Three Ways Of Playing A Chorus

“I’m sure he’ll be along before we know it.”

“Freddie? Punctuality has never been one of his strong suits. He’s probably found a pretty stewardess. Or a whole train car full of nuns.”

Dickie’s lit up again, shining. Even Marge can’t quit looking at him with her fair hair straggling down from under her scarf, frazzled as a chambermaid. She’s been unpacking luggage all day and Dickie’s been trying to set up the record player. One of those portable numbers, courtesy of one of the other Americans in Freddie’s orbit.

This is the finest hospitality the Italians have to offer — a little shoebox of a refuge, whose caretaker is conspicuously absent. It feels like they shouldn’t be here at all — which is one thing to Tom and quite another to Marge and Dickie, who stroll around most places like they own them. Stone floors, wooly rugs, wood-burning stove. Oh, you know — not enough rooms. There’s more than enough rooms in this place to put up half the expats in Rome. Peter’s laying out their baggage in the other room, tracking snowy footprints.

“Maybe he caught up with Meredith, going opposite ways. It’s a shame she couldn’t make it, her hospitality is the stuff of legend.”

The stuff of legend, but Peter still can’t remember her last name. Lucky Tom. Punctuality is not one of Freddie Miles’ virtues, but he wouldn’t be late to his own vacation. Something’s holding him back.

“It’s so generous of her to let Tom in. I’ll have to write her a letter.” Marge’s voice sounds thready. “Things have just been so — up in the air.”

Tom makes a more solicitous face. “You’re not — not feeling well, are you? Do you want me to put the kettle on to boil?”

“No, I’m all right. Thanks, Tom. But it couldn’t hurt.”

In her cuffed-up sweater and slacks she looks just like a boy, just like Dickie Greenleaf’s profligate younger brother. Dickie seems surprised to see him, but hardly angry. It could be a reluctance to spoil the fun, but Dickie’s never held back before for fear of ruining everything. Tom feels the first pricklings of something like hope.

“I’m so glad you made it,” Dickie says. “This place is incredible. Everybody’s been talking about it, last year they hosted the Olympics or something. The place was completely overrun. And you thought it was crowded now!”

Not out here, it isn’t. Up in the mountains it’s universally cool-white and unmarked, the mountains themselves had a reddish tint for the trip inward — Peter had remarked on it as the two of them made slow headway, how it had the look of blood. If you really looked closely you might be able to see the scars of past sportsmanship on the slopes — already its pristine qualities are fading.

*

There are six beds after all. Meredith Logue’s sacrifice was in vain. Tom can’t help but feel a little sheepish — six beds, a single bathroom, a well-stocked bar getting more well-stocked with every new arrival as each of them seems to have brought liquid refreshments as if fearing a massive run on Cortina’s wine cellars, a rather rustic stove. The exterior is one long softly-sloping triangle, like a child’s drawing of a mountain. The windows and doors are all placed with perfect symmetry — all in all the impression it makes is appealing, but it’s certainly not a palatial hotel. More like a farmhouse with some funny ideas. The high ceilings make everything echo.

By the time Freddie arrives, the snow is already falling hard, piling up around the first-floor doors and windows — hard wet drifts of impacted snow, the kind of dense blight that makes Marge wrinkle her brow. Dickie has a map out, spread across the narrow wooden table so he can scrutinize the best spots. It’s all Greek to Tom, but he’s watching the span of Dickie’s hands as he scribbles annotations in pencil or roughly circles the starting-place of a piste that piques his interest. His handwriting is no tidier in graphite, and he knows no more about what makes a good track or a bad one than Tom does. He’d been making a study of Peter’s handwriting on the trip over, you know, just in case — but the boyish sloppiness of Dickie Greenleaf’s hand is paradise by comparison with frigid well-schooled print.

*

Freddie and Dickie are absorbed in some game of cards, both explaining the rules in a repetitive fashion to Marge, who sits cross-legged in her pyjamas. Tom is reading beside the stove, bent over with his elbows on the tabletop. Peter slinks up behind him like a shadow, without a sound.

“I know your secret,” Peter says somberly from very near in the vicinity of Tom’s ear.

Tom’s face is a smooth, easy mask. “Peter. You scared the hell out of me.”

“You’ve never gone skiing a day in your life.”

“I was hoping I could get away with drinking brandy instead.” There’s plenty of it. And he hasn’t broken his neck so far, so it’s really of no consequence.

“I’m impressed with you, honestly. Coming through in a pinch like that. I would never have guessed, all the way over, you seemed so keen on the whole thing.”

“Really, I hope it doesn’t cause any trouble for you. I didn’t mean to put one over on you and Freddie, it’s just not the kind of opportunity I could pass up.”

Peter throws a confidential arm around him. “I brought you this far, didn’t I? I’ll be your tour guide. And your chaperone.”

Tom smiles and turns his head. His fingers are pressed between the pages of his book.

*

“Freddie, I thought you were going to hire a guide.”

“They’re all taking the holiday off. All in church, probably. Or dead drunk.” Freddie sparks a cigarette lighter, and curses. Tom declines to assist him. All the matches have made their way into his luggage.

Snow is falling thick and fast outside, piling up so dense the roof is practically creaking.

“Well, we won’t be hurting for liquor.”

“Thank God for that.” There must be enough liquor here to float a battleship — crusty bottles of liqueurs Tom doesn’t recognize and a whole rank of unopened wine bottles, spirits with the paper bands still around their necks. “Who wants to mix the first cocktail of the season?”

“Would you shut up?” Dickie’s face flashes saturnine for a moment with something like concern. “I can’t hear the radio.”

Peter straightens up and raises his hands in preemptive placation.

