It wouldn’t do to become too friendly with any of these, Tom thought. One of them might know somebody who knew Dickie very well, someone who might be at the next party.
At eleven-fifteen, when he said good-bye to his hostess and to her parents, they looked very sorry to see him go. But he wanted to be at Notre Dame by midnight. It was Christmas Eve.
The girl’s mother asked his name again.
“Monsieur Granelafe,” the girl repeated for her. “Deekie Granelafe. Correct?”
“Correct,” Tom said, smiling.
Just as he reached the downstairs hall he remembered Freddie Miles’s party at Cortina. December second. Nearly a month ago! He had meant to write to Freddie to say that he wasn’t coming. Had Marge gone, he wondered? Freddie would think it very strange that he hadn’t written to say he wasn’t coming, and Tom hoped Marge had told Freddie, at least. He must write Freddie at once. There was a Florence address for Freddie in Dickie’s address book. It was a slip, but nothing serious, Tom thought. He just mustn’t let such a thing happen again.
He walked out into the darkness and turned in the direction of the illuminated, bone-white Arc de Triomphe. It was strange to feel so alone, and yet so much a part of things, as he had felt at the party. He felt it again, standing on the outskirts of the crowd that filled the square in front of Notre Dame. There was such a crowd he couldn’t possibly have got into the cathedral, but the amplifiers carried the music clearly to all parts of the square. French Christmas carols whose names he didn’t know. “Silent Night.” A solemn carol, and then a lively, babbling one. The chanting of male voices. Frenchmen near him removed their hats. Tom removed his. He stood tall, straight, sober-faced, yet ready to smile if anyone had addressed him. He felt as he had felt on the ship, only more intensely, full of goodwill, a gentleman, with nothing in his past to blemish his character. He was Dickie, good-natured, naïve Dickie, with a smile for everyone and a thousand francs for anyone who asked him. An old man did ask him for money as Tom was leaving the cathedral square, and he gave him a crisp, blue thousand-franc bill. The old man’s face exploded in a smile, and he tipped his hat.
Tom felt a little hungry, though he rather liked the idea of going to bed hungry tonight. He would spend an hour or so with his Italian conversation book, he thought, then go to bed. Then he remembered that he had decided to try to gain about five pounds, because Dickie’s clothes were just a trifle loose on him and Dickie looked heavier than he in the face, so he stopped at a bar-tabac and ordered a ham sandwich on long crusty bread and a glass of hot milk, because a man next to him at the counter was drinking hot milk. The milk was almost tasteless, pure and chastening, as Tom imagined a wafer tasted in church.
He came down in a leisurely way from Paris, stopping overnight in Lyon and also in Arles to see the places that van Gogh had painted there. He maintained his cheerful equanimity in the face of atrociously bad weather. In Arles, the rain borne on the violent mistral soaked him through as he tried to discover the exact spots where van Gogh had stood to paint from. He had bought a beautiful book of van Gogh reproductions in Paris, but he could not take the book out in the rain, and he had to make a dozen trips back to his hotel to verify the scenes. He looked over Marseille, found it drab except for the Canebière, and moved on eastward by train, stopping for a day in St. Tropez, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, all the places he had heard of and felt such affinity for when he saw them, though in the month of December they were overcast by gray winter clouds, and the gay crowds were not there, even on New Year’s Eve in Menton. Tom put the people there in his imagination, men and women in evening clothes descending the broad steps of the gambling palace in Monte Carlo, people in bright bathing costumes, light and brilliant as a Dufy watercolor, walking under the palms of the Boulevard des Anglais at Nice. People—American, English, French, German, Swedish, Italian. Romance, disappointment, quarrels, reconciliations, murder. The Côte d’ Azur excited him as no other place he had yet seen in the world excited him. And it was so tiny, really, this curve in the Mediterranean coastline with the wonderful names strung like beads—Toulon, Fréjus, St. Rafael, Cannes, Nice, Menton, and then San Remo.
There were two letters from Marge when he got back to Rome on the fourth of January. She was giving up her house on the first of March, she said. She had not quite finished the first draft of her book, but she was sending three-quarters of it with all the photographs to the American publisher who had been interested in her idea when she wrote him about it last summer. She wrote:
When am I going to see you? I hate passing up a summer in Europe after I’ve weathered another awful winter, but I think I’ll go home early in March. Yes, I’m homesick, finally, really. Darling, it would be so wonderful if we could go home on the same boat together. Is there a possibility? I don’t suppose there is. You’re not going back to the U.S. even for a short visit this winter?
I was thinking of sending all my stuff (eight pieces of luggage, two trunks, three boxes of books and miscellaneous!) by slow boat from Naples and coming up through Rome and if you were in the mood we could at least go up the coast again and see Forte dei Marmi and Viareggio and the other spots we like—a last look. I’m not in the mood to care about the weather, which I know will be horrid. I wouldn’t ask you to accompany me to Marseille, where I catch the boat, but from Genoa??? What do you think? . . .
