beneath the golden hill

In Greece, looking at Peter’s sleeping head — Tom wants so dearly to slip loose the seams of Peter’s skin and step inside it, to inhabit him, to take whatever it is that lets him wear himself so easily and put it on. Nothing about him is uncertain, nothing unstable. The sweet furrow of his upper lip, the pillow-lines furrowing his cheek — the bloody cast of the light shining through the bedclothes. Peter always travels with red cotton pajamas, two pairs — one of them now belongs to Tom, in a voluntary act of sharing that Tom cannot account for. You’ll have to put your own initials on it, Peter had said, laying two fingers against Tom’s breast, right here. Tom sits up at night, wearing Peter’s clothes.

“Peter,” he says, “are you awake?”

“Well, I am now. What’s the matter?”

Tom draws back against the plastered wall. “I’ve done something.”

“Oh, Tom.”

“Something you won’t like me for.”

Peter flops over on the bed — in their bed. “Tom, I don’t understand. I was fast asleep. Is something wrong?”

“I’ve never told anyone, and when I tell you, you have to promise me — promise me, Peter, that you won’t do anything foolish. Promise me.”

“I can’t promise you anything if I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What would you do if I told you something unspeakable had happened, and I had done it?”

“I’d tell you there’s no such thing.” Peter sits up, pushing up his cuffs and pressing back the hair from his forehead. He looks no less sweet like this, but will need to be managed.

Tom Ripley’s throat is utterly dry, his voice is false as a phonograph record, and he must say it. “Dickie’s dead. I know he’s dead because I killed him.”

“Don’t be absurd— Tom, Dickie Greenleaf is almost certainly dead, but you can leave it at that.” Peter’s sleepy crossness has fallen away, replaced by urgency. “Don’t lay the blame on yourself. Leave it be.”

“I can’t, I can’t leave it at that. In Italy we fought, we were disagreeing about something or other. I thought he thought I was moving in on Marge, that I knew too much about the two of them, but then he starts talking about me and him— about how I felt about him. Drawing that into question. I mean, I was blindsided.”

This is not the complete truth, the utter truth, but it is the truth as he felt it — or the truth that he feels without conscious feeling that gentle, witty, loving Peter will be able to stomach. There are doors behind doors, and locks that will not open to only a single key.

“You haven’t told anyone else.” Simply a bald fact. Peter knows that Tom would rather die than tell anyone else, would rather kill. Peter knows that Tom would rather die. Peter knows that Tom would rather kill.

The tears are standing in his eyes, queer fraudulent tears that he nevertheless cannot keep from flowing, cannot blink back.

“I never wanted it to be like this. I only wanted him to stop talking to me that way. He was saying the most terrible things, Peter, you can’t even imagine—”

“I can imagine,” Peter says quietly. He, too, has secrets behind locked doors, bloody ones locked up tight with black iron keys. He does not ask if Tom Ripley has killed Freddie Miles. He does not need to ask. They’ve spent long enough in one another’s company that Peter knows, or he believes he knows. Tom doesn’t know which is worse.

Tom shakes his head uselessly, feeling something like guilt at the sight of Peter’s broken face. He has broken him, all at once.

“It doesn’t make it easier.” Not true — Dickie being dead has made some things a great deal easier indeed, but most things are immeasurably more complicated. “I wish I could undo it all. God, I wish I could take it all back.”

Tom wipes his eyes of their bogus tears, but his shame and astonishment are genuine, the underlying paroxysm of guilt is too real to escape. He has made a hideous mistake. He will have to finish this, just as he began it. There must be something — a lamp, a clock, an electrical cord. He must take it in both hands, and end this farce of a confession where it stands.

Peter takes both his hands and kisses his mouth.

“Well. And here I rather thought you were a spy or something.”

Tom laughs the ghost of a laugh. “Something.”

Peter’s face is very serious, but it is radiant with love, lit up with universal adoration. “What do you need me to do?”

*

Say it in Italian, say it in English, say it in every tense. Say it in Latin, say it in Greek, say it in French and in Arabic. Peter loves men. Peter has loved men before Tom. Peter loved Dickie, a long time ago, but that is finished. Peter might love Tom, after this.

They go places where Dickie Greenleaf has never been, places the Logues and Sherwoods never go except on vacations. Peter finds a place for them; he coaxes an offer of employment from some man he knows from school, another Englishman in Beirut, or perhaps his father knew him, and perhaps coaxes is the wrong word. People seem to give Peter things with remarkably little negotiation — a job, a guided tour, an apartment on the very edge of some quarter or other that comes pre-furnished with songbirds and indolent cats.

Peter’s work involves a great deal of typing and hanging about in hotel bars talking about economics — Tom takes dictation from him in his underwear, on a portable typewriter, and they have a remarkable amount of sex surrounded by sheaves of half-written dispatches. Tom’s work is a sinecure of significantly less glamour — he is given a little office for a publishing house so small that few have heard of it, and plenty of time to practice writing signatures that are not his own, plenty of time to engineer small swindles. He will never be mistaken for anything but an American here, and that will hobble him in some contexts, but to his fellow Americans, he’s as familiar and comforting as hamburgers and applesauce and that will serve him well in others.

Peter makes supper; Tom goes shopping. He brings Peter home a piano one night, as payment for his discretion. Peter plunks out a tune happily, as the men paid to carry it up the narrow stairs watch the pair of them with knowing, disinterested eyes. It will never make up for giving up performance, but he did that for Tom too, without a whimper. There must be call for classical conductors in Lebanon.

Here in this city of spies and reporters, there are many job openings waiting to be filled — facilitated by aloof homosexuals and wealthy Englishwomen trailing after delinquent husbands and everywhere impenetrable political wrangling. There’s much call for the work Tom can do, if he can only get his bureaucrat’s handwriting just right. And there are lots of other people with secrets — dark, hazardous secrets in a city of genteel neglect.

After dinner with some ambassador, they have sex on the bedroom floor. Peter praises his mouth, tracing the shape of his lips as they come together. In sex Tom is mutable, a mirror; he gives and takes, he reflects what is there and what isn’t. With Peter, he never has to counterfeit passion, and that makes it easier.

Lying in his arms, Tom senses an opening — he feels Peter’s quiet, his pleasant loving laxness, and must act.

“You remember what I said at the hotel in Athens.”

“Yes, of course. I meant what I said, too.” Peter’s amorousness has a tinge of concern to it; he strokes Tom’s hair back behind his ear and kisses his freckled shoulder. Peter had offered him absolute acceptance, just as Tom is, and had meant it — the greatest marvel of all.

“Will you help me with something?”

“What sort of something?”

“Something exciting. Something fun. I think you’ll be good at it.”

“These days one needs a little fun,” Peter says mock-stodgily. “Count me in.”

Peter will help him because Peter loves him. That is its own secret bliss — Peter will do anything for him, he’ll pass phony checks or deposit fraudulent wire transfers or help wash away the blood from a wooden slatted floor like the one on which they now lie.