A Tom Ripley For Our Times

Nearly seven decades later, we’ve got the first version that’s faithful, in spirit and plot, to Patricia Highsmith’s first Ripley novel—and we’re in a special position, decades later, to “get” him.

“Really, I don't mind too much if they take liberties with my plots, because they're trying to do something quite different from a book, and I think they have a right to change the story as much as they wish. I couldn't write a book with the idea in my mind that it was going to be a film. That would be like thinking of a statue when you're painting a picture."

Patricia Highsmith didn’t care how inventive filmmakers were with her novels, and neither did Rene Clemente or Anthony Minghella, who each did a version of the first of her five Ripley novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Clemente’s 1960 Purple Noon, the only Ripley movie Highsmith lived to see, is very French “New Wave.” Starring the astonishingly pretty, young Alain Delon— who nowadays would more likely be cast as Dickie Greenleaf—much of the dialogue and action is improvised (the script being viewed as a skeleton to be filled out with the auteur’s vision¹) and both Ripley and Dickie exist in an existentialist playground, pretty much doing anything they please (conning a blind man to sell them his cane, then groping a drunk young women who they eventually shove off their carriage and into the street) taking pleasure in the “all is permitted—just choose!” of their freedom. Except for Dickie’s wealth and macho confidence, there’s not that much “moral” difference between the two. (Dickie does draw the line at working with a low-life gangster; he thinks nothing, though, of throwing Marge’s book manuscript overboard, which I found more shocking.)

Ripley’s homoerotic attraction to Dickie isn’t just lurking underground (as it is in the novel); it just isn’t. Like most films of the period, Purple Noon revels in heterosexual liberation and normalizes male sexism as it pursues that liberation. (Even when Tom, dressed in Dickie’s clothing, kisses himself in the mirror, he whispers “Marge, oh Marge…”)

Ooh-la-la. Alan Delon, as a very pretty Ripley

Highsmith was ok with all of that. She only objected—strongly and sneeringly—to the fact that Clemente couldn’t keep up the middle-finger to conventional morality at the ending, which leaves Ripley at the precipice of paying for his sins. Clemente had fantasized a more ambiguous ending, but ultimately decided viewers wouldn’t understand it: “No, no, there’s no way around it; you cannot transgress…. Somehow it reassures people. It is immanent justice.” Highsmith felt felt otherwise about unpunished transgression: “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial,” she wrote, “for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.” She found the ending of Purple Noon a “terrible concession to so-called public morality.”

Anthony Minghella’s version (The Talented Mr. Ripley,) made at a time when film-makers were coming out of the “celluloid closet,²” not only made Tom’s (Matt Damon) homoerotic attraction to Dickie (Jude Law) explicit, but signified Tom’s sexual orientation is numerous ways (including a flirty, ostentatiously “gay” dance in Dickie’s tuxedo and top hat) and turned Peter Smith-Kingsley, a character only passingly mentioned in the novel, into a tender lover who gives Tom the care and attention that Dickie could not. But when it came to the ultimate transgression—murder—Minghella, like Clemente, did not have Highsmith’s narrative nerve. “There’s so much nihilism in film right now,” he said. “If I’m going to tell a story that’s so bleak and so much a journey of a soul, if in the end Ripley was just going to go about his business, what’s the journey?” Tom, who unlike Delon’s Ripley has not had a moment of existential jouissance in his entire life, finds true love. But then, trapped yet again and on the brink of exposure, he sobbingly commits another murder that there will surely be no escape from. (Watching the film again after several years, it struck me: How on earth can he possibly get away with this one? How would Minghella write the next act?) The talented Ripley of the novel would surely have anticipated the impossibility of hiding the murder, and figure out another way to evade Meredith (another character that doesn’t exist in the novel, brilliantly played by Kate Blanchett.)

Both Clemente and Minghella were concerned with having viewers sympathize with Tom Ripley, despite his serial murders. Clemente’s strategy was to emphasize his humiliation:

“You don’t make films with despicable people—that doesn’t work. People want to relate, they want to identify. I’m stating the obvious. So how will I make Ripley likable? By humiliating him. At the beginning of the film, Ripley is nothing. Freddy doesn’t even look at him; he calls him “chum,” which is openly disdainful. O’Brien acts high and mighty around him. Riccordi can’t remember his name. He is treated feudally, which puts everyone on his side. Many viewers even think it’s too bad he gets caught at the end. After everything he did!”

