The Pleasure of Being Deceived

We met in a residential hotel in Rome, the kind with a lobby that smelled of lemon polish and old mail, where the front desk was unmanned but a bell sat on the counter with a handwritten sign in Italian that said, roughly, ring once and wait. Highsmith had been staying there for a week. Calvino had suggested it. Neither of them told me this; I gathered it from how she moved through the space — as someone who knew which stairs creaked — and from how he didn’t, drifting through the foyer like a man reading the footnotes of a building rather than its text.

She had taken the writing desk in the corner of the second-floor sitting room, a room with green wallpaper and two windows that looked onto an interior courtyard where someone had hung laundry. The laundry was dry. Nobody had collected it. This detail seemed important to Highsmith, or at least she kept glancing at it while she talked, and I couldn’t tell whether she was noting it as atmosphere or judging whoever had left it.

Calvino arrived carrying a book he wasn’t reading — it was tucked under his arm like a prop, the spine deliberately facing out: a Borges collection, naturally. He set it on the table between us and never mentioned it. The gesture was so perfectly staged that I couldn’t decide whether it was calculated or habitual, which, I realized later, was exactly the distinction Calvino spent his entire career dissolving.

“You want to write a heist story,” Highsmith said. She didn’t ask it. She stated it. She had a way of framing your ambitions back at you that made them sound slightly criminal — as though wanting to write a story were itself a form of trespass.

“A heist story,” Calvino said, “is already a story about stories. The heist is a fiction the crew tells — to themselves, to each other, to the mark. They rehearse it. They revise it. They perform it. If the performance succeeds, the fiction becomes reality. The money moves. The vault opens. But what has actually happened? A group of people told a more convincing story than the institution they robbed.”

“That’s charming,” Highsmith said. “And wrong.”

Calvino sat down. He didn’t look offended. He looked interested, which was worse — it meant he was collecting her objection for later use.

“A heist,” Highsmith said, “is not a fiction. A heist is a person deciding that the boundary between what is theirs and what is someone else’s is arbitrary, and then acting on that decision. It’s not a story they tell. It’s a skin they put on. Tom Ripley doesn’t narrate his way into Dickie Greenleaf’s life. He inhabits it. He wears Dickie’s clothes. He signs Dickie’s name. The story isn’t what he tells other people — the story is what he tells himself, which is that he was always Dickie, that Dickie was a draft and Tom is the final version.”

“But that is a fiction,” Calvino said. “A fiction of the self.”

“No. That’s the point you keep missing. For Tom, it is not a fiction. The moment he becomes Dickie, Dickie is real and Tom is the fiction. You want to stand outside and call it a game, a narrative structure, a story within a story. But the person inside the con doesn’t experience it as a story. He experiences it as finally becoming who he was supposed to be.”

I started to say something about this being exactly the tension I wanted to explore — the con artist who doesn’t know he’s performing — and Highsmith cut me off.

“Don’t synthesize us. We’re not compatible. He thinks the story is a structure you observe from above. I think the story is a body you live inside. Those are not two versions of the same idea.”

Calvino smiled. It was a gentle smile, almost pedagogical. “Patricia, we are more compatible than you want to admit. You just described the reader.”

“I described the criminal.”

“Same person. The reader enters a story and inhabits it. For the duration of the reading, the fiction is real. The reader is inside — not observing from above, not analyzing the structure. Living in it. And then the book ends and the reader returns to being themselves, and there is a moment — a very brief, very specific moment — of loss. Of returning to the original self and finding it insufficient. Your Tom Ripley is a reader who refuses to put the book down.”

Highsmith was quiet. She was looking at the laundry again, or through it. I watched her process what he’d said. She didn’t nod or concede. She simply moved on, which was her way of conceding without ceremony.

“The heist,” she said. “What are they stealing?”

I said I’d been thinking about that. What if the object of the heist was itself a forgery? A painting, maybe, or a document — something the crew believes is genuine, something they plan and sacrifice and risk prison for, and it turns out to be worthless. A copy.

“That’s been done,” Highsmith said.

“Everything has been done,” Calvino said. “The question is not whether the idea is new. The question is what the forgery means to the person who discovers it. If you steal a painting you believe is a Vermeer and it turns out to be a forgery — what have you lost? Not the painting. You never owned the painting. You’ve lost the story you were telling yourself about who you would be once you had it. The forgery doesn’t negate the theft. It negates the thief.”

“I like that,” I said.

“Don’t like it yet,” Highsmith said. “It’s too clean. A man discovers the object is a forgery and has an existential crisis — that’s a short story in The New Yorker. It’s not a heist. In a heist, the revelation has to break something mechanical, not just philosophical. The plan falls apart. Relationships fall apart. Someone gets hurt. The forgery isn’t a symbol — it’s a detonator.”

“Can it be both?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Pick one.”

“It can be both,” Calvino said, “if the story itself is structured as a forgery.”

He said this casually, the way he said things that he’d been thinking about for thirty years. He picked up the Borges, opened it to a random page, closed it again. The gesture meant nothing and everything — he was performing the act of not-reading, of handling a text without engaging with it, which was itself a commentary on what we were discussing, or maybe he just liked holding books.