“The roads are out. That won’t be a problem for the real die-hards, but out here I’m afraid things might get a little boring.”

“Boring? With you and Marge around the place? Never. You’re just like a couple of newlyweds. You make your own fun.” Freddie makes just like a couple of newlyweds sound like a slur. One of his big red hands is busy shearing open a bottle of vodka.

*

Dickie and Marge are locked in together upstairs. Occasionally a coital-sounding thump can be heard, or a sigh.

An absurd rack of antlers is mounted over the fireplace. Peter is drinking red wine on the cinder-marked rug. Freddie is waxing his skis in his bathrobe with a lit cigarette hanging from his lip.

A peal of laughter issues from the upstairs bedrooms, and a loud rattle. Tom’s face must be scarlet; he can feel it, creeping up from under his collar, the curse of a powerful imagination.

“I know,” Peter says, “let’s play chess.”

Some kind of psychological conditioning has taken place. Tom now associates chess with the kind of guilty camaraderie that drove him away from Mongi — that drove him away from Dickie, really. Peter’s a hopeless chess player, and admits as much, with his soft sweater and his completely guileless face —

Tom could stay like this for a very long while, hunkered down on the threadbare carpet, watching Peter watch him. The tips of Peter’s fingers toy with a chess piece before he sweeps it off the board.

“Where did you say you met Meredith?”

*

Marge is crying in the upstairs bedroom, loud enough to be heard. Tom ties his scarf into a hurried slipknot. “I thought we’d go and see if any of the slopes are passable. The guides back in town seemed to be worried about avalanches.” The subtle emphases in his voice don’t seem to register — sledgehammer blows might not register a response from Freddie Miles in a determined mood.

“Fuck it. Get your coat on, Tom.”

*

The guides aren’t all in church, or lazing around the big rifugi at the base of the range smoking and whoring and drinking espresso. They aren’t stupid enough to go out in this weather.

Dickie is swearing into the wind, somewhere far behind them. Freddie ploughs onward, huffing and red-faced in the high snow — turning back has spoiled his mood, but he expresses this in a perverse cheerfulness. Tom looks in his face and thinks optimistic thoughts about avalanches.

“You must be so disappointed. Marge says you were so goddamn determined to get to ski you practiced for three months. Got yourself a special teacher or something.”

“To tell you the truth, it’s been a while. I needed a refresher.”

“Where’d you learn to ski? Upstate? Vermont? Where?”

“Oh, well. We used to go up to Lake Placid when we were kids.”

He’s read books, which provide the skeleton frame of experience for Tom to lay charming anecdotes on, but it’s very hard to muster up the enthusiasm for a pleasing lie with Freddie. Freddie Miles is an absolute beast — if this had gone some other way that might have been Dickie, Tom might have been sent to retrieve a total ingrate like Freddie and gone chasing him through every café and bordello in Rome. It’s baffling how many degrees separate the two of them, how many little gestures and physicalities and charms divide them, and yet — some other time, some other quest, some other Tom.

They slough on through awful deep drifts, Dickie has fallen so far behind them that his calls to slow down sound as if they’re coming through water. The driving snow stings Tom’s eyes and sticks to his lips — the shape of Freddie slogging on in front is enough to break up some of the gusts before they reach him, but it also puts them both at the mercy of Freddie’s navigation skills. The wind whistles around them, as it gusts through the trees — they couldn’t be any further from December in New York, from churned-up gray snow and dirty icicles and drunk vagrants scuffling in the street. Everything is horribly white.

Freddie halts in his tracks, in a white scuff of powder. Tom struggles to stop in a timely way, and nearly stumbles.

“You don’t miss a trick. Showing up here with Peter Smith-Kingsley, like you and Dickie are pals again and suddenly you’re in tight with Meredith Logue. You must have better stamina than I realized, Tommy-boy.”

“Oh no, she and I — I mean, I never slept with Meredith. I thought she was seeing Peter.”

“Peter Smith-Kingsley is a fairy. He isn’t sleeping with Meredith Logue, and he isn’t fucking her either. What did you say she was down with again? Was it the flu or something?”

*

By the time Tom comes down the stairs, the fire has gone out. Marge is hunched over at the table with a blanket thrown over her pyjamas. Freddie’s been at her already, Tom can tell. Freddie practically leaves a trail wherever he goes, like some kind of slug.

Marge stabs a barrette through her hair and looks up at him fiercely, red-eyed and red-lipped. “Tom, is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t ski?”

“I can ski, I’m just — it’s just being out of practice, that’s all. I didn’t want to overstate things like I was trying to be the expert. I can ski well enough to keep up with Freddie.”

“It’s really not safe, Tom.” Marge’s voice is raw from the cold, and there’s a thumbprint of red color in both of her cheeks. “What if something happened to you? Or God forbid, something happened to Dickie? You wouldn’t even be able to get help.”

How is it that this has happened twice in as many days?

Tom puts on a conciliatory face, and drops his voice low. “Cortina isn’t a wasteland. I promise you nothing bad’s going to happen out here, and anyway I thought we were mostly staying put. We made it up here, didn’t we?”

*

Peter’s writing in a little leather book, more schoolboy handwriting and mysterious abbreviations preserved for posterity. Tom’s teeth are chattering as he smokes in the mudroom.

Dickie and Marge are going at it with fury upstairs, slamming doors and screaming so loud the snow is practically shaking from the rafters — a fist lashes out and thumps the wall, sending reverberations. It’s practically exhibitionism, this vivisection of their relationship — it’s as if Dickie wants him to see it, Dickie wants him to be reminded.

This is too much to bear. Someone comes barrelling down the hall like a shot, heavy footsteps like a man’s on the ancient floorboards — Tom positions himself strategically at the foot of the stairs between the wall and the woodpile, stiffened for the impact of a fist.