While Clemente’s Ripley is stung by the dismissive way people treat him, Minghella’s Ripley has an endless tolerance for being pushed around, so long as he isn’t abandoned. That’s how Minghelli makes him “likeable”—by portraying him as an incurably hopeful puppy-dog who will take anything Dickie has to dish out, no matter how hurtful, so long as he isn’t left on the side of the curb. Unlike Delon who was so glamorous in his youth, Matt Damon had no sex appeal at this stage—(his face wanted some filling out, and most likely some expert surgery)—especially alongside the dazzling Jude Law. And then, too, there’s the fact that he loves Dickie—isn’t just envious of his wealth and position—and who can’t identify with the pain and desperation of unrequited love?

Minghella even warmed up his blood as a murderer. Not only is the killing of Dickie a crime of passion, but—watch the scene again, it may be different than you remember it—Dickie is actually the one who turns it physical, and it’s less a murder than a fight that gets horrendously out-of-control. After the first blow with the oar, Tom is horrified at what he’s done. “Oh God…Dickie…We’ve got to get you…” But his next words (“some help”? “To a hospital”?) never get said, as Dickies lunges at and tries to choke Tom. And then, well you can watch it yourself:

After killing “Philippe” (the name given to Dickie in Purple Noon), Delon grabs a peach and tears into it, gulping down a mouthful; Minghella’s Tom lays down with the blood-soaked body, cuddling, finally allowed to be as close as he’s desired. The existential thrill of transgressive “choice” in one. Guilt, sorrow, and still-clinging love in the other.

The Ripley of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel doesn’t respond in either of these ways. The murder, to begin with, is already imagined by him on the train to San Remo:

“He wanted to kill Dickie. It was not the first time he had thought of it. Before, once or twice or three times, it had been an impulse caused by anger or disappointment, an impulse that vanished immediately and left him with a feeling of shame. Now he thought about it for an entire minute, two minutes, because he was leaving Dickie anyway, and what was there to be ashamed of anymore? He had failed with Dickie, in every way. He hated Dickie, because, however he looked at what had happened, his failing had not been his own fault, not due to anything he had done, but due to Dickie’s inhuman stubbornness. And his blatant rudeness! He had offered Dickie friendship, companionship, and respect, everything he had to offer, and Dickie had replied with ingratitude and now hostility. Dickie was just shoving him out in the cold. If he killed him on this trip, Tom thought, he could simply say that some accident had happened. He could—He had just thought of something brilliant: he could become Dickie Greenleaf himself. He could do everything that Dickie did. He could go back to Mongibello first and collect Dickie’s things, tell Marge any damned story, set up an apartment in Rome or Paris, receive Dickie’s check every month and forge Dickie’s signature on it. He could step right into Dickie’s shoes. He could have Mr. Greenleaf, Sr., eating out of his hand. The danger of it, even the inevitable temporariness of it which he vaguely realized, only made him more enthusiastic. He began to think of how.”

We then get several pages of Tom’s imagining how he could carry on as Dickie. As for the murder itself, there’s no fight or immediate provocation. Taking advantage of Dickie’s preparations for a swim, Tom “picked up the oar, as casually as if he were playing with it between his knees, and when Dickie was shoving his trousers down, Tom lifted the oar and came down with it on the top of Dickie’s head,” then struck repeatedly, with the oar and then a knife, until “the prostrate body relaxed, limp and still.” Then, he “straightened, getting his breath back painfully. He looked around him.”

“There were no boats, nothing, except far, far away a little white spot creeping from right to left, a speeding motorboat heading for the shore. He stopped and yanked at Dickie’s green ring. He pocketed it. The other ring was tighter, but it came off, over the bleeding scuffed knuckle. He looked in the trousers pockets. French and Italian coins. He left them. He took a keychain with three keys. Then he picked up Dickie’s jacket and took Marge’s cologne package out of the pocket. Cigarettes and Dickie’s silver lighter, a pencil stub, the alligator wallet and several little cards in the inside breast pocket. Tom stuffed it all into his own corduroy jacket.”

