Dickie looked at him sharply, put out the bent wisp of the Nazionale he was smoking, and opened one of the packs of Luckies. “Are you sure the guy you were talking to wasn’t under the influence of dope himself?”
“You’re so damned cautious these days!” Tom said with a laugh. “Where’s your spirit? You look as if you don’t even believe me! Come with me and I’ll show you the man. He’s still down there waiting for me. His name’s Carlo.”
Dickie showed no sign of moving. “Anybody with an offer like that doesn’t explain all the particulars to you. They get a couple of toughs to ride from Trieste to Paris, maybe, but even that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Will you come with me and talk to him? If you don’t believe me, at least look at him.”
“Sure.” Dickie got up suddenly. “I might even do it for a hundred thousand lire.” Dickie closed a book of poems that had been lying face down on his studio couch before he followed Tom out of the room. Marge had a lot of books of poetry. Lately Dickie had been borrowing them.
The man was still sitting at the corner table in Giorgio’s when they came in. Tom smiled at him and nodded.
“Hello, Carlo,” Tom said. “Posso sedermi?”
“Si, si,” the man said, gesturing to the chairs at his table.
“This is my friend,” Tom said carefully in Italian. “He wants to know if the work with the railroad journey is correct.” Tom watched Carlo looking Dickie over, sizing him up, and it was wonderful to Tom how the man’s dark, tough, callous-looking eyes betrayed nothing but a polite interest, how in a split second he seemed to take in and evaluate Dickie’s faintly smiling but suspicious expression, Dickie’s tan that could not have been acquired except by months of lying in the sun, his worn, Italian-made clothes and his American rings.
A smile spread slowly across the man’s pale, flat lips, and he glanced at Tom.
“Allora?” Tom prompted, impatient.
The man lifted his sweet martini and drank. “The job is real, but I do not think your friend is the right man.”
Tom looked at Dickie. Dickie was watching the man alertly, with the same neutral smile that suddenly struck Tom as contemptuous. “Well, at least it’s true, you see!” Tom said to Dickie.
“Mm-m,” Dickie said, still gazing at the man is if he were some kind of animal which interested him, and which he could kill if he decided to.
Dickie could have talked Italian to the man. Dickie didn’t say a word. Three weeks ago, Tom thought, Dickie would have taken the man up on his offer. Did he have to sit there looking like a stool pigeon or a police detective waiting for reinforcements so he could arrest the man? “Well,” Tom said finally, “you believe me, don’t you?”
Dickie glanced at him. “About the job? How do I know?”
Tom looked at the Italian expectantly.
The Italian shrugged. “There is no need to discuss it, is there?” he asked in Italian.
“No,” Tom said. A crazy, directionless fury boiled in his blood and made him tremble. He was furious at Dickie. Dickie was looking over the man’s dirty nails, dirty shirt collar, his ugly dark face that had been recently shaven though not recently washed, so that where the beard had been was much lighter than the skin above and below it. But the Italian’s dark eyes were cool and amiable, and stronger than Dickie’s. Tom felt stifled. He was conscious that he could not express himself in Italian. He wanted to speak both to Dickie and to the man.
“Niente, grazie, Berto,” Dickie said calmly to the waiter who had come over to ask what they wanted. Dickie looked at Tom. “Ready to go?”
Tom jumped up so suddenly his straight chair upset behind him. He set it up again, and bowed a good-bye to the Italian. He felt he owed the Italian an apology, yet he could not open his mouth to say even a conventional good-bye. The Italian nodded good-bye and smiled. Tom followed Dickie’s long white-clad legs out of the bar.
Outside, Tom said, “I just wanted you to see that it’s true at least. I hope you see.”
“All right, it’s true,” Dickie said, smiling. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Tom demanded.
“The man’s a crook. Is that what you want me to admit? Okay!”
“Do you have to be so damned superior about it? Did he do anything to you?”
“Am I supposed to get down on my knees to him? I’ve seen crooks before. This village gets a lot of them.” Dickie’s blond eyebrows frowned. “What the hell is the matter with you? Do you want to take him up on his crazy proposition? Go ahead!”
“I couldn’t now if I wanted to. Not after the way you acted.”
Dickie stopped in the road, looking at him. They were arguing so loudly, a few people around them were looking, watching.
“It could have been fun,” Tom said, “but not the way you chose to take it. A month ago when we went to Rome, you’d have thought something like this was fun.”
“Oh, no,” Dickie said, shaking his head. “I doubt it.”
The sense of frustration and inarticulateness was agony to Tom. And the fact that they were being looked at. He forced himself to walk on, in tense little steps at first, until he was sure that Dickie was coming with him. The puzzlement, the suspicion, was still in Dickie’s face, and Tom knew Dickie was puzzled about his reaction. Tom wanted to explain it, wanted to break through to Dickie so he would understand and they would feel the same way. Dickie had felt the same way he had a month ago. “It’s the way you acted,” Tom said. ”You didn’t have to act that way. The fellow wasn’t doing you any harm.”