The other letter was more reserved. Tom knew why: he had not sent her even a postcard for nearly a month. She said:
Have changed my mind about the Riviera. Maybe this damp weather has taken away my enterprise or my book has. Anyway, I’m leaving from Naples on an earlier boat—the Constitution on 28 Feb. Imagine—back to America as soon as I step aboard. American food, Americans, dollars for drinks and the horseraces— Darling, I’m sorry not to be seeing you, as I gather from your silence you still don’t want to see me, so don’t give it a thought. Consider me off your hands.
Of course I do hope I see you again, in the States or anywhere else. Should you possibly be inspired to make a trip down to Mongy before the 28th, you know damned well you are welcome.
As ever,
Marge
P.S. I don’t even know if you’re still in Rome.
Tom could see her in tears as she wrote it. He had an impulse to write her a very considerate letter, saying he had just come back from Greece, and had she gotten his two postcards? But it was safer, Tom thought, to let her leave without being sure where he was. He wrote her nothing.
The only thing that made him uneasy, and that was not very uneasy, was the possibility of Marge’s coming up to see him in Rome before he could get settled in an apartment. If she combed the hotels she could find him, but she could never find him in an apartment. Well-to-do Americans didn’t have to report their places of residence at the questura, though, according to the stipulations of the Permesso di Soggiorno, one was supposed to register every change of address with the police. Tom had talked with an American resident of Rome who had an apartment and who had said he never bothered with the questura, and it never bothered him. If Marge did come up to Rome suddenly, Tom had a lot of his own clothing hanging ready in the closet. The only thing he had changed about himself, physically, was his hair, but that could always be explained as being the effect of the sun. He wasn’t really worried. Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil—Dickie’s eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges—and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place.
On the tenth of January Tom wrote Marge that he was back in Rome after three weeks in Paris alone, that Tom had left Rome a month ago, saying he was going up to Paris, and from there to America though he hadn’t run into Tom in Paris, and that he had not yet found an apartment in
Rome but he was looking and would let her know his address as soon as he had one. He thanked her extravagantly for the Christmas package: she had sent the white sweater with the red V stripes that she had been knitting and trying on Dickie for size since October, as well as an art book of quattrocento painting and a leather shaving kit with his initials, H.R.G., on the lid. The package had arrived only on January sixth, which was the main reason for Tom’s letter: he didn’t want her to think he hadn’t claimed it, imagine that he had vanished into thin air, and then start a search for him. He asked if she had received a package from him? He had mailed it from Paris, and he supposed it was late. He apologized. He wrote:
I’m painting again with Di Massimo and am reasonably pleased. I miss you, too, but if you can still bear with my experiment, I’d prefer not to see you for several more weeks (unless you do suddenly go home in February, which I still doubt!) by which time you may not care to see me again. Regards to Giorgio and wife and Fausto if he’s still there and Pietro down at the dock . . .
It was a letter in the absentminded and faintly lugubrious tone of all Dickie’s letters, a letter that could not be called warm or unwarm, and that said essentially nothing.
Actually he had found an apartment in a large apartment house in the Via Imperiale near the Pincian Gate, and had signed a year’s lease for it, though he did not intend to spend most of his time in Rome, much less the winter. He only wanted a home, a base somewhere, after years of not having any. And Rome was chic. Rome was part of his new life. He wanted to be able to say in Majorca or Athens or Cairo or wherever he was: “Yes, I live in Rome. I keep an apartment there.” “Keep” was the word for apartments among the international set. You kept an apartment in Europe the way you kept a garage in America. He also wanted his apartment to be elegant, though he intended to have the minimum of people up to see him, and he hated the idea of having a telephone, even an unlisted telephone, but he decided it was more of a safety measure than a menace, so he had one installed. The apartment had a large living room, a bedroom, a kind of sitting room, kitchen, and bath. It was furnished somewhat ornately, but it suited the respectable neighborhood and the respectable life he intended to lead. The rent was the equivalent of a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month in winter including heat, and a hundred and twenty-five in summer.
Marge replied with an ecstatic letter saying she had just received the beautiful silk blouse from Paris which she hadn’t expected at all and it fitted to perfection. She said she had had Fausto and the Cecchis for Christmas dinner at her house and the turkey had been divine, with marrons and giblet gravy and plum pudding and blah blah blah and everything but him. And what was he doing and thinking about? And was he happier? And that Fausto would look him up on his way to Milan if he sent an address in the next few days, otherwise leave a message for Fausto at the American Express, saying where Fausto could find him.