What follows are pages and pages of details (which I’ve condensed—believe it or not, extensively—in a long footnote) describing the various obstacles that arise in disposing of the body and Tom’s endurance and ingenuity in dealing with them.³ These granular details—exhausting for the reader as well as Tom—are important. They show how the obdurate “thingness” of the material world is always surprising and interfering with human desire, imagination, and effort. Many story-tellers glide over this, afraid to lose their readers (or in the case of movies, their viewers) in bogging down the “main” action. But Highsmith isn’t afraid of losing the affection of readers if it means “softening” her characters in the interests of conventions of morality or narrative, and she was used to people finding both her and her work “unpleasant.” The passages show Tom’s extraordinary talent at maneuvering his way out of everything. And they demonstrate that for Ripley people are mostly just things. If they get in your way, you remove them. And when they are removed, their dead bodies are as sacred (which is to say, not at all) as discarded appliances. Having finally dispatched Dickie’s, Tom is back to coldly strategizing: “He began to plan his return to the hotel, and his story, and his next moves: leaving San Remo before nightfall, getting back to Mongibello. And the story there.”

Looking over reviews, both of the book and the two movies, it’s surprising how often Ripley is described as a “charming” psychopath. A small sampling of an amazingly typical tendency: “unsettlingly likable”; “charming criminal”; “both a likable character and a cold-blooded killer”; “a dapper sociopath,” and “agreeable and urbane psychopath”; “charming and literate, and a monster.” “Highsmith’s most alluring sociopath” Sam Jordison wrote in The Guardian, that “It is near impossible, I would say, not to root for Tom Ripley. Not to like him. Not, on some level, to want him to win.” He enumerates the reasons why:

It’s a classic story of someone who starts off down on his luck and disregarded, but who, through force of personality, hard work and sheer determination, manages to make something of himself. He’s had a hard upbringing. He lost his parents and was brought up by an aunt who called him a “sissy”. And yet, he came out the other end polite, self-effacing, hard working. He is endearingly shy in company and worried about the impression he makes on others. He is always assessing himself, always trying to improve.

He is also endearingly starry-eyed…and he never loses [a] charmingly naive appreciation of good fortune and high society.

That’s not to say, however, that he is a sucker. Part of his charm lies in the fact that he is so clever and able to outwit all around him. He can do wonderful imitations. He escapes from horrible scrapes with flair and elan. He has a brave taste for adventure, for putting himself in difficult situations and foreign landscapes. Oh, and he is a very good tipper.

The review presents itself as being about the novel, and includes quotes from the novel. But it was published in 2015, accompanied by a still photo from Minghella’s 1999 film, of Matt Damon, looking very “starry-eyed.”

Matt Damon, as a wistful, puppy-dog of a Ripley.

I wonder whether the “lovable,” “likable” part that keeps coming up in descriptions of Ripley isn’t heavily influenced by the overlay of a movie that tries very hard to make him likable. I just re-read the novel in preparation for writing this, and found nothing “charming” about the character at all. Yes, he can be amusing—when he wants to ingratiate himself with someone who can provide benefit to him. More often, he’s irritated by people (like Humbert Humbert, he’s especially disgusted by heavy-bottomed women, which Marge is in the book, but—of course—not in any of the films.) Yes, he is very, very clever, but I wouldn’t use the words “flair” or “elan” to describe his talents as an escape artist. He simply does what he perceives as necessary, and often it involves dealing with a dead body in ways that are graceless and bumbling. There’s nothing “starry-eyed” about him; he’s ruthlessly pragmatic and opportunistic. He’s not “endearingly shy” so much as emotionally detached. And yes, he’s always “assessing himself”—but not in order “to improve,” in order to perfect his various “performances.” Here he is, on the ship en route to Italy:

“He began to play a role on the ship, that of a serious young man with a serious job ahead of him. He was courteous, poised, civilized, and preoccupied. He had a sudden whim for a cap and bought one in the haberdashery, a conservative bluish-gray cap of soft English wool. He could pull its visor down over nearly his whole face when he wanted to nap in his deck chair, or wanted to look as if he were napping. A cap was the most versatile of headgears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world’s dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist’s face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.”

Maybe the “lovable psychopath” is an appealing archetype that’s simply stamped on the brains of readers/viewers, even more so now that Dexter and Killing Eve have entered our cultural repertoire of endearing anti-heroes. It’s also possible that in the four sequels that followed the Talented Mr. Ripley—novels that I haven’t yet read—Ripley develops some of the finesse and “charm” so often mentioned. If John Malkovitch’s Ripley in the movie adaptation of Ripley’s Game is an indication of Tom’s later trajectory, that would make sense, for Malkovitch’s Ripley is tremendously seductive, smooth, sweetly attentive to his wife, and may even have something of a moral compass. But he’s nothing like the Ripley of the first novel.