“Explain,” Highsmith said.

“The reader picks up the story. They read a heist narrative — a crew, a plan, a target. They invest in it. They learn the characters’ names, their debts, their reasons. They follow the plan through its complications. And then, at some point, the story reveals that it has been lying to them. Not in the way an unreliable narrator lies — with winks and clues and the satisfaction of rereading. In the way a forger lies: by presenting something false with the absolute conviction of the genuine. The reader discovers they have been reading a forgery. The story they thought they were in is not the story they are in.”

“That’s metafiction,” Highsmith said. The word came out like a diagnosis.

“That’s crime,” Calvino said. “I am robbing the reader. I am taking their investment — their hours, their attention, their belief — and revealing that the thing they invested in was not what they thought. The reader is the mark. The story is the con.”

I felt something shift in the room, one of those moments where two incompatible ideas generate a third thing that neither person intended. I said, carefully, that I thought the protagonist should be a forger. Not a thief — a forger. Someone who makes copies so good they replace the originals. Someone whose talent is not taking things but becoming them.

“Tom Ripley is a forger,” Highsmith said. “He forges identities. He takes a person and reproduces them so perfectly that the copy erases the original.”

“And the reader,” Calvino said, “is also a forger. The reader takes the text and reproduces it in their mind — a private copy that is never identical to the author’s version. Every reading is a forgery. Every reader is a Ripley.”

“You keep making the reader into a criminal,” Highsmith said. “The reader isn’t a criminal. The reader is an accomplice. There’s a difference. A criminal acts. An accomplice watches and does nothing. An accomplice enjoys. The pleasure of reading about Tom Ripley is the pleasure of complicity — of watching someone do terrible things and feeling your own capacity for those things expand without consequence.”

“Complicity,” Calvino said, tasting the word. “Yes. But the reader’s complicity is also a kind of performance. The reader performs the role of the accomplice. They pretend to be shocked, pretend to disapprove, while turning the page as fast as they can. The reader is an actor in a play they didn’t write but have agreed to be in.”

“They haven’t agreed to anything. They bought a book.”

“Buying a book is a contract. A reader who opens a novel has agreed to be deceived. They want to be deceived. The entire transaction is premised on the willingness to accept a fiction as temporarily real. What I am suggesting is that we honor that contract by actually deceiving them. Not in a playful way. Not with a wink. With the same cold sincerity your Tom uses when he signs Dickie’s name.”

There was a pause. The laundry in the courtyard moved slightly — not wind, just the weight of the fabric adjusting to itself. Highsmith looked at Calvino with an expression I hadn’t seen from her before, something between suspicion and recognition.

“You’re proposing we steal from the reader,” she said.

“I am proposing we forge something for the reader. Something so convincing they cannot tell it from the real thing. And then I am proposing we tell them — or not tell them, let them discover — that what they held was never genuine. And the question the story asks, the question it doesn’t answer, is: does that matter? If the experience was real — if the forgery moved them, changed them, made them feel the way the original would have — does the falsehood of the object negate the truth of the experience?”

“Yes,” Highsmith said.

“No,” Calvino said.

“Yes,” Highsmith said again, harder this time. “Because Tom Ripley knows. He knows he is not Dickie. He knows it every second. The performance is perfect and the knowledge is total and the gap between the performance and the knowledge is where the entire horror of the character lives. If Tom didn’t know — if he genuinely believed he was Dickie — he would be a madman, not a monster. Madmen are pitiable. Monsters are interesting. The forgery matters because the forger knows it’s a forgery. That knowledge is what makes it unbearable.”

“For the forger,” Calvino said. “But what about the people around him? Marge. Dickie’s friends. The Italian police. They don’t know. For them, the forgery is indistinguishable from the original. They are living inside a fiction and they don’t know it. Are they diminished by this? Are their experiences with ‘Dickie’ — with Tom performing Dickie — less real because the person they were experiencing was a copy?”

“Their experiences are stolen,” Highsmith said. “Every conversation they had with ‘Dickie’ was a theft. Not of money or objects — of their own reality. He stole their ability to know what was true. That’s worse than robbery. Robbery takes things. Forgery takes the ground you stand on.”

I said something then that I thought was smart — about how the heist could mirror the structure of the narrative, the crew planning to steal something that turns out to be a forgery, while the narrative itself is a forgery the reader doesn’t discover until late — and both of them looked at me with the particular patience of people who had arrived at that idea twenty minutes ago and were waiting for me to catch up.

“The question,” Calvino said, “is not whether we deceive the reader. We will. The question is what we leave them with after the deception. A puzzle? A wound? A mirror?”

“Not a mirror,” Highsmith said. “Mirrors are for people who want to learn something about themselves. I don’t write for people who want to learn something about themselves. I write for people who already know and are hoping someone else will say it first.”

“A wound, then.”

“A wound implies healing. I’d rather leave a draft.” She almost smiled. “An incomplete version. Something they have to finish themselves, and they’ll finish it wrong, and that wrongness will be the most honest thing in the story.”