“Jesus Christ, Tom, you scared me!” Dickie wheels back a little, unsure of where to put his momentum, nearly crushing him with it.

“People are trying to sleep.”

“Obviously, you’re not.” Dickie’s pale beneath his lingering suntan. Tom flicks away his cigarette guiltily.

“Freddie’s passed out unconscious, it’s just Peter and I having to listen to the two of you making a scene up there.”

“I’m sorry, Tom, but where exactly are the two of us supposed to go? It’s Marge that’s being unreasonable, and I asked her if she’d like to take a walk, but she’s scared she’ll fall and break her leg or something. I should push her.”

“Could you save it for another time? It’s making it pretty difficult—”

“That’s just what I do, isn’t it?” Dickie’s smile is flashing dangerously, all teeth. “I pick on poor Marge and ruin it for the rest of you. Are you starting to feel a little put upon, Tom? Because I really don’t remember inviting you to come at all—”

“You invited me back in Mongibello. You didn’t even retract the invitation on your own, you made Marge do it. It would have been a lot easier coming from you directly, Dickie. You don’t need to hide things from me.”

“I don’t think honesty is really one of your strong suits, Tom.” The color is coming back into his face. He’s beautiful, poisonous.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you. Good night, Dickie.”

*

Peter unbuttons his pyjama shirt. His feet are bare against the raw boards — their braided rug seems to have gone missing in the night.

“When did you meet Dickie?”

“Oh, years ago now. I was young and green then and he was thrillingly American. He was a painter back then.”

Tom laughs politely at that image. “Well, was he any good?”

“Dickie’s never been any good. You must know that by now.”

Peter Smith-Kingsley isn’t a nobody. He’s only a few rungs below Dickie on the barometer of class, if that, he’s attached himself to him because he likes him and not because he’s grown accustomed to being rich.

“You make him sound like a real heel.”

“Oh yes. He’s a scoundrel.”

“What did he paint?”

“Houses. No, he painted landscapes — he could’ve gotten good at it, too, but that’s all ancient history now. It got him to Italy, anyway. I came for the architecture.”

“I came for Dickie.” Not true, really. He came to Italy for the climate and Dickie is just a part of that, as much as the sunlight or the fresh air.

“What if instead of going back to New York, you went someplace else with me? Two can live as cheaply as one in most of these places, and I’m not like Dickie, I don’t mind eating a lot of plain pasta and drinking nothing but black coffee. Or sleeping on a park bench and living on bread and water, after all this wanton excess. We might have to. I hope they’re not going to charge us for the days we’ve been snowed in.”

Tom shakes his head a little, acutely aware of the need to run a comb through his hair. “I’m sure Freddie can make them see reason. I’ll think about it, Peter, but I’ll have to talk to Dickie and Marge about it. I can’t change plans on a dime like I could before.”

Peter’s face falls before it brightens again. Almost imperceptibly, if you haven’t made a study of men’s faces. “Of course.”

Tom stands in front of their battered mirror with a comb, coaxing his forelock of hair into an approximate curl before raking it into straightness.

*

“Jesus Christ, if it was going to be like this, why didn’t we just get a hotel?” The door’s shuddered open again and Dickie’s tendency to kick it shut isn’t keeping the cold out for measurably longer every time it happens.

“You don’t have to be such a goddamn tourist about it. We’ve got everything we need here, there’s no reason not to wait it out until the wind dies down.”

Freddie hasn’t shut up about what they’ll do and where they’ll go once the wind dies down since the storm began — the drifts are piling up so stiffly you can hardly clamber out, and now the doors aren’t closing. If there was a hammer and nails around the place, it’d be an easy fix, but everyone else is too helpless to consider it.

“Right, well, you’re the boss.”

“We can still make the best of it,” Marge says. “Peter and I will make dinner.

“That’s my girl,” Freddie calls out from behind a chair stifled in blankets. As if Marge has done this before a day in her life, except for pleasure.

Marge cracks eggs into a spitting skillet as Freddie reads to her from a vulgar Italian novel. His lascivious eyes trail over Tom from time to time, as if he’s assessing the viability of a fallback plan.

Peter fumbles at a block of arrestingly yellow butter, and Dickie contributes nothing but a lot of crumbs. There’s a convivial feeling to it anyway, a kind of dormitory atmosphere. Freddie cajoles Marge into sitting on his lap — like Santa Claus, but when she breaks away and flings herself into Tom’s arms she’s laughing ruefully.

And Dickie laughing too, “What are you doing? That’s my cook you’re manhandling!”

No way to talk about your wife. Only they aren’t married, not yet, only sort of — promised to one another. Tom knows all about broken promises.

By the end of the night, Freddie’s passed out on top of Tom’s luggage and he declines to take the necessary chances to retrieve any of this things. (Few of them are really his things — a hasty bit of business protesting about lost luggage netted him a replacement shaving kit and a narrow sheaf of passable checks before they set off for the Alps.)

Tom stumbles into the nearest vacant bed — drowsing for a few merciful moments in the wasteland of mismatched blankets before Peter’s fingers are flossing through his hair. Not so vacant as he’d have hoped.

“You’ve got butter,” Peter says muzzily from someplace nearby. “You’ve got butter in your hair. What have you been doing?”

“I’m so sorry—” Tom scrambles up onto his knees,

“No, stay, stay. It’s warmer this way.”

“I thought I felt a draft.”

“Has anyone ever told you you make a really excellent draft excluder?”

Face to face — well, he isn’t Dickie. Peter smells like peat and wool and burned toast.