Highsmith may not have cared about the liberties films took with her novels, and the different incarnations are entertaining and artful movies in their own right. They also are windows onto the different artistic cultures of 1960 and 1999 respectively—one enchanted by anti-bourgeois rebellion, but paradigmatically of a strictly white male, heterosexual variety, the other unwilling to keep homosexual love in the celluloid closet any more. But it’s only with Steven Zaillian’s Ripley and Andrew Scott’s perfect performance that, in my opinion, we finally get Ripley as Patricia Highsmith imagined him (and identified with him: she sometimes signed her letters “Tom/Pat”.) We’re more than ready for him, in this culture of ours in which performance and “optics” count for more than character, compassion, and integrity, in which half of the population and an entire political party has been bamboozled by a highly skilled con-man—who, like Ripley, also manages to maneuver his way out of accountability for every crime he commits.

There are so many ways in which the new series is spectacular I could easily spend a separate stack “reviewing” it. But there are lots of such reviews around, and my interest, in this particular stack, is on Tom Ridley and how Zaillian/Scott have creatively revisioned him, ironically by returning to the original text and virtually enacting it—including the drawn-out, arduous post-murder struggles with the dead bodies. (My husband couldn’t take it, and mid-way through the sequence he went to bed.) Except for a few artsy inventions (e.g. the parallels with Caravaggio, who Tom is mesmerized by), the preponderance of steep stairs (which Dickie and Marge navigate with ease—a symbol of their confident physicality and unconscious privilege—while Tom huffs and puffs), and the continued (mis)representation of Dickie (Johnny Flynn) and Marge (Dakota Fanning) as lovers (in the novel, the relationship is more complicated), most of what happens comes straight from the book, and very little has been left out. It’s a luxury an eight-episode series has that a 90-minute film doesn’t have. But the courage of Andrew Scott’s performance, in which he deliberately resisted the influence of earlier versions or the critics’ assessments of them, was the crucial ingredient. “You don’t play the opinions, the previous attitudes that people might have about Tom Ripley,” he told Vanity Fair. “You have to throw all those out, try not to listen to them, and go, Okay, well, I have to have the courage to create our own vision and my own understanding of the character.”

Courage was required because the Tom Ridley of the novel is not a colorful, fascinatingly evil killer—like Hannibal Lector, say—but a vacant, uncertain, inexpressive black hole of a person who psyches out and performs whatever qualities are required by the situations he finds himself in. Unlike the famously ghoulish serial killers who eat the body-parts of their victims to possess them, Tom only feels “full” when he swallows the “not-him” that he desires, not by physically digesting him but by embodying him. Most of the time he’s glum and vaguely annoyed with himself and other people. His moments of pure pleasure only come in the novel after he has “become” Dickie, and can enjoy, not only the material delights of wealth, but the social status it brings. Only then is he able to “put his head down and almost at once fell asleep, happy, content, and utterly, utterly confident, as he had never been before in his life.”

As Dickie, Tom smiles at the concierges at the hotels and they, as is their habit with the presumed monied, smile back and offer to serve him in any way. Of course, as soon as Tom’s back is turned, their mask of subservience falls off, just as Tom’s does when his own performance is failing. And because he is continually facing the threat of the increasingly elaborate web he’s woven coming apart, that’s pretty often. He’s thus not a very vivacious character to play. And remarkably—this is “hot” Andrew Scott, after all, and the cinematographer had some work to do—he isn’t even physically very appealing. (In the book, he describes himself as merely “ordinary.”) Of course, he becomes far more attractive when he takes on Dickie’s casual stride, effortlessly stylish clothing, and rakish hat. The transformation is subtle, but definite.

Not so “charming.” Andrew Scott’s Ripley.

