Patricia Highsmith

In order to convince his son to come home, Herbert Greenleaf, a rich shipbuilder, sends the suave con man Tom Ripley to Italy, but is unaware of his son's friend's criminal activities. Reprint.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Sarah Christine Gill

“Yes, Richard’s got talent along those lines,” Mr. Greenleaf said with a satisfied air. “I think he has,” Tom agreed. His boredom had slipped into another gear. Tom knew the sensations. He had them sometimes at parties, but generally when he was having dinner with someone with whom he hadn’t wanted to have dinner in the first place, and the evening got longer and longer. Now he could be maniacally polite for perhaps another whole hour, if he had to be, before something in him exploded and sent him running out of the door.

The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the days went on. It was as if something had gone out of New York—the realness or the importance of it—and the city was putting on a show just for him, a colossal show with its buses, taxis, and hurrying people on the sidewalks, its television shows in all the Third Avenue bars, its movie marquees lighted up in broad daylight, and its sound effects of thousands of honking horns and human voices, talking for no purpose whatsoever. As if when his boat left the pier on Saturday, the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof like a lot of cardboard on a stage.

He was feeling mellow on the wine. Far over on his left, a three-quarter moon drifted above the jagged hump of Mount Vesuvius. Tom gazed at it calmly, as if he had seen it a thousand times before. Around the corner of land there, beyond Vesuvius, lay Richard’s village.

Tom took a breath and began. He made it very funny, and Marge laughed like someone who hadn’t had anything funny to laugh at in years. “When I saw him coming in Raoul’s after me, I was ready to climb out of a back window!” His tongue rattled on almost independently of his brain. His brain was estimating how high his stock was shooting up with Dickie and Marge. He could see it in their faces. The climb up the hill to Dickie’s house didn’t seem half so long as before. Delicious smells of roasting chicken drifted out on the terrace. Dickie made some martinis. Tom showered and then Dickie showered, and came out and poured himself a drink, just like the first time, but the atmosphere now was totally changed.

Tom drank it off, slightly 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.

The Via Appia Antica stretched out before him, gray and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps. Black fragments of tombs rose up on either side of the road, silhouetted against the still not quite dark sky. There was more darkness than light. And only a single car ahead, coming this way.

The boat approached Palermo harbor slowly and tentatively, nosing its white prow gently through the floating orange peels, the straw, and the pieces of broken fruit crates. It was the way Tom felt, too, approaching Palermo.

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