*

The natural splendors of Cortina may be largely inaccessible, but Peter and Freddie are deeply entrenched in one another’s company again, pairing off chummily in one room of the rifugio or another. It’s a little disturbing to see Peter slide into the mode of being Freddie’s friend after they’ve been alone together — lackey-like, as if Freddie were the one who brought him here and not, indirectly, Dickie. But from Tom that judgment is slightly hypocritical. There are socks drying on the stove, and empty wine bottles cluttering the kitchen floor.

Marge has locked herself in the only bathroom. At the rate that Dickie is listening to the same two records and drinking only red wine, it will be really terrifically inconvenient if he has to be sick.

Dickie’s pyjamas are buttoned askew. The suntan is fading along the line of his neck. He’s golden as he ever was. Tom shoves another log into the stove, more forcefully than strictly necessary, and turns away from the flare of yellow heat.

The palms of Tom’s hands are starting to itch as he approaches Dickie there on the rug.

“You’re looking at me.”

Dickie’s eyes are cracked in drowsy slits, still arrestingly blue. Or not quite blue, not like Tom’s eyes are, but close enough, ocean-color.

“I am.”

“You’re looking at me funny. What — what did I do? Did I fall asleep?”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Well, quit staring. It’s spooky.” Tom kneels to jam a flattened bolster under Dickie’s pillow. Dickie draws him down, down, down, against the prickly expanse of his chest — his chest hair is escaping his pyjama shirt, like fine gold leaf flaking. “This is perfect. This, right here. Not too hot, not too cold.”

His hands are going every place — Tom freezes for a moment, but there’s no one here to watch them, no one to see, the two of them are perfectly invisible here in the middle of a snowdrift.

“Dickie, watch out—”

For what? For the iron leg of the stove, of course, too close. “Your hands are ice cold, you know that? Bring them over here.”

He’s fever-hot, and smells like wine. With Tom he is awkward and ungainly, not like with Marge, like something else — a little like fighting, clumsy knees and clumsy hands and Tom feeling out the shape of Dickie’s body through his clothes, compassing with his hands what he’s only seen with his eyes. But he’s sprawlingly affectionate — he kisses Tom and musses his hair with a big hand. Tom makes a sound of denial — they might be overheard down here, or worse, seen like this — and Dickie kisses him again, horribly louche, with tongue. It’s not a very funny joke.

The ring on his finger leaves a raw scratch on the nape of Tom’s neck. His mouth tastes like wine, and his erection fills Tom’s hand without Tom even needing to go looking for it — like a quick fuck in a public washroom only infinitely more clumsy and lazy and the two of them are here, surrounded by beautiful things, in the middle of what must be the most beautiful country in the world. Maybe it’s only that Dickie Greenleaf is here.

Tom jerks him off against his belly, feeling dizzier with every stroke. Dizzy, intoxicated, feverish. The muscles in his stomach are trembling, and Dickie’s long thigh is taut with concentration, concentration on every pull of Tom’s eager hand. They can’t come back from here. This much is shockingly unambiguous. But at least it’s quick, and Tom can commit it to memory in its entirety.

People die out here in the snow, they freeze like stones. People die here, for want of warmth.

Afterward is much the same as before — cramped logy heat, and special indulgence. “I’m sorry for what I said back in San Remo.” He shifts next to him in a state of palpable discomfort, eventually freeing his arm from under Tom’s shoulder.

“That’s so funny, Dickie, I was just going to say the same thing.”

Tom’s sorry for what he might have done there in San Remo, along the water and under the sky. Deeply, deeply, terribly sorry. This is what being sorry feels like — remorse that he’d almost lost it all, that he’d almost lost his only friend.

“I don’t even remember what you said. I just wasn’t much of a pal to you. We can head over to Col Gallina when the weather clears up. There’s some easy paths over there, you can get you sea legs.”

Tom wipes his hands on his shirttail, like a guilty schoolboy, and lies very still.

*

“How goes it in civilization?”

There’s coffee on the stove, but it’s burning. Peter crouches by the ancient radio, twisting the dial by imperceptible degrees. “News bulletin. They’re looking for a Richard Greenleaf.”

His voice is low and terse — Tom’s never heard him like this before.

“What did they say he did?” Tom balances on the bench, trying not to totter over backwards.

“He’s done something to Miss Meredith Logue.”

“Oh Jesus, Peter, you don’t think—”

“Oh no, they’d never put that on the radio. More like accosted, I think. They’re saying he accosted her.”

Tom’s heart is stopping, his blood is running a degree or two cooler, but still the words come to his lips, the sounds and motions of concern. “Is she dead?”

“What a terrible thing to say. She’s alive. She’s alive and she wants to press charges.”

“That just doesn’t sound like Dickie to me — I’ve never seen him lay a finger on Marge. Maybe if she had a date with her, but—”

Peter grows perceptibly frostier as well, or maybe Tom’s only imagining it, an icy streak in his worried poise. “You never really met Meredith, did you? You didn’t know her like I did.”

Red-gilt Meredith Logue, all red and white and yellow. What could Peter have to do with a woman like that?

“I didn’t think you knew her that well either.”

“Are you going to tell Marge?”

“That her fiance nearly beat a woman to death in Rome, then jaunted off to spend Christmas in Cortina? Of course not. Jesus, no.”

“Beaten to death might be an exaggeration. They certainly made it sound as if she’s still up and walking around. And hopping mad.”

That’s what he needs, Meredith Logue and Dickie Greenleaf both being furious with him. Furious at each other, really. Tom schools his face into something pensive. “Well, you know about Silvana.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up, I’m sorry. I’m his friend, I shouldn’t be weighing in on his personal life.”

Peter’s face grows cold and hard. He’s lain a hand on the tabletop, like a schoolteacher turned disciplinarian. “Tom, this is very serious.”