Some reviewers have been put off by the “new” Ripley. One wrote Scott’s performance off as “bland and uncharming.” Another: “Previous projects have presented a more inviting experience in which the audience becomes enamored of Tom’s treacherous designs. Here, over eight tepid episodes, he never undergoes any fundamental transformation. From the beginning, he is just a grating grifter who lacks finesse.” That’s the risk Scott took in playing Highsmith’s Ripley (as opposed to the mythology of the charming psychopath.) Highsmith’s Ripley is not “charming.” That requires some ease of being, and Tom is trapped in the stiff cage of his uneasy consciousness. He’s empty rather than evil—which gives more sense to his hunger to be filled by Dickie and Marge as personalities and social beings than chunks of flesh served up with a good Chianti. And it resists categorization in any standard psychiatric diagnoses, an ultimate undecipherability that Scott deliberately went for: “The big challenge of it,” he’s said, “was that there’s a kind of unknowableness to the character that I think you have to acknowledge. Once you acknowledge that, you’re not trying to diagnose him with anything that might actually reduce the very thing that we’re interested in.”

It’s an amazingly restrained performance. He walks and talks like an actual human being and also does a lot of awful things but without much change of expression. Sometimes he smirks a bit, when he’s getting even or exercising power over someone he resents or has humiliated him. Sometimes he gets transfixed (e.g. looking at the Caravaggio of David and Goliath or watching a sinuous, seductive singer in a bar) but it’s only his eyes that register his transport—eyes that most of the time are glazed, staring, creepily photographed reflecting a dead, white center of nothingness. No window onto the soul. He only becomes fully expressive when he’s angry—as, for example, when being baited by the detective Ravini (Mauricio Lombardi). His resting face is worried, his mouth drawn. Most of the time he acts out of necessity rather than feeling; he even embraces Freddie’s dead body and kisses his lips when a passerby sees him with his arm around Freddie. It’s a dead and bloody body—and Tom isn’t a necrophiliac. It made me squirm. But Tom is used to do what he has to do to survive.

Tom’s great “talent” is not the ability to ensnare and deceive people with charm (he doesn’t often succeed at that, and frequently rouses suspicion—in Marge and Freddie, for example, not to mention the ever-watchful cat at his Rome apartment building) but (as the Malkovich Ripley describes himself) as a “gifted improviser” who is always able to maneuver his way out of trouble when his performances stumble and the lies collide with each other. He is able to do that because he has no conscience to interfere; just an unswerving priority on self-survival. He does whatever is necessary to preserve and protect himself.

It’s disturbing familiar, isn’t it? Some months ago, I wrote a stack on how often we’ve expected good to finally triumph over the crimes and lies that have piled on unpunished over the past almost-ten years—and how consistently we’ve been disappointed. We’ve watched justice evaded, time and again. We’ve watched public service degenerate into self-serving performance. Lies have become normative. Just say them often enough and without the interference of moral qualm and you can give them the convincing solidity of fact.

At the center of it all has been a talented, soul-less grifter with an unswerving instinct for self-preservation at all costs. He has maneuvered (without much trouble, because their own moral centers were already fairly vacated when he entered the scene) an entire political party to follow him. He’s snookered ordinary people into believing he cares about them, when in fact they are entirely dispensable the moment they stopping serving his needs. Journalists and psychologists have tried to figure him out. But none of the theories work, because they all presume a substance (a personality, a soul, an enduring set of principles or commitments, a human constancy of any kind at all) that simply isn’t there. In its place is a series of inventions and reinventions to suit the necessities of the moment. And so far, he’s managed to hide the bodies.

Will the lies ever ensnare him? We still hope for a different ending than Highsmith relished in The Talented Mr. Ripley. In one of her diaries, she wrote that in that book, she showed “the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoic[ed] in it.” But Highsmith was unusually fueled by disdain for “humanity”and conventional morality—and besides that, it was 1955. In 2024, Tom is still a compelling character, but we may long for a yet-unwritten chapter in “real life” in which Ravini, handcuffs waiting, finally gets him.

(P.S. If you liked this post, please don’t forget to “say” so by clicking the little “like” button. It’s either at the end or at the top, depending on which version you’re reading.)

1. Clemente: “Paper and writing are very cut-and-dried. A script is like a score that is missing any indication of tempo. You have to breathe life into it. It demands an element of improvisation.”

2. The title of Vito Russo’s graound-breaking book, later made into a 1996 documentary, about the representation of homosexuality in Hollywood movies.