“He looked like a dirty crook!” Dickie retorted. “For Christ sake, go back if you like him so much. You’re under no obligation to do what I do!”
Now Tom stopped. He had an impulse to go back, not necessarily to go back to the Italian, but to leave Dickie. Then his tension snapped suddenly. His shoulders relaxed, aching, and his breath began to come fast, through his mouth. He wanted to say at least, “All right, Dickie,” to make it up, to make Dickie forget it. He felt tongue-tied. He stared at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear. He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall to the ground. It was too much: the foreignness around him, the different language, his failure, and the fact that Dickie hated him. He felt surrounded by strangeness, by hostility. He felt Dickie yank his hands down from his eyes.
“What’s the matter with you?” Dickie asked. “Did that guy give you a shot of something?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? In your drink?”
“No.” The first drops of the evening rain fell on his head. There was a rumble of thunder. Hostility from above, too. “I want to die,” Tom said in a small voice.
Dickie yanked him by the arm. Tom tripped over a doorstep. They were in the little bar opposite the post office. Tom heard Dickie ordering a brandy, specifying Italian brandy because he wasn’t good enough for French, Tom supposed. Tom drank it off, slightl
y sweetish, medicinal-tasting, drank three of them, like a magic medicine to bring him back to what his mind knew was usually called reality: the smell of the Nazionale in Dickie’s hand, the curlicued grain in the wood of the bar under his fingers, the fact that his stomach had a hard pressure in it as if someone were holding a fist against his navel, the vivid anticipation of the long steep walk from here up to the house, the faint ache that would come in his thighs from it.
“I’m okay,” Tom said in a quiet deep voice. “I don’t know what was the matter. Must have been the heat that got me for a minute.” He laughed a little. That was reality, laughing it off, making it silly, something that was more important than anything that had happened to him in the five weeks since he had met Dickie, maybe that had ever happened to him.
Dickie said nothing, only put the cigarette in his mouth and took a couple of hundred-lire bills from his black alligator wallet and laid them on the bar. Tom was hurt that he said nothing, hurt like a child who has been sick and probably a nuisance, but who expects at least a friendly word when the sickness is over. But Dickie was indifferent. Dickie had bought him the brandies as coldly as he might have bought them for a stranger he had encountered who felt ill and had no money. Tom thought suddenly, Dickie doesn’t want me to go to Cortina. It was not the first time Tom had thought that. Marge was going to Cortina now. She and Dickie had bought a new giant-sized thermos to take to Cortina the last time they had been in Naples. They hadn’t asked him if he had liked the thermos, or anything else. They were just quietly and gradually leaving him out of their preparations. Tom felt that Dickie expected him to take off, in fact, just before the Cortina trip. A couple of weeks ago, Dickie had said he would show him some of the ski trails around Cortina that were marked on a map that he had. Dickie had looked at the map one evening, but he had not talked to him.
“Ready?” Dickie asked.
Tom followed him out of the bar like a dog.
“If you can get home all right by yourself, I thought I’d run up and see Marge for a while,” Dickie said on the road.
“I feel fine,” Tom said.
“Good.” Then he said over his shoulder as he walked away, “Want to pick up the mail? I might forget.”
Tom nodded. He went into the post office. There were two letters, one to him from Dickie’s father, one to Dickie from someone in New York whom Tom didn’t know. He stood in the doorway and opened Mr. Greenleaf’s letter, unfolded the typewritten sheet respectfully. It had the impressive pale green letterhead of Burke-Greenleaf Watercraft, Inc., with the ship’s-wheel trademark in the center.
10 Nov., 19——
My dear Tom,
In view of the fact you have been with Dickie over a month and that he shows no more sign of coming home than before you went, I can only conclude that you haven’t been successful. I realize that with the best of intentions you reported that he is considering returning, but frankly I don’t see it anywhere in his letter of October 26th. As a matter of fact, he seems more determined than ever to stay where he is.
I want you to know that I and my wife appreciate whatever efforts you have made on our behalf, and his. You need no longer consider yourself obligated to me in any way. I trust you have not inconvenienced yourself greatly by your efforts of the past month, and I sincerely hope the trip has afforded you some pleasure despite the failure of its main objective.
Both my wife and I send you greetings and our thanks.
Sincerely,
H. R. Greenleaf
It was the final blow. With the cool tone—even cooler than his usual businesslike coolness, because this was a dismissal and he had injected a note of courteous thanks in it—Mr. Greenleaf had simply cut him off. He had failed. “I trust you have not inconvenienced yourself greatly . . .” Wasn’t that sarcastic? Mr. Greenleaf didn’t even say that he would like to see him again when he returned to America.
Tom walked mechanically up the hill. He imagined Dickie in Marge’s house now, narrating to her the story of Carlo in the bar, and his peculiar behavior on the road afterward. Tom knew what Marge would say: “Why don’t you get rid of him, Dickie?” Should he go back and explain to them, he wondered, force them to listen? Tom turned around, looking at the inscrutable square front of Marge’s house up on the hill, at its empty, dark-looking window. His denim jacket was getting wet from the rain. He turned its collar up. Then he walked on quickly up the hill toward Dickie’s house. At least, he thought proudly, he hadn’t tried to wheedle any more money out of Mr. Greenleaf, and he might have. He might have, even with Dickie’s cooperation, if he had ever approached Dickie about it when Dickie had been in a good mood. Anybody else would have, Tom thought, anybody, but he hadn’t, and that counted for something.