Of course it’s serious. The Italian police won’t be coming all the way out here — if they knew where Dickie Greenleaf was, they surely wouldn’t be broadcasting it on the radio, would they? Peter is looking at him with worried eyes in a hard face. Tom clasps his shoulder for a moment, then lets him go.

“I’m going back to bed.”

Tom lies awake in the upstairs room, and thinks of Dickie.

*

Tom is resolved that the two of them, Peter and Dickie, must never be alone together. Spending time with Dickie when Peter would rather be spending time with Tom — there’s a simple solution, but the three of them at once feels uneven somehow, off-balance. Tom has grown attuned to the balance in these situations, after Mongi, but there’s something about Peter that makes him more difficult to know.

If there’s something Tom can do for Dickie, he does it. If it’s to be the charming younger brother, the tag-along kid, he’ll do it. Dickie certainly talks to him like nothing is the matter. Like Peter is still just his funny English friend, and like Tom is just such a good sport —

The record player is defective somehow. Neither Dickie nor Peter will admit responsibility, and Freddie acquits himself of all blame mostly by being in a drunken stupor half the time and brutally funny the rest of the time. Dickie compensates by playing terrible dirges on the saxophone and singing Christmas songs in shattered Italian.

Tom’s never had any real sentimental associations around Christmas. He’s picked up on other people’s sentimental associations, sure, but it’s a little like picking up after other people’s messes — fragments of memory, Marge saying something about holidays from school or Peter humming a carol as he butters his toast. The general atmosphere of agnosticism enhances the charm rather than undercutting it — they’re just a bunch of children waiting on Santa Claus.

This is how the very, very rich live their lives — waiting on the next pleasant surprise. If Herbert Greenleaf became destitute overnight, there would be no more waiting.

It’s like something out of a story. Tom can hardly bear to get out of bed on Christmas morning — he wants to sustain it, to keep the feeling of snugness and security going an hour longer. If they could remain like this, he could be someone else entirely.

*

A day or two after Christmas, when the snow’s dampened down a little and the road has been carved out again. Dickie’s out on the slopes someplace, making an ass out of himself and having a wonderful time. Entirely solo.

“I hope you girls have been enjoying yourselves.” Freddie leers at him with a pink stripe of sunburn across the bridge of his nose. He smells like brandy. “Marge and I made it into town after all. I didn’t even have to carry her. Now she’s off again, and she’s left me holding the bag.”

“Did you get groceries?”

“Groceries and newspapers. And you won’t believe what I read — Dickie made it all the way to page four.”

“You mean his father did.” Tom casts around with his eyes, looking for Peter to rescue him.

“It certainly sounds like our Dickie. Wanted for questioning. Wanted for a lot of things, probably. He tried to throttle that Logue girl and she’s ready to sue the pants off him once they’re back on American soil. I thought I’d be a sport and not break it to him until we’ve had our trip.”

How could she not be dead? She’d looked dead — dead and beautiful, beautiful and dead with her head at a sick angle and red lipstick smeared across her face like a scar. He hadn’t wanted her then, he’d never wanted her at all but it had been easy to pretend — because Dickie would have, the platonic ideal of Dickie that exists off in a cloud somewhere and not the unpleasant reality. He’d left a red welt on her neck so dark it was practically purple. Like spilled wine.

He’d left her there, and that was the mistake.

“Freddie,” Tom says quietly. “Dickie’s your friend. Do you really think he’d do something like this?”

Freddie spreads out the newspaper on the bare table, stabbing with a thick finger. “But there’s a funny thing here that I didn’t get down at the station. It says, ‘in connection with the events of 18 November, in Rome’. Roma. Which should be patently easy to disprove, even for Italian cops. Dickie wasn’t with her that night in Rome, he was tooling around with me, making an ass of himself. You, on the other hand, were, you little creep. On the loose, like some kind of goddamn animal. They never taught you how to behave at Princeton, did they?”

“Well, coming from you…” Tom’s heart is pounding in his throat. He takes a hesitant step back, then another, feeling for the edge of the wooden countertop. “Coming from you I’d say that’s a compliment.”

“Of course not. Now, Dickie might not be terribly bright, and I say that as his friend, but I am. That’s why I’m running this whole little excursion, and it’s why I know for a fact he never really wanted you here in the first place. You were on the outs with him when you left Mongi, so you went on a spree and let Tom foot the bill. You get another rich blonde piece completely blotto — who, by the way, looks just like Marge, except for two big differences — and you go to town, and when she wakes up in the morning you tell her Dickie did it.”

The record is skipping on the turntable. Tom is suffocating. Freddie Miles is advancing on him with all the righteousness of certainty.

“Dickie, Dickie, Dickie. Not nice-guy Tom Ripley who learned to ski up in the Finger Lakes and wouldn’t know his way around snatch if you showed him with a flashlight. She doesn’t know who’s been slapping her around, Tom or Dick or fucking Dwight D. Eisenhower, so she takes your word on it and goes squalling to the cops. Does that seem like a likelier story? Or maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s some other bastard, I don’t know. Or maybe Dickie Greenleaf has a twin brother with a sick sense of humor. That’s a possibility too, of course.”

Freddie concludes with a flourish, like a demented magician, just as Tom hefts the record player into his head. There’s a terrible sound, but Tom feels nothing at all — less than he’d felt before, only the jolt of contact running up both his arms like an electric jolt.

The newspaper soaks up the worst of it. But scalp wounds bleed heavily, and after the first blow drops him Tom brings the record player down again on his head. Freddie’s fat hand lashes out, grazing Tom’s temple, but it can only be a sort of reflex reaction, a dying throe.

All in all, it is surprisingly quick. He stands for a moment and considers his options.

