Trashley: Part Twenty
The Wickedly Talented Mr. Ripley
I started planning an elaborate trip to Europe after Ashley suggested we go there for two weeks over Christmas. I must’ve been a travel agent in a past life because I poured all of my spare time into researching train routes and flights between countries, reading restaurant reviews, making reservations, and comparing hotels to Airbnbs.
Ashley booked suites at the Four Seasons in Paris and Milan that were easily two to four thousand dollars a night. This was nothing like my work trip to Spain, this was a rich person’s trip, and we weren’t concerned about the cost of anything. Ashley wanted to enjoy a dinner cruise down the Seine for New Year’s Eve, so I bought non-refundable tickets because I’m stupid. And I missed traveling; the Pandemic had robbed me of seeing the world, and for that, I will never forgive it.
Ashley told me her work would start flying her internationally now that the Pandemic was winding down, and said I could join her. My MTV job would be remote for the next eight months, so I was all about it. All I want to do is write and read and travel and eat and drink and be on my iPad. And I’m lucky because I can do these things anywhere.
Ashley sounded well-traveled too, even though some of her stories were too insane to believe.
“Did I tell you about when I was kidnapped in Colombia?” she asked.
I looked up from my computer. “You were kidnapped?” I said, not believing it. “What happened?”
“Yeah, Russians have been trying to hack into my company for years. I have to change our encryptions regularly, or they’ll use our data against the US. Whenever I went to South America, I had to have my briefcase handcuffed to my wrist and travel with armed security.”
“No way. That’s insane.” I laughed.
“It’s true! Call my Mom right now, she’ll tell you.”
“So Russians kidnapped you in Colombia?”
What the fuck was she talking about. Also, if I were kidnapped, I would lead with that every time I met someone new, even if it was just the cashier at Trader Joe’s.
“You find everything okay?”
“Yes, and I was kidnapped.”
“No, Colombians stopped our van and held us hostage for an entire day. They finally let us go after negotiating with our US branch.”
“Crazy,” I said, meaning her, not the story. I was pretty sure she was just reciting the plot of Behind Enemy Lines. But god damn, she sounded like she believed it. It reminded me of when she would tell me women were hitting on her everywhere she went. Like, okay, whatever you gotta tell yourself to boost your confidence. I knew that was a lie, but I let her have it.
Growing up, I lied all the time. It wasn’t just a hobby, it was a lifestyle. My friends and I used to get on AOL chatrooms and tell the most elaborate stories to anyone who happened to be online. My friend Ji and I told an entire Canadian hockey team that our parents died in 9/11. And they were so stupid, they believed it. Other times I’d be with my friend Chelsea and we would pretend to be deaf and use sign language to communicate. And we didn’t even know sign language, though she learned it later. I stopped lying when I moved to New York and started taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where I realized that the truth is always funnier than the lie.
“I just got a work email saying I have to go to New York in a few weeks,” Ashley said, casually changing the conversation from kidnapping to Manhattan. She was a Data Scientist, whatever that meant, but I still didn’t understand why she had to fly around the world for it.
“Do you want to come?”
“Fuck yeah, I want to come!”
I had lived in New York for eleven years before moving to LA. I spent my entire twenties and one of my thirties there, and I knew that city better than I knew myself. I could show Ashley my New York, and bring her to all of my old haunts, like Corner Bistro and Tavern on Jane. The West Village was my old stomping grounds, and I hadn’t visited since the Pandemic began. How exciting, I had two trips to look forward to.
I started making reservations at my favorite restaurants and telling my friends I’d be in town. I booked a hair appointment with my girl Berri, who had been doing my color for eighteen years. Broadway had just reopened, so I bought tickets to Hamilton, and not just any tickets, I reserved the entire box above stage left. I wanted to sit close enough to make direct eye contact with Miss Mariah Reynolds, that whore. I invited my Aunt to take the third ticket and set up a dinner with her and my Uncle. They lived in the West Village, and although I’m certain my aunt hated me, I wanted her to meet Ashley so she could hate her, too. Plus, my uncle was a former rocket scientist, so I was sure he and Ashley would have much to discuss.
I told my therapist about our upcoming New York trip. My therapist knew all of the ups and downs of my relationship with Ashley. She knew about the ex-wife, lying about having children, the death and possible un-death of Ashley’s grandparents, the love bombing, the random paydays. I was making progress because before going to therapy, I didn’t even notice red flags. But now dating Ashley, I saw the red flags, I just didn’t act on them. Progress was knowing they were there.
