On Forgery, Furniture, and the Problem of the Empty Room

The bar was the kind of place that pretends to be old — brass fixtures, dark wood, taxidermied pheasant above the door — but gives itself away in small details. The cocktail menu printed on card stock. The bartender’s practiced indifference. We were in a booth near the back, and Donna Tartt was already drinking bourbon, neat, which she held in both hands as if warming herself by it, though the room was not cold.

Patricia Highsmith arrived twelve minutes late and did not apologize. She ordered a gin and tonic, changed her mind, ordered a Scotch, and sat down with the air of someone who had already decided the evening would be tolerable at best. She was wearing a dark blazer that looked expensive in a way she seemed neither proud of nor aware of. She smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, though I hadn’t seen her smoking outside.

“So,” Highsmith said. “Identity theft.”

“Identity absorption,” Tartt corrected, and took a slow sip of her bourbon. “There’s a difference. Theft implies someone who knows what they’ve taken. I’m interested in the person who doesn’t know — or who refuses to know. The person who slides into someone else’s life the way you slide into a warm bath. Gradually. Pleasantly. Until you can’t remember when you got in.”

“The bath metaphor is soft,” Highsmith said. She said it flatly, the way you’d note that a door was ajar.

“I know. I’m reaching for something else.”

I had been quiet, which felt appropriate. I was taking notes on a napkin because I had forgotten my notebook, and the napkin was beginning to disintegrate under my pen. I said, “I think the question is whether this character knows he’s a forger. Or whether he’s managed to convince himself he’s something else. A caretaker, a steward, a — ”

“Oh, he knows,” Highsmith said. She picked up her drink but didn’t sip it. “That’s not the interesting problem. The interesting problem is that knowing doesn’t produce guilt. He sees what he’s doing with perfect clarity and it doesn’t bother him. The question you’re reaching for isn’t whether he knows. It’s whether his lack of guilt is a pathology or a talent.”

Tartt set her glass down. “I disagree. I think the most dangerous version of this character is the one who genuinely does not understand what he’s doing. Not because he’s stupid — because the environment has made the transgression invisible. The academic world is all borrowed identity. You cite your influences. You build on your predecessors. You sit in a dead man’s chair and teach a dead man’s syllabus and nobody calls that theft. The line between scholarly inheritance and outright fraud is — ”

“Clear,” Highsmith said. “The line is clear. You’re romanticizing it.”

A pause. Tartt’s mouth tightened, very slightly, and then she laughed — a short, genuine sound. “You may be right. I have a weakness for the version where the setting is complicit.”

“Of course you do. That’s your whole thing. The beautiful poisoned garden. The architecture of a college campus as moral architecture — the way all those fieldstone buildings and leaded windows seem to promise that the people inside are protected from the consequences of ordinary life.” Highsmith paused, and something in her face shifted, became almost gentle. “I understand the appeal. But the version that interests me is colder. A man moves into a dead man’s house. He wears the dead man’s jacket. He finishes the dead man’s book. Not because the campus has seduced him into believing this is acceptable. Because he has no particular feeling about it one way or the other. It’s convenient. The jacket fits.”

I wrote the jacket fits on my napkin and underlined it twice. “That’s the line, isn’t it? The jacket fitting as a kind of permission.”

“No,” Highsmith said. “The jacket fitting as a fact. He puts it on. It fits. There is no permission needed because there’s no one inside asking for it.”

I felt the familiar vertigo that comes from being between two writers who both see the same character but see him from angles that shouldn’t be compatible. Tartt’s version was a man drunk on beauty, absorbed by a world whose aesthetics had replaced his ethics. Highsmith’s version was a man with nothing to replace — a vacancy wearing tweed. The character I was beginning to see was somehow both, and I didn’t yet understand how.

“Can I tell you what scares me about this story?” I said.

Highsmith raised an eyebrow.

“What scares me is the reader’s identification. Because the character is going to be sympathetic. He’s going to be educated and articulate and self-aware, and he’s going to describe what he’s doing in language that makes it sound reasonable — even appealing. And the reader is going to go along with it. Not because the reader is a sociopath. Because the reader also wants to live in that cottage. The reader also wants to sit at that desk with the green lamp and the cat on the manuscript pages and feel like they’ve arrived at a life that finally makes sense.”

Tartt nodded slowly. “That’s the seduction. You have to build the cottage — the desk, the lamp, the tea, the view of the sugar maples — you have to make it so specific and so beautiful that the reader falls in love with it before they realize they’re falling in love with a crime scene.”

