I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organized in chronological order. Pat was seventy-four and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumored, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasized that she might try to kill me.
The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modeling since I was seventeen. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee, and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. In the foreword to one of her catalogs, she explained that although she felt guilty about spending “so much time in the company of two lemons” (the subjects of her still lifes) when there were so many big problems in the world, she had concluded that being able to see beauty was also essential. She taught me, in the years I knew her, a great deal about fighting my fears and following my passions.
Anna’s husband, Daniel—or Dani, as we called him—was a book editor and the founder and owner of Diogenes Verlag, a Zurich-based publishing house that was (and still is) a major publisher of European fiction. He was brutally honest but had kind eyes and piles of books that he used as furniture. Anna and Dani hosted what they called “interesting dinners” at their house, inviting random combinations of people they found fascinating. The night I arrived, all the doors were opened so the fresh air from their tree-filled garden could fill the dining room. Dinner was served on an oval wooden table covered with platters of pasta and cantaloupe and delicious prosciutto, along with many different bottles of French and Italian wines. The conversation switched from English to Swiss German (which I didn’t understand), and I stared at the original Picasso print on the wall: a naked woman with a man peering between her legs. Dani noticed my gaze and explained that their Sicilian cook hated the “drawing”: nobody wanted to see a woman at the gynecologist.