Tom begins zipping him back up inside his coat — which contains the bleeding, somewhat, remarkable what they can do with synthetics these days — and after a moment’s tactical hesitation, grabs him by the collar and drags.

There’s a rocky gully not far off, emerging from a break between the trees— even carpeted in powder, the broken ground is obvious, nobody would take a stroll down this particular hill unless they were very stupid or very drunk or both. In life, Freddie Miles managed to be both, and Tom manages to haul him through thigh-deep drifts and over the point of no return, more or less with the grace of a sack of bricks.

He isn’t dead, Tom thinks for a horrible delirious moment, I can see his breath, but then Freddie’s body tumbles down, striking rocks. Almost comically, the impact knocks loose another clot of snow from the overhanging trees— half-burying Freddie where he lies, and a second bout hurling his locked suitcase after him sandwiched around the offending record player brings down enough to cover him completely. Not deeply, but adequately.

There’s an intermittent trail of blood back to the cabin from both trips — Tom scuffs it with his feet the best way he can, but its redness is almost comically red against the picture-postcard white. He can feel his face gone scarlet, he’s soaked inside his sweater and heaving with exertion. He can hear voices echoing down the path from the terrace. He can hear…

*

When Dickie comes back in, Tom’s got his socks and sweater drying in front of the fire. His hair is still wet, plastering to his forehead in unpleasant strands, and his teeth are chattering so hard that it must be audible even from the doorway.

“Jesus, you must be freezing. I can see your nipples. Get over here.”

Dickie unzips his coat as he nonchalantly takes the stairs three at a time — how in God’s name he can be so spry after a day on slopes is a real mystery. He returns with one of his own sweaters, and tosses it to Dickie as he rakes a comb through his hair.

“You weren’t out on the slopes, were you?”

“I took a little walk.”

Dickie’s hand pauses against his temple, like Dickie is delivering a look of consideration. Dickie’s consideration is functionally indistinguishable from a state of confusion.

“Where’s Freddie?”

“Out with Marge, I thought.”

“Try this on. Marge bought it for me, and I hate it.” Dickie compels him into the cable-knit sweater — he stinks of sweat and his hands rake Tom’s chest through his shirt, though Tom is stifling a laugh. “I’m not mad, you know, about all of that stuff. You’re not a mooch. You’re more like a growth. A appendage. What’s mine is yours.”

He’s daring Tom to say something, to make a claim on something that isn’t a pair of shoes or a bottle of aftershave or a share in an icebox. He’s issuing Tom a challenge. Is this about Marge? It can’t be — gorgeous, sunburned, pointless Marge who’s never cared about a thing in the world besides Dickie. La fidanzata. The fiancée has competition.

Tom’s throat is beginning to close up. If he doesn’t speak, he’ll choke. He levels his eyes on Dickie’s and projects a soft gaze of assurance. “I’m going to pay my own way from here.” He doesn’t know how he’ll do it, but he’ll do it. Tom already has a couple ideas. “I won’t be such a nuisance.”

He’s thinking whenever Dickie touches him, whenever his hand grazes Tom’s back or his knee jostles him under the table, that it could happen again.

*

Marge tugs off her hat, dislodging her braided hair. There’s a single paper bag of groceries standing forlorn by the stove — the very edge of the brown paper is dipped in blood.

“Freddie wasn’t with me. I haven’t seen him since getting back from town.”

“That pig. He must have seen the opportunity to take off and took it.”

“Couldn’t he be at one of the other cabins? Maybe he met somebody he knew,” Tom says. Voice of reason.

“And came back and got his suitcase? Christ, he even took his record player.” Dickie casts around for anything else that might be missing. Sometimes he can be so dense — beautiful and brutal and desperately stupid.

“He left his skis behind,” Marge says softly. “Tom, may I talk to you?”

*

This is the bedroom where Marge and her fiance sleep. This is the bedroom where Marge and her fiance scream at each other.

Marge stands a few paces away, at the foot of one bed. Tom’s back is against the door.

“You know what Freddie’s like. He’s been sniffing around ever since Mongi and the other day when we were playing cards he made a sort of pass at me. I didn’t take it seriously, Dickie was right there fixing us drinks and it seemed more like a joke — about this whole situation, really, being snowed in. When we were walking to town he brought it up again, and I told him that Dickie and I were getting engaged. I think it hurt him.”

“Oh, Marge—”

Marge huddles forward, flushed-faced, and Tom braces her shoulders with his hands.

“Men and their pride, you know — you know what Dickie’s like, and under the bravado Freddie’s a hundred times worse, a thousand. I know he’s Dickie’s best friend but I can’t stand him, and even if I weren’t with Dickie.”

Tom chafes her upper arms in a way that seems to be reassuring yet nonsexual. “It’s not your fault, Marge, he’s a pig. If he planned this whole thing to get to you, then he’s an even bigger pig than I thought he was.”

“You can’t tell Dickie what I told you now. If he figures it out on his own, that’s all right, but if he hears I drove Freddie off he’ll be so angry with me. And don’t go telling Peter, either.”

“No one’s telling anyone anything.”

“Oh Tom, what if he has us thrown out? We won’t be able to find another rental on such short notice, I couldn’t stand it—”

“I’ll tell you what, Marge. I’ll go into town as soon as I can. I’ll see what I can do.”

Where would Freddie Miles go? Where would you put Freddie Miles if you wanted to be rid of him, apart from at the bottom of a ravine?

*

When the three of them are lying next to each other by the fire, cozy as lice, Dickie asks him in a loverish kind of voice: “What did the two of you talk about, hmm?” His hands bracket Marge’s waist with unmistakable possessiveness.