“But you can’t let the prose do the seducing for you,” Highsmith said. “I’ve read too many books where the writing is gorgeous and the moral vision is nonexistent. If the prose is too lush, the reader goes into a trance. They stop judging. That’s not complicity, it’s sedation.”

“I disagree,” Tartt said, and her voice had an edge now, the first real friction of the evening. “The lushness is the moral vision. A sentence that makes you feel the candlelight on the college china — ‘cream-and-gold, Limoges, each plate hand-painted with the seal of the college’ — that sentence is doing ethical work, because it’s showing you exactly how this character has been drugged. He’s drunk on surfaces. The prose isn’t sedating the reader; it’s giving the reader the same drug the character is taking.”

Highsmith was quiet for a moment. She tilted her glass, watched the Scotch slide. “That’s a good argument,” she said, and it sounded like it cost her something. “I’ll give you that. But you need the cold underneath. You need the moment where the reader suddenly feels the floor give way — where they realize they’ve been admiring a room in which someone is dying, or already dead. The lush prose and the dead man in the chair. Both at once.”

“Fenwick in the chair,” I said. “The mentor. The character finds him dead and sits with him for two hours and doesn’t call anyone. That’s the Highsmith moment. The reader expects grief. They get… inventory. He looks at the room, the books, the rug with the wine stain. He’s not mourning. He’s appraising.”

“Not appraising,” Highsmith said. “That makes him calculating, and calculating is easy to write and boring to read. He’s recognizing. The room is the first thing that has made sense to him in years. He isn’t thinking about taking it. He isn’t thinking at all. He’s just — fitting. The way the jacket fits.”

Tartt leaned forward. “This is where we’re going to fight, Pat, because I think you’re wrong. I think there has to be a moment of conscious decision. Not a dramatic one. Not an I-choose-evil speech. But a moment — maybe it’s answering the email from the editor, maybe it’s writing the first paragraph of the manuscript — where he knows what he’s doing and does it anyway. Your version, where he just drifts into it, is terrifying in its own way. But it lets him off the hook. If he never chooses, he can never be judged.”

“Why does he need to be judged?”

The question sat between them like something that had been dropped on the table.

“Because the reader needs to judge him,” Tartt said. “Eventually. Not in the moment — in the moment, the reader should be with him, complicit, enjoying the cottage and the tea and the beautiful manuscript. But by the end, the reader needs to look back and feel the retrospective horror of having been seduced by a vacancy. If he never chooses, the reader was seduced by a weather pattern. Where’s the horror in that?”

Highsmith smiled, and it was not a warm smile. “The horror is precisely that it’s a weather pattern. The horror is that evil doesn’t require a decision. That a person can consume another person’s life the way mold consumes bread — through proximity, through patience, through the simple fact of being there when the bread is left out.”

I was writing fast now, the napkin completely ruined. I signaled for another one. The bartender brought a stack and looked at me with the mild curiosity of someone who has seen worse.

“There’s the manuscript problem,” I said. “He finishes the dead man’s book, and the chapters he writes are better than the dead man’s. That’s not just theft. That’s — ”

“Improvement,” Highsmith said.

“Desecration,” Tartt said.

They looked at each other. Neither blinked.

“Both,” I said, and immediately felt I’d said something stupid, the kind of diplomatic nothing that helps no one. But Highsmith tilted her head and didn’t disagree, which I was learning was her version of agreement.

“The manuscript is the story’s engine,” Tartt said. “Because it’s where the character is most alive and most monstrous simultaneously. He’s producing his best work inside another man’s name. The irony is that the fraud is more authentic than anything he’s ever done as himself. The borrowed identity doesn’t diminish his talent — it liberates it.”

“The book he’s ghostwriting,” Highsmith said. “What is it about?”

“Literary forgery,” I said.

Highsmith laughed. An actual laugh, brief and sharp. “Of course it is.”

“I want the book-within-the-book to be good enough that the reader believes it,” Tartt said. “Not summaries of arguments. Actual lines. ‘The forger does not lack a self. He has too many. The authentic person is a house with one door; the forger is a house with every door open, and the wind passes through without finding anything to move.’ Something like that. The reader should think, yes, that’s a real insight, and then remember that it was written by a man committing the very act he’s analyzing.”

“Self-awareness as camouflage,” Highsmith said. “He understands forgery so well that his understanding becomes part of the forgery. He’s not blind. He sees everything. And the seeing changes nothing.”

