
He had always thought he had the world’s dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase.
It was like looking back at another person to remember himself then, a skinny, sniveling wretch with an eternal cold in the nose, who had still managed to win a medal for courtesy, service, and reliability.
as if he had spent so much of his time hating Aunt Dottie and scheming how to escape her, that he had not had enough time to learn and grow.
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.
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.
Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and of self-pity.
Nothing he took desperately seriously ever worked out.
The first step, anyway, was to make Dickie like him. That he wanted more than anything else in the world.
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.
“Maybe she’s working well. She doesn’t like to see people when she’s in a streak of work.”
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.
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.
Tom sat opposite him, staring at his bony, arrogant, handsome face, at his hands with the green ring and the gold signet ring.
Tom stopped in at a restaurant two streets away and forced himself to eat a bowl of minestrone for the strength it would give him.
It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice.
It was impossible ever to be lonely or bored, he thought, so long as he was Dickie Greenleaf.
He had no need to relax when he was alone. Now, from the moment when he got out of bed and went to brush his teeth, he was Dickie, brushing his teeth with his right elbow jutted out, Dickie rotating the eggshell on his spoon for the last bite. Dickie invariably putting back the first tie he pulled off the rack and selecting a second. He had even produced a painting in Dickie’s manner.
He looked neither particularly bright nor stupid.
He felt better, concentrating on being Dickie Greenleaf for a few seconds, pacing the floor once or twice.
Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.”
It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than his experiencing.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes anxious and scared. He looked as if he were trying to convey the emotions of fear and shock by his posture and his expression, and because the way he looked was involuntary and real, he became suddenly twice as frightened.
Hadn’t he learned something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.
He asked it sadly. He felt sad. He was not afraid, but he felt that identifying himself as Thomas Phelps Ripley was going to be one of the saddest things he had ever done in his life.
made Tom smile. He turned the smile into an expression of noncomprehension.
He was not at all in the mood for parties. He seemed to see people through a mist, and communication was slow and difficult.
Each day he looked eagerly in his mailbox for a letter from Marge or Mr. Greenleaf. His house was ready for their arrival. His answers to their questions were ready in his head. It was like waiting interminably for a show to begin, for a curtain to rise.
“Well, not with Tom. I mean, not with Dickie,” he said laughing, flustered at his slip of the tongue.
Peter and Marge and the Franchettis—an attractive pair of brothers from Trieste whom Tom had recently met—were in the next room and able to hear almost every word he said, so Tom did it better than he would have done it completely alone, he felt.
Tom had a dark-brown taste in his mouth from too many espressos,
Tom turned his glare at her into a faint smile.
From the fact that he carefully chose a pasta dish and ate no salad, Tom thought that he might be suffering from the tourist’s complaint,
Mr. Greenleaf with his taut face-of-an-industrialist under his gray homburg looking like a piece of Madison Avenue walking through the narrow, zigzagging streets
Dickie’s money had given him only an added momentum on the road he had been traveling.
It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning.
He was sweating and shaking. What was happening to him? What had happened? Was he going to blurt out a lot of nonsense tomorrow when he saw Mr. Greenleaf, about Marge falling into the canal, and his screaming for help and jumping in and not finding her? Even with Marge standing there with them, would he go berserk and spill the story out and betray himself as a maniac?
McCarron looked like a typical American automobile salesman, or any other kind of salesman, Tom thought—cheerful, presentable, average in intellect, able to talk baseball with a man or pay a stupid compliment to a woman. Tom didn’t think too much of him, but, on the other hand, it was not wise to underestimate one’s opponent.
“I’d really think something was the matter with you if you didn’t break down like this,” Peter said sympathetically.
The very chanciness of trying for all of Dickie’s money, the peril of it, was irresistible to him. He was so bored after the dreary, eventless weeks in Venice, when each day that went by had seemed to confirm his personal safety and to emphasize the dullness of his existence.
He had decided in Venice to make his voyage to Greece an heroic one. He would see the islands, swimming for the first time into his view, as a living, breathing, courageous individual—not as a cringing little nobody from Boston. If he sailed right into the arms of the police in Piraeus, he would at least have known the days just before, standing in the wind at the prow of a ship, crossing the wine-dark sea like Jason or Ulysses returning.
What about the knot on Dickie’s body? Wouldn’t it be just his luck to have that come undone now? “Ah, carissimo, you are so pessimistic,” Titi said, patting his knee.
janet change 