3. Then he reached for the rope that was tumbled over the white cement weight. The end of the rope was tied to the metal ring at the prow. Tom tried to untie it. It was a hellish, water-soaked, immovable knot that must have been there for years. His cigarette lighter. He fumbled for it in the pocket of his trousers on the bottom of the boat. He lighted it, then held a dry portion of the rope over its flame. The rope was about an inch and a half thick. It was slow, very slow, and Tom used the minutes to look all around him again. Would the Italian with the boats be able to see him at this distance? The hard gray rope refused to catch fire, only glowed and smoked a little, slowly parting, strand by strand. Tom yanked it, and his lighter went out. He lighted it again, and kept on pulling at the rope. When it parted, he looped it four times around Dickie’s bare ankles before he had time to feel afraid, and tied a huge, clumsy knot, overdoing it to make sure it would not come undone, because he was not very good at tying knots. He estimated the rope to be about thirty-five or forty feet long. He began to feel cooler, and smooth and methodical. The cement weight should be just enough to hold a body down, he thought. The body might drift a little, but it would not come up to the surface. Tom threw the weight over. It made a ker-plung and sank through the transparent water with a wake of bubbles, disappeared, and sank and sank until the rope drew taut on Dickie’s ankles, and by that time Tom had lifted the ankles over the side and was pulling now at an arm to lift the heaviest part, the shoulders, over the gunwale…

He pulled the limp body toward the stern, sliding the rope around the gunwale. He could tell from the buoyancy of the weight in the water that the weight had not touched bottom. Now he began with Dickie’s head and shoulders, turned Dickie’s body on its belly and pushed him out little by little. Dickie’s head was in the water, the gunwale cutting across his waist, and now the legs were in a dead weight, resisting Tom’s strength with their amazing weight, as his shoulders had done, as if they were magnetized to the boat bottom. Tom took a deep breath and heaved. Dickie went over, but Tom lost his balance and fell against the tiller. The idling motor roared suddenly. Tom made a lunge for the control lever, but the boat swerved at the same time in a crazy arc. For an instant he saw water underneath him and his own hand outstretched toward it, because he had been trying to grab the gunwale and the gunwale was no longer there. He was in the water. He gasped, contracting his body in an upward leap, grabbing at the boat. He missed. The boat had gone into a spin. Tom leapt again, then sank lower, so low the water closed over his head again with a deadly, fatal slowness, yet too fast for him to get a breath, and he inhaled a noseful of water just as his eyes sank below the surface….

He reached out wildly for the end of the boat, heedless of the propeller’s blades. His fingers felt the rudder. He ducked, but not in time. The keel hit the top of his head, passing over him. Now the stern was close again, and he tried for it, fingers slipping down off the rudder. His other hand caught the stern gunwale. He kept an arm straight, holding his body away from the propeller. With an unpremeditated energy, he hurled himself toward a stern corner, and caught an arm over the side. Then he reached up and touched the lever. The motor began to slow. Tom clung to the gunwale with both hands, and his mind went blank with relief, with disbelief, until he became aware of the flaming ache in his throat, the stab in his chest with every breath. He rested for what could have been two or ten minutes, thinking of nothing at all but the gathering of strength enough to haul himself into the boat, and finally he made slow jumps up and down in the water and threw his weight over and lay face down in the boat, his feet dangling over the gunwale. He rested, faintly conscious of the slipperiness of Dickie’s blood under his fingers, a wetness mingled with the water that ran out of his own nose and mouth…. Could he wash it all out? But blood was hell to get out, he had always heard….

He headed in for the shallow, short beach, handling the throttle respectfully, because he was not sure it wouldn’t flare up again. Then he felt the scrape and jolt of earth under the prow. He turned the lever to ferma, and moved another lever that cut the motor. He got out cautiously into about ten inches of water, pulled the boat up as far as he could, then transferred the two jackets, his sandals, and Marge’s cologne box from the boat to the beach. The little cove where he was—not more than fifteen feet wide—gave him a feeling of safety and privacy. There was not a sign anywhere that a human foot had ever touched the place. Tom decided to try to scuttle the boat. He began to gather stones, all about the size of a human head because that was all he had the strength to carry, and to drop them one by one into the boat, but finally he had to use smaller stones because there were no more big ones near enough by. He worked without a halt, afraid that he would drop in a faint of exhaustion if he allowed himself to relax even for an instant, and that he might lie there until he was found by somebody. When the stones were nearly level with the gunwale, he shoved the boat off and rocked it, more and more, until water slopped in at the sides. As the boat began to sink, he gave it a shove toward deeper water, shoved and walked with it until the water was up to his waist, and the boat sank below his reach. Then he plowed his way back to the shore and lay down for a while, face down on the sand.