Marge touches his cheek with the backs of her unpainted fingernails. “It’s nothing. It’s a surprise.”

“Didn’t sound like a surprise.”

Merry fucking Christmas.

*

Peter traces a comma of hair away from Tom’s forehead, and makes a concerned sound. He’s backing him up into the hot stove and he doesn’t even realize it.

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’s just a scrape —"

“I know, I can see that.” He thumbs at his brow, making the split scab prickle. “Someone really clocked you.”

“I’m all right, really.”

“Tom, did somebody hit you?”

Tom gives up, and smiles at him rather helplessly. “I ran into a branch.”

Peter isn’t charmed by his helplessness, not even a little. The concern is flattering; the attention is frightening. His voice drops into that register Tom has come to hate so much in the past two weeks, the sotto voce zone of enforced secrecy. “Did Dickie hit you?”

“It wasn’t — what, you don’t think I could take down Dickie in a fight?”

Peter laughs as intended, puncturing the horrible tissue of tension, but his thumb still worries the bruised spot on Tom’s forehead. He hadn’t even looked at it after washing away the blood — the water from the bath faucet is fearfully hot. The bruise must have had its chance to bloom.

“I’d find that rather surprising, yes. You don’t strike me as the pugnacious type.”

“Are you ever surprised by what you’re capable of?”

“Not very often. I know very well what I’m capable of.”

Peter’s expression is a little enigmatic. Tom looks away.

*

“It’s a much more hospitable place since Freddie took off. You can take his bed now if you want, Tom, make yourself a king-size mattress. Make yourself a fort. Did you ever do that when you were a kid?”

“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea, Dickie.” Marge hangs around close to him now, half-doting and half-worried. “It’d be warmer, anyway.”

“No, I never did,” Tom says. “I’m all right sharing with Peter, if it’s all the same to the two of you.”

“We need to keep warm for now. All the food Freddie brought back was junk. It’s like he thought we were hosting a dinner party, and he didn’t bring any more firewood like he said he did. He must have known he wasn’t sticking around. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do for food—”

“I’ll go to town in the morning, all right?” Dickie says. “Road or no road. How does that sound?”

“I thought we’d already agreed no one else was going anywhere.” Tom folds a cuff into the sleeve of his sweater.

“I’m starting to like it, I think. Sort of a Donner Party feeling. Peter, you know about the Donner Party, don’t you? It’s an American institution. We love eating each other alive.”

Marge slams down a tinned ham. “Would you stop? Why is all this a joke to you?”

Dickie shows all his teeth at once, in a horrible grin like an ape. “Who’s joking?”

“Then we’ll both go to town,” Tom says firmly. “We’ll lash on some snowshoes or something.”

*

The wind’s settled down to nothing. He can hear every treacherous raw edge in Dickie’s voice over the crunch of wet snow.

“Marge has you running her errands now. Putting in a good word for us at the front office. Has it ever occurred to you, Tom, that some things are between a man and his wife?”

“She’s not your wife. You don’t even want to marry her.”

“Where do you get off telling me what I do and don’t want?”

“The other night, was that something you and Marge do a lot? In pairs, or just solo?”

“I was drunk, you were there. Christ, didn’t you ever go to school? You shouldn’t take everything so goddamn personally.”

“Why can’t you just admit that you were glad to see me?”

“I was surprised. I was surprised you made it out here, surprised you didn’t just pack up and go back to New York. Go whining to my father.”

Anyone could overhear them, out here. They’re far from the tourist areas, but there’s an echo in the pass, and no other sound but the slicing of their tracks—

“This isn’t about your father, Dickie. I know — I know it started out that way, but I don’t give a damn about him now, or about the money. You’ve taught me so much. About Italy, and jazz, and Bird, and I don’t care how it started. I’ll come back in the New Year on my own dime, I swear. I just want to be near you.”

“Holy shit, Tom. You know what you sound like right now? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it. You sound just like Peter. Have you been talking about me with him?”

 

And it’s all clear, like a thunderclap — Peter with Dickie, Dickie with Peter. Dickie the renegade, the rogue. He wants to play the saxophone, he wants to play the drums. How big-hearted of Peter to be so accommodating and to foot the bill, but after all, he’d been there himself, he’d know the feeling.

Tom pauses in his tracks, mild as anything.

“Dickie, are you sure we’re headed the right way?”

The trees all look the same. The mountains are all the same, in every direction, all steep and washed in pink. One alpine pass looks much the same as any other.

“It’s sick of him to bring you here, Tom. It’s really pretty sick. I’m going to get married.”

“Just stop for a second, all right? Are we on the right trail, or not?” His ski poles are itching against his palms. Steel, with a spike at the end of it.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? All of it’s covered in snow—”

“Dickie, you told Marge where we were going, didn’t you?”

“Why would I tell her that? Why would I tell her anything? Tom, when we get back I’m going to need you to leave. I don’t appreciate your coming here, and I don’t want you hanging around any more. Do you think you can do that?” His voice is hysterical, he sounds insane, unreasonable — Dickie’s in hysterics but Tom is very very calm, there in the cold, and still in his tracks.

Tom would like to draw the veil there.

*

Tom comes back alone, and takes a long bath, as hot as it can go. He holds his head to the surface of the water and lets the blood boil away from his hair, from his mouth.

*

He sits shivering in his towel while Peter fumbles to pull an undershirt on him before Marge can see his naked chest — what a delightful act of helplessness, simply to be touched.

Peter makes an alarmed sound. “Oh, Tom, your hands—”

“He went off without me. I tried to talk to him, but it was like he couldn’t even hear me—”

“Tom, please, your hands are bleeding. You must have lost your gloves.”