I thought about Tom Ripley in the palazzo in Venice, surrounded by beautiful things he had acquired through murder, perfectly content, watching the light change on the canal. I didn’t say this. I didn’t want to invoke Highsmith’s own creation too directly; it felt like pointing at a photograph of someone while they were standing in front of you.

But she seemed to read the thought anyway. “The difference,” she said, “between this character and certain other characters I’ve written is that Tom enjoyed himself. Tom had appetites. This man — your Julian — I don’t think he enjoys anything. I think the cottage and the tea and the jacket are satisfying in the way that completing a puzzle is satisfying. The last piece clicks and the picture is done and you feel — not pleasure. Completion. The absence of incompleteness.”

“That’s lonelier than anything I could write about him,” Tartt said quietly.

“Yes,” Highsmith said. “It should be.”

I realized I had been holding my pen above the napkin without writing anything for some time. The conversation had arrived somewhere I hadn’t expected — not at the character’s crime, but at his emptiness. The crime was almost incidental. He forges a manuscript, he lives in a dead man’s house, he deposits checks that aren’t his. These are actions. But the story, the real story, was about the void they were performed to fill. Or not fill. To outline, the way a chalk line outlines a body that has already been removed.

“The woman,” I said. “The visiting scholar from Norway. Lena. She’s the one who sees him.”

“She’s the only one who knew Fenwick well enough to notice the wrong notes,” Tartt said. “The rearranged desk. The different tea. She’s like a tuning fork. She doesn’t accuse — she vibrates at a frequency that makes the falseness audible.”

“She loved Fenwick,” Highsmith said. It was not a question.

“She had an intellectual friendship with him,” I said. “Which in academic terms — ”

“She loved him. Say it straight. She loved the man this creature is wearing.” Highsmith finished her Scotch. “That’s what gives her scenes their voltage. She isn’t investigating a fraud. She’s grieving a man while sitting across from his ghost. She’s watching his gestures performed by the wrong hands.”

“Does she confront him?” I asked.

“Not directly,” Tartt said. “Direct confrontation would give the story a climax, and I don’t think this story earns a climax. I think it earns a slow, terrible recognition. She reads the journal. She reads what Fenwick wrote about him. And then she asks, ‘Are you going to finish the book?’ and that question contains everything — the accusation, the grief, the understanding that the book is already finished and was finished by the wrong person.”

“And he says it’s finished,” Highsmith said. “And she leaves. And he locks the door and feeds the cat.”

“And that’s the ending.”

“No,” I said. I surprised myself. They both looked at me. “That’s not the ending. The ending is the mirror. He stands in the bathroom and practices Fenwick’s expression. The contained amusement, the private knowledge. He adjusts his jaw. He tilts his chin. He holds the expression and studies it and makes a small correction. That’s where you leave the reader.”

Tartt was silent for a moment. “Because it never ends.”

“Because it’s never enough,” Highsmith said. “He’ll be practicing that expression tomorrow. And the day after. Not because he hasn’t mastered it. Because mastery isn’t the point. The practice is the point. The practice is the only thing that fills the room.”

Tartt flagged the bartender. She ordered another bourbon and didn’t look at either of us while she waited for it to arrive. When it came, she held it in both hands again and said, “I want the prose to be beautiful. Genuinely beautiful. Not as a trick and not as a trap but because this character experiences the world through aesthetics the way other people experience it through emotion. The beauty is real. What’s missing is everything else.”

“Fine,” Highsmith said. “Make it beautiful. But when the editor from New York reads the manuscript aloud and presses her knuckles to her lips and says it’s the best thing Fenwick ever wrote — I want the reader to feel ill. I want the compliment to land like a diagnosis.”

I looked down at my stack of napkins. I had filled four of them. My handwriting had deteriorated as the evening progressed, and the last napkin was nearly illegible — just fragments, arrows, a circled phrase: the lock opened either way.

“There’s one more thing,” I said. “He tells himself, at the end, that he can leave whenever he wants. That this is temporary. That he’s a visiting fellow, not a permanent resident. He’s certain of this.”

“Of course he is,” Highsmith said. She stood and put on her coat. “That’s the most frightening sentence in the story, and you don’t even need to underline it.”

Tartt raised her glass toward the door but Highsmith was already through it. I sat with my napkins and my ruined pen and the bartender who was wiping down the counter with the steady, circular motions of a person who would be here all night, who would be here tomorrow night, who would be here until the place closed, attending to surfaces that would never stay clean.