Tom supposed her good humor was due mostly to the fact that she now thought Tom had departed for America via Paris. Along with Marge’s letter came one from Signor Pucci, saying that he had sold three pieces of his furniture for a hundred and fifty thousand lire in Naples, and that he had a prospective buyer for the boat, a certain Anastasio Martino of Mongibello, who had promised to pay the first down payment within a week, but that the house probably couldn’t be sold until summer when the Americans began coming in again. Less fifteen percent for Signor Pucci’s commission, the furniture sale amounted to two hundred and ten dollars, and Tom celebrated the night by going to a Roman nightclub and ordering a superb dinner which he ate in elegant solitude at a candlelit table for two. He did not at all mind dining and going to the theater alone. It gave him the opportunity to concentrate on being Dickie Greenleaf. He broke his bread as Dickie did, thrust his fork into his mouth with his left hand as Dickie did, gazed off at the other tables and at the dancers in such a profound and benevolent trance that the waiter had to speak to him a couple of times to get his attention. Some people waved to him from a table, and Tom recognized them as one of the American couples he had met at the Christmas Eve party in Paris. He made a sign of greeting in return. He even remembered their name, Souders. He did not look at them again during the evening, but they left before he did and stopped by his table to say hello.
“All by yourself?” the man asked. He looked a little tipsy.
“Yes. I have a yearly date here with myself,” Tom replied. “I celebrate a certain anniversary.”
The American nodded a little blankly, and Tom could see that he was stymied for anything intelligent to say, as uneasy as any small-town American in the presence of cosmopolitan poise and sobriety, money and good clothes, even if the clothes were on another American.
“You said you were living in Rome, didn’t you?” his wife asked. “You know, I think we’ve forgotten your name, but we remember you very well from Christmas Eve.”
“Greenleaf,” Tom replied. “Richard Greenleaf.”
“Oh, yes!” she said, relieved. “Do you have an apartment here?”
She was all ready to take down his address in her memory.
“I’m staying at a hotel at the moment, but I’m planning to move into an apartment any day, as soon as the decorating’s finished. I’m at the Elisio. Why don’t you give me a ring?”
“We’d love to. We’re on our way to Majorca in three more days, but that’s plenty of time!”
“Love to see you,” Tom said. “Buona sera!”
Alone again, Tom returned to his private reveries. He ought to open a bank account for Tom Ripley, he thought, and from time to time put a hundred dollars or so into it. Dickie Greenleaf had two banks, one in Naples and one in New York, with about five thousand dollars in each account. He might open the Ripley account with a couple of thousand, and put into it the hundred and fifty thousand lire from the Mongibello furniture. After all, he had two people to take care of.
15
He visited the Capitoline and the Villa Borghese, explored the Forum thoroughly, and took six Italian lessons from an old man in his neighborhood who had a tutoring sign in his window, and to whom Tom gave a false name. After the sixth lesson, Tom thought that his Italian was on a par with Dickie’s. He remembered verbatim several sentences that Dickie had said at one time or another which he now knew were incorrect. For example, “Ho paura che non c’è arrivata, Giorgio,” one evening in Giorgio’s, when they had been waiting for Marge and she had been late. It should have been “sia arrivata” in the subjunctive after an expression of fearing. Dickie had never used the subjunctive as often as it should be used in Italian. Tom studiously kept himself from learning the proper uses of subjunctive.
Tom bought dark red velvet for the drapes in his living room, because the drapes that had come with the apartment offended him. When he had asked Signora Buffi, the wife of the house superintendent, if she knew of a seamstress who could make them up, Signora Buffi had offered to make them herself. Her price was two thousand lire, hardly more than three dollars. Tom forced her to take five thousand. He bought several minor items to embellish his apartment, though he never asked anyone up—with the exception of one attractive but not very bright young man, an American, whom he had met in the Café Greco when the young man had asked him how to get to the Hotel Excelsior from there. The Excelsior was on the way to Tom’s house, so Tom asked him to come up for a drink. Tom had only wanted to impress him for an hour and then say good-bye to him forever, which he did, after serving him his best brandy and strolling about his apartment discoursing on the pleasure of life in Rome. The young man was leaving for Munich the following day.
Tom carefully avoided the American residents of Rome who might expect him to come to their parties and ask them to his in return, though he loved to chat with Americans and Italians in the Café Greco and in the students’ restaurants in the Via Margutta. He told his name only to an Italian painter named Carlino, whom he met in a Via Margutta tavern, told him also that he painted and was studying with a painter called Di Massimo. If th
e police ever investigated Dickie’s activities in Rome, perhaps long after Dickie had disappeared and become Tom Ripley again, this one Italian painter could be relied upon to say that he knew Dickie Greenleaf had been painting in Rome in January. Carlino had never heard of Di Massimo, but Tom described him so vividly that Carlino would probably never forget him.
He felt alone, yet not at all lonely. It was very much like the feeling on Christmas Eve in Paris, a feeling that everyone was watching him, as if he had an audience made up of the entire world, a feeling that kept him on his mettle, because to make a mistake would be catastrophic. Yet he felt absolutely confident he would not make a mistake. It gave his existence a peculiar, delicious atmosphere of purity, like that, Tom thought, which a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be played better by anyone else. He was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made. But he no longer felt tired after several hours of it, as he had at first. 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.