... having been breathed out

Everything was salvaged, some by the right hands and some by the wrong, but nothing was simply lost.

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.”

In Switzerland [in the 1980s], Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.”

Pat [Highsmith] and Marijane [Meaker] broke up quickly (and then continued to break up slowly) during their six months of cohabitation. Pat … moved in and out of the house so many times, that they had to change moving companies a couple of times to avoid embarrassment.

Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

“Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing.” […] Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know. […]

“He laughed, his own unmistakeable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.”

Ripley’s Believe it or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel created by Robert Ripley […] in 1918. […] By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in the American household vernacular.

In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she'd been thinking about for two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the "best" in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)

When she was in Paris [in the 1940s, socialite painter] Buffie [Johnson], who knew everyone and went everywhere, was invited to both Natalie Barney’s literary salon and Gertrude Stein’s gatherings on the rue de Fleurus. When Buffie went to the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude, as was her custom, immediately relegated her to the “women’s corner” of the room with Alice B. Toklas, while she, Gertrude, spoke of important things with the men. Although Alice Toklas was very kind, Buffie was piqued at being ignored by Gertrude, and so, as she was leaving the atelier, she leaned over and surreptitiously pinched Gertrude Stein on her bottom. ‘It had,’ Buffie reported, 'the consistency of a block of mahogany.’

On one of her trips “home” to Texas–she was still in her teens–Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie’s behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each others’ clothes. Pat was enthralled.

No, I shall never be jealous, only die of jealousy.

During a rather burning season of jealousy, I myself ran some risks. A rival of mine, very insecure in her happiness, thought of me strongly, and strongly I thought of her. But I made the mistake of letting myself go back to my writing, which demanded my attention, and to abandon my other task of antagonism, of daily and secret defiance. In short, I postponed my curses during three or four months, while Madame X continued hers, devoting her long hours of leisure to this. And I soon became aware of the results of such inequality. I began by falling into a ditch in the Place du Trocadéro, then I caught bronchitis. Then, in the Métro, on my way to the publisher, I lost the last part of a manuscript of which I had not kept a duplicate. A taxi driver short-changed me, leaving me on a rainy night without a sou. Then a mysterious epidemic bore off three of my Angora kittens…

To put an end to the series of misfortunes, I had only to arouse myself from an inexcusable negligence and to return once more to an even exchange of mental trajectories with Madame X. And we lived on mutually bad terms until the bond between us was worn out and space ceased to be a pathway of wicked beams of thought, a harp of resonant waves, a starry ether hung with signs and portents. I was not the only one to regret it, for we had quarreled without feeling any fundamental antipathy. Time recompenses honorable adversaries. Mine, as soon as she stopped being an adversary, had some delightful anecdotes to tell which could amuse only ourselves.

“One day when I was going to Rambouillet to murder you…”

The rest of this story was a gay vaudeville, an involved tale of a missed train, a stalled car, a gold-mesh handbag that burst open at the bottom, spilling out an indiscreet revolver upon the Rambouillet pavement, of inopportune encounters, of a friend who read in the periwinkle blue eyes of Madame X a homicidal intent and by some fond diplomacy diverted her from it…

“My dear,” she exclaimed, “just count all these little happenings which raised chance obstructions between you and me in the town of Ramouillet! Can you deny that they were providential?”

“God forbid! There is one, especially, that I would hate to forget.”

“Which one?”

“You see, I wasn’t in Rambouillet at the time. I didn’t set foot there that year.”

“You weren’t in Rambouillet?”

“I was not in Rambouillet.”

“Well! That is the absolute limit!”

This limit revived, for some unknown reason, a little of the former resentment in the periwinkle eyes that questioned mine. But it was only a fleeting gleam. In vain we tried—in vain we still try—to upset each other by violent arguments, a tone of defiance quite out of keeping with our calm remarks: we soon recover our cordial relations. The powerful bond that was our youthful and mutual hatred can no longer unite us.

With that beautiful blue-eyed woman, whose light chestnut hair was exactly the shade of mine—and with such and such another and still another woman—I have ceased to exchange, shall never more exchange because of a man and through a man that menacing thought, those reflections from mirror to mirror, that tireless emanation which the wronged lover himself… “What are you thinking about?” he asked them. They were thinking about me. “But where are you, please?” he asked me when he saw I was not listening to him. “In the moon?” I was in spirit close to some woman, my invisible presence was upsetting her. We lacked nothing, these women and I: we had every kind of trouble.