He stood at the corner of the terrace, staring out at the vague empty line of the horizon and thinking of nothing, feeling nothing except a faint, dreamlike lostness and aloneness. Even Dickie and Marge seemed far away, and what they might be talking about seemed unimportant. He was alone. That was the only important thing. He began to feel a tingling fear at the end of his spine, tingling over his buttocks.
He turned as he heard the gate open. Dickie walked up the path, smiling, but it struck Tom as a forced, polite smile.
“What’re you doing standing there in the rain?” Dickie asked, ducking into the hall door.
“It’s very refreshing,” Tom said pleasantly. “Here’s a letter for you.” He handed Dickie his letter and stuffed the one from Mr. Greenleaf into his pocket.
Tom hung his jacket in the hall closet. When Dickie had finished reading his letter—a letter that had made him laugh out loud as he read it—Tom said, “Do you think Marge would like to go up to Paris with us when we go?”
Dickie looked surprised. “I think she would.”
“Well, ask her,” Tom said cheerfully.
“I don’t know if I should go up to Paris,” Dickie said. “I wouldn’t mind getting away somewhere for a few days, but Paris—” He lighted a cigarette. “I’d just as soon go up to San Remo or even Genoa. That’s quite a town.”
“But Paris—Genoa can’t compare with Paris, can it?”
“No, of course not, but it’s a lot closer.”
“But when will we get to Paris?”
“I don’t know. Any old time. Paris’ll still be there.”
Tom listened to the echo of the words in his ears, searching their tone. The day before yesterday, Dickie had received a letter from his father. He had read a few sentences aloud and they had laughed about something, but he had not read the whole letter as he had a couple of times before. Tom had no doubt that Mr. Greenleaf had told Dickie that he was fed up with Tom Ripley, and probably that he suspected him of using his money for his own entertainment. A month ago Dickie would have laughed at something like that, too, but not now, Tom thought. “I just thought while I have a little money left, we ought to make our Paris trip,” Tom persisted.
“You go up. I’m not in the mood right now. Got to save my strength for Cortina.”
“Well—I suppose we’ll make it San Remo then,” Tom said, trying to sound agreeable, though he could have wept.
“All right.”
Tom darted from the hall into the kitchen. The huge white form of the refrigerator sprang out of the corner at him. He had wanted a drink, with ice in it. Now he didn’t want to touch the thing. He had spent a whole day in Naples with Dickie and Marge, looking at refrigerators, inspecting ice trays, counting the number of gadgets, until Tom hadn’t been able to tell one refrigerator from another, but Dickie and Marge had kept at it with the enthusiasm of newlyweds. Then they had spent a few more hours in a café discussing the respective merits of all the refrigerators they had looked at before they decided on the one they wanted. And now Marge was popping in and out more often than ever, because she stored some of her own food in it, and she often wanted to borrow ice. Tom realized suddenly why he hated the refrigerator so much. It meant that Dickie was staying put. It finished not only
their Greek trip this winter, but it meant Dickie probably never would move to Paris or Rome to live, as he and Tom had talked of doing in Tom’s first weeks here. Not with a refrigerator that had the distinction of being one of only about four in the village, a refrigerator with six ice trays and so many shelves on the door that it looked like a supermarket swinging out at you every time you opened it.
Tom fixed himself an iceless drink. His hands were shaking. Only yesterday Dickie had said, “Are you going home for Christmas?” very casually in the middle of some conversation, but Dickie knew damned well he wasn’t going home for Christmas. He didn’t have a home, and Dickie knew it. He had told Dickie all about Aunt Dottie in Boston. It had simply been a big hint, that was all. Marge was full of plans about Christmas. She had a can of English plum pudding she was saving, and she was going to get a turkey from some contadino. Tom could imagine how she would slop it up with her saccharine sentimentality. A Christmas tree, of course, probably cut out of cardboard. “Silent Night.” Eggnog. Gooey presents for Dickie. Marge knitted. She took Dickie’s socks home to darn all the time. And they’d both slightly, politely, leave him out. Every friendly thing they would say to him would be a painful effort. Tom couldn’t bear to imagine it. All right, he’d leave. He’d do something rather than endure Christmas with them.
12
Marge said she didn’t care to go with them to San Remo. She was in the middle of a “streak” on her book. Marge worked in fits and starts, always cheerfully, though it seemed to Tom that she was bogged down, as she called it, about seventy-five percent of the time, a condition that she always announced with a merry little laugh. The book must stink, Tom thought. He had known writers. You didn’t write a book with your little finger, lolling on a beach half the day, wondering what to eat for dinner. But he was glad she was having a “streak” at the time he and Dickie wanted to go to San Remo.
The Talented Mr. Ripley Page 9