“—maybe he couldn’t hear me, you have no idea how bad it is out there. It’s not safe—”

Peter catches his hand in a warm grip, chafing circles onto his palm, gingerly avoiding his split knuckles. Soft and clean and warm as life. Tom kisses him, desperately, fatally.

*

That night, it’s not Peter the pale-handed pianist but Peter the stark shadow of Dickie, shot through with his own kind of wicked intentions —

“Be very, very quiet. If you can.”

He holds him back against the bed, and all the boyishness seems to fall away — there’s a fearful strength in him even if the twist of his mouth makes it seem like play, like Peter’s own kind of game. Tom holds up his wrists behind his head, in a silent: teach me. End him, unmake him, make it like he was never there at all.

Peter tugs open his shirt with a few hard yanks, stripping him down and groping roughly between his legs. It doesn’t feel cheap like this. It feels very expensive. Tom flashes with self-consciousness and turns his face away — Peter buries his face against his throat and breathes for a moment, deliberating, before he bites.

This is a funny kind of comfort for both of them. Peter wouldn’t be doing any of this if he knew the first thing about him — or maybe he would, maybe he’s been with all kinds of men and has cultivated an interest in violence. Peter thrusts his palm out at a level with Tom’s face. “Now spit, please,” he says amiably. Tom does. He slips in two fingers and Tom makes a choking, breathless sound — Peter tells him what he’s going to do to him, and why.

Where did he go to school? Where do they teach you to talk like that? Tom’s reflexive broken imitation is smothered in his throat, smothered by Peter’s good-natured hand — their bodies come together sharp and twisting, Tom tightens his legs against Peter as if it hurts but it doesn’t really, it’s really a very pleasant pain considering.

The raw slide of him finds an easy pitch for entry — Peter’s breathing grows so rough it interrupts even his whispered commands, just so, like that, right here. Don’t speak.

Tom’s cock is beading up with uneasy wetness but the tight sensation of a climax is only building, building, building. He can cease being himself here, he can merely be Peter’s object, merely a thing — his wrists ache. The scabs on his knuckles have split from twisting his hands into fists.

Tom doesn’t know what on earth to do with his legs, where to put his feet in a bed this size, but fortunately Peter finds it amusing. He might be screwing him like a cheap pickup, but the press of his hand on Tom’s throat is strangely comforting, tender and not murderous.

Peter holds him in his arms afterward, tranquil and warm and substantial — not slack but deliberate. His whole body has a sober attitude of responsibility to it — like a gentleman. It’s really kind of horrible. Tom tries not to think of Dickie now, out there in the cold. He’ll think about anything than that. Anything, really anything, anything at all but Dickie anonymized in death with frost crystals in the corners of his eyes.

Breathlessly Tom says, “I want you to take me with you. I don’t care where. I’ll go wherever you go.”

Peter laughs and kisses him, hovers over his mouth and says: “Yes, yes, yes.”

*

In the morning they’re a dreary crew — cast adrift in a cloud of skis and duffel bags, assorted detritus of hasty departures looking even bleaker in the graying light. Peter’s still asleep. Tom listlessly fries up the last of the eggs.

The edges are beginning to blacken. He is caught in a vortex of things he hasn’t even done yet, things he’ll need to do as soon as they’re far away from here, things he needs to do before Peter’s dressed and out of bed – a thousand things. This far in the mountains he’d better hope the snow never melts all year round, that there aren’t policemen with dogs, that there isn’t any trouble with their bill.

“Looks like it’s time to abandon ship. Tom, can you put the coffee on?”

She’s there in the doorway. Marge’s coat is tossed over her shoulder, and her boots are on her feet. What on earth did she hear last night? What?

Tom drops the skillet and draws Marge in close, cupping her small sharp elbows in his hands. His heart is thrashing in his chest like a caged bird, with violence. “God, I’m so sorry. I should have stopped him, Marge. I should have stopped him. You have every right to be angry with me.”

Marge pulls away, flustered. She’s been crying, but not from grief — the sharp kind of tears that come from being embarrassed and let down flat.

“Don’t worry about it, Tom, it’s hopeless at this point — I don’t know why I ever thought he’d change. I love him, but I can’t be with him. And he can’t be with me. How can we be married if we can’t make it two weeks?”

“None of this was your fault. Really, I had a wonderful time here with you. I almost wish — it had just been us.”

Just Tom, Marge, and Peter, the best of pals. Dickie Greenleaf’s cast-offs. Or just Dickie, Marge, and Tom, a single golden band, forever.

Marge laughs wetly and scuffs a sleeve across her face. “I would have liked that too, Tom.”

“I’ll take Dickie’s things. I’ll have them shipped back to the place in Mongi.”

“Don’t bother. You might as well keep them.”

“Marge, that’s really not necessary. Whatever you want to do, I mean, it’s all right.”

“I don’t mean that to be nasty, I only mean — I need a little room right now. If the boys have abandoned us, I’m packing up my things and going to Rome. I’ll pay Meredith Logue a visit on her sickbed — it had better be her deathbed, ditching me like this. The only girl in a barracks full of men. No offense, Tom, it’s just — difficult sometimes.”

“I understand.”

Marge smiles, a faint mysterious smile on pink Vaselined lips. “I’ll kiss her for you. She’s a marvelous kisser.”

So this is his break from Marge too — he’d better get moving with Peter, and stay moving. He wants to say something — to wish her every happiness, to tell her to get the hell out of Italy and never come back. To leave all this behind and turn to a fresh page, open up a blank book.

Tom stands there for a long while, watching Marge measure out ground coffee and thaw out the sputtering tap. Peter pads over and puts an arm around him from behind, and Tom doesn’t stiffen. They’ll have to throw out the old wine bottles, and burn the rubbish.

This will be their new year.