“Have you seen the Talented Mr. Ripley?” My therapist asked in our last session before my New York trip.
“I mean, yeah, a long time ago. I just don’t know what Matt Damon has to do with any of this.”
“No Lauren, Ashley IS Matt Damon. She is most likely pretending to be someone she’s not. You doubt she is a physicist because she hasn’t done anything related to Physics the entire time you’ve dated. And you say you can’t find a trace of her teaching or going to MIT. And she lied about having a family. And you think she lied about her Grandparents dying.”
I thought about this for a second. When she put it that way, she had a good point.
“If only there were a way to find out for sure.”
“I suggest you re-watch The Talented Mr. Ripley. It might help you see some similarities between her and the main character.”
I told her I’d add it to my watch list, but after our session I started packing for New York City. Ashley’s work was paying for the hotel, but the list of hotels they’d pay for was sad. There was no way I’d stay in the Fairfield Inn across from Penn Station. Ashley ended up booking us the Dream Hotel in Midtown. I wasn’t familiar with it, but at least it was near Columbus Circle and the subway.
We boarded our flight, which was fully booked, so we weren’t able to sit next to each other. Ashley was seated several rows behind me, but I was determined to manifest better, and it just so happened that the woman on the aisle seat was traveling with her dog, and the guy sitting in the middle seat was allergic. So he switched seats with Ashley and we got to sit next to each other to New York.
Ashley took some edibles and passed out. I’d downloaded The Talented Mr. Ripley for the flight and started watching. I could see some similarities between Ashley and Tom Ripley. Like the way he borrowed a Princeton jacket from a piano player he filled in for and how he was approached by a wealthy man who said his son also went to Princeton, which Ripley went along with. Ashley wore her MIT shirts and hats everywhere, signaling that she was an academic who went to school there. She was wearing the shirt next to me on the flight.
Then Tom is sent to Italy and “accidentally” drops all of these jazz records in front of his target, Dickie Greenleaf, who loves jazz music and plays the saxophone. It was so calculated, the way Ripley orchestrated this move. He knew that Dickie would see they shared a passion for jazz, and that would build a connection. It reminded me of Ashley opening her Nintendo Switch before all of those one hundred dollar bills fell out.
“This is just like me, I leave money in the weirdest places and I don’t even notice.”
This was the first time I had that thought: what if Ashley was orchestrating everything? What if what Tom did to Dickie with the Jazz records was what Ashley did to me with the Nintendo Switch case? It seemed very calculated and pre-meditated. She would be insane to even think of doing something like that.
It was the first week of October, and the weather in New York was perfect. We took a cab to our hotel, but when we got out, I knew we couldn’t stay there. It was four in the afternoon, and there was a club underneath the hotel blasting techno music. We checked in at the front desk and were given a room on the eighth floor. When we opened the door, the room’s stench knocked me back. It smelled like someone had emptied a bottle of Pine-Sol on a rotting corpse.
“We can’t stay here,” I said, without taking a step further. “I’m gonna look at the Citizen Hotel and see if they have rooms. You gotta get a refund, this is ridiculous.”
We went back into the lobby, and I found a room at the Citizen for the same price as the Dream. Ashley just had to put in her work’s credit card information, so I handed her my phone.
Ashley pulled out her wallet and took out a credit card. It didn’t work. She pulled out another one, and took a big gulp of air, as if she was praying to the MasterCard gods for it to go through.
It didn’t.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s because I didn’t tell my bank I was traveling, they must’ve locked all my cards.”
She pulled out one more, and it worked. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was weird, like watching her take that breath was like watching her break character. Until then, I’d never seen her worry about money, or seem concerned a credit card wouldn’t go through. And I never questioned her finances. Of course it was because the bank didn’t know she was traveling, not because she didn’t have the funds.
She had the money. I watched her spend it all the time.
I remembered the ending of The Talented Mr. Ripley and the line: I always thought it’d be better to be a fake somebody than be a real nobody.”
I thought about The Talented Mr. Ripley at the beginning of these posts, when I was reading about Ashley casually sharing that she liked Oregon Trail, only to “discover” with “surprise” that you’d written a book on it. 100% calculated.
“You find everything okay?
Yes, and I was kidnapped.”