Calvino nodded, slowly. “An incomplete version. A forgery that the reader must complete. Yes. The story gives them ninety percent of a heist narrative and the last ten percent is — not missing. Replaced. Substituted with something they didn’t expect to find. And the reader must decide whether to accept the substitution or to go back and read again, looking for the seams.”

“There are no seams,” Highsmith said. “That’s the whole point. A good forgery has no seams. A good lie has no tells. You keep wanting to give the reader the tools to disassemble the trick, and I keep telling you: the trick works because it cannot be disassembled. The reader who goes back looking for clues finds nothing, because the liar was better than the reader. The forger was better than the detective. That’s the horror of it. That’s the pleasure of it. They’re the same thing.”

The light in the room was changing — the courtyard shadows shifting as the afternoon tilted. Calvino stood and walked to the window. He looked at the laundry. He looked at it the way he looked at everything: as a text to be read, interpreted, enjoyed for its formal properties.

“Whoever hung that laundry,” he said, “left it there on purpose. It’s been dry for hours. They like the look of it. The white shirts against the yellow wall. It’s decorative now, not functional. It has crossed the line from object to image.”

“Or they forgot,” Highsmith said.

“Or they forgot. But I prefer my version.”

“That’s your problem.”

“That is everyone’s problem,” Calvino said. “We all prefer the version that interests us. The forger knows this. The con artist knows this. The novelist knows this. We give people the version they prefer, and they accept it, and the acceptance is not stupidity — it is desire. They want the forgery because the forgery is better than the original. More coherent. More beautiful. More complete.”

“More false.”

“More false, yes. And more desired for it. The original is messy. The original has laundry left on the line because someone forgot. The forgery has laundry left on the line because it’s beautiful. The reader prefers the forgery. The reader always prefers the forgery. That is what your Tom Ripley understands: people don’t want the truth. They want a better-looking version of the truth, and they will pay for it, and they will thank you for it, and they will punish you when they find out, not because you lied but because you forced them to know that they preferred the lie.”

Highsmith stood up. She gathered her things — a notebook, a pen, a pack of cigarettes she couldn’t smoke indoors but kept on the table like a boundary marker. “I need to walk,” she said. “I’ve been sitting too long and you’ve been talking too long and I need to think about what this story is before you convince me it’s about semiotics.”

“It’s not about semiotics,” Calvino said.

“Everything you say is about semiotics. You can’t help it. You see the world as a system of signs and you want the reader to see it that way too, and I think that’s — I think it’s generous, actually. I think it’s a generous impulse. But generosity is not what crime fiction needs. Crime fiction needs the opposite of generosity. It needs a writer who will put the reader in a room with someone dangerous and not explain why they should be afraid.”

She was at the door. “The protagonist is a forger. We agree on that. He makes copies of things and the copies are better than the originals. He doesn’t steal identities — he improves them. He takes a mediocre person and makes a version of that person that the world prefers. And the world accepts the copy and discards the original, and that is the crime. Not the forgery itself. The preference.”

She left. The door closed with the particular heaviness of European doors, engineered for a different century’s sense of privacy.

Calvino sat back down. He picked up the Borges and this time he opened it and actually read — or appeared to read — for about thirty seconds.

“She is magnificent,” he said, without looking up.

“She’s terrifying,” I said.

“Those are the same quality. She sees people the way a surgeon sees a body — with total knowledge and zero sentimentality. I see people as readers. She sees them as texts. Finished, closed, legible to anyone willing to look closely enough. Her Tom Ripley is not a mystery. He is perfectly transparent. Everyone around him refuses to read what is plainly written.”

“And your version?”

“My version is that the text itself is unreliable. Not the narrator — the text. The words on the page. The reader reads the story and the story is lying, not because the narrator is lying but because the story itself is a forgery. The pages, the binding, the cover — all genuine. The words — counterfeit.”

He closed the Borges. He looked at me.

“Write a heist where the reader discovers, too late, that they were the one being robbed. Not of their time. Not of their attention. Of their certainty. They were certain they knew what kind of story they were reading, and they were wrong, and the wrongness is not a trick — it is the story’s actual subject. The heist is the narrative. The mark is the reader. And the forger — your protagonist, the man who makes copies — he is not a character. He is a method.”

“Patricia would hate that,” I said.

“Patricia would hate it and write it better than either of us. That is her gift. She hates her best ideas. She resents them for being too clever. And then she writes them with such cold precision that the cleverness becomes invisible, and all that remains is the feeling of having been handled by someone who understood you better than you understood yourself.”

He left the Borges on the table. I don’t think he forgot it. I think he left it the way the laundry was left — as an image, a residue, something for me to interpret or ignore.

I sat in the green room with the two windows and the courtyard and the laundry that was either forgotten or deliberate, and I tried to hold both versions: Highsmith’s criminal who knows exactly what he is, and Calvino’s structure that doesn’t know what it is because it was designed not to. The story would need to be both — a character study and a formal experiment, a forgery and a confession, a heist that steals from the reader the thing the reader came to have stolen.

I picked up the Borges. I didn’t open it. I just held it. It felt like evidence.