Love in the Time of Serial Killers(67)

“I have to teach a couple guitar lessons,” he said. “But I should be back around two. Want to hang out later?”

I wanted to say yes. It almost surprised me, how much I wanted to. But I knew it wasn’t the best idea for my productivity, and there was some perverse part of me that still wanted to assert a boundary just as a reminder that I could. The fact that I knew Sam would accept it unquestioningly only made it feel shittier, in a way, that I was doing it mostly to prove a point to myself. “I really, really need to work on that chapter,” I said. “I’ll come over if I finish before dinner, but I might not.”

“Okay,” he said. He wanted to kiss me—I could just tell. He’d leaned forward in the doorway a bit, his fingers drumming on the wood frame. But I was behind a tall mountain of clothes, my hands busy with taking things off hangers, and I didn’t make any move to meet him halfway. We’d already kissed once when he came over, and he’d brought me coffee and petted the cat and solved my brother’s problem, and I’d touched his arm and gently teased him about his musical taste . . . if we added anything else to today, it might give him the wrong idea.

And what idea is that?

I mentally told myself to get a grip, and gave Sam a smile that I hoped seemed breezy and unaffected. “See you later,” I said.

After Sam had gone, Conner wandered back in the room and half-heartedly tried to pick back up where he’d left off. I could tell he’d be useless to me the rest of the day, though, now that his brain was all filled with proposal plans again. He also forced me to listen to “Tubthumping” three times through, which eventually prompted me to tell him to go home so I could work on my dissertation in peace and quiet.

Part of the reason it had taken me so long to write this chapter on In Cold Blood—besides the usual issues of distraction and procrastination, of course—was that I was intimidated by it. Capote’s book was basically the prototype for the genre, after all, and had been analyzed before by people smarter than I was.

One argument I’d made in my introduction was that true crime was ultimately about place, and time, with the criminal acts themselves just the lens through which an author sought to understand the broader cultural context. In that way, it wasn’t just what Capote was trying to say about the Clutter murder, what relationship he’d developed with Perry and Dick while he researched his book, but his perspective on middle America in the early 1960s as a whole.

I thought it was interesting that, in addition to spending a lot of time giving the flavor of Holcomb, Kansas—a town in a time where still only one person was known to lock the door to their house, an unusual enough practice to be remarked upon—Capote also made sure that every major character in the book wanted something. The scene where Dick takes Perry to buy wedding clothes for a made-up event, a ruse just to pass off a fraudulent check scheme, is particularly affecting because it shows you just how badly Perry wishes it were true. He allows himself to believe, only for a second, that Dick’s lies are reality, and that he has the love of a good woman waiting for him, the chance to have a child, make a life. It’s the American Dream in its most distilled, bittersweet rendition, and then you had to reconcile that with the fact that these are the same two men who ended four other American Dreams with close-range gunshots.

I was on a roll, my fingers flying over my laptop keys, when Lenore jumped up and walked right across my keyboard, putting her asshole in my face.

“Thanks,” I said, making sure my progress was saved before her kitten paws replaced all my work with asno;wiwn;;aj. “Very helpful.”

The pulsing heartbeat of true crime, of all human stories when you got right down to it, was we all wanted and hoped and dreamed and loved, but we had no control over what happened in the end. There was a reason why even the most sensationalistic supermarket paperback would tell you that the victim loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian, or that another victim was three days away from her birthday.

“These books promise closure and justice,” I said to Lenore, scratching her under the chin. “But ultimately they reinforce the reality that so many lives are interrupted, so many dreams unfulfilled.”

She looked at me through slitted eyes, a slight tilt of her head the only sign that she wanted me to continue with the scratching.

“That’s why you gotta live in the moment, DTC,” I said. “To want something is to set yourself up for disappointment.”

The flick of her tail seemed to say, Bitch, I invented living in the moment, and, Three thousand words of analysis on Capote’s classic and you’ve reduced it to an Instagram quote on a picture of a sunset?

I wondered what Sam was doing.





TWENTY





OKAY, HERE’S THE deal,” I said to him ten minutes later, after I’d shown up at his front door with my laptop in my backpack. “I have to finish this today, so I’m going to keep working. But I don’t want to be distracted, and the best way is if you are also doing something productive and not just, like, watching Red Hot Chili Peppers concert DVDs or whatever you normally do.”

“I don’t even like them that much,” Sam said. “I just respect their musicianship—”

I had already hung my backpack up on the back of one of his dining room chairs and unpacked my laptop to set it up on the table. “The point is, I think it would be a good idea if you spent time working on that guitar you’ve been trying to build. Then we can check back in in, like, an hour?” I frowned down at the wall, where a two-by-two shelf filled with records appeared to be blocking where the outlet would be. “Where can I plug in?”