The Sociopath Next Door (16 page)

Sydney was divorced from a man named Luke. The divorce had drained her life savings and caused her to go into debt, because she had needed to make sure she got custody of her son, Jonathan, who was eight when I knew Sydney, and only five at the time of the divorce. Luke had put up an expensive struggle, not because he loved Jonathan, but because he was enraged with Sydney for making him move out of her house.

The house in South Florida had a swimming pool. Luke loved the pool.

“Luke was living in this shabby little apartment when I met him,” Sydney told me. “That should've raised a red flag for me right there, a thirty-five-year-old man who'd gone to graduate school at NYU—city planning, actually—living in that awful little place. But I ignored it. He said he really liked the big pool his apartment complex had. So when he saw I had my own pool, he got all happy. What can I tell you? My husband married me for my pool. Well, that's not entirely true, but in retrospect, it was definitely part of it.”

Sydney overlooked Luke's lifestyle, and his attraction to hers, because she thought she had found something rare, an extremely intelligent, attractive thirty-five-year-old man, with no wife and no ex-wives, whose interests seemed similar to hers, and who treated her well.

“He treated me very well at first, I must say. He took me out. He always brought me flowers. I remember all those birds-of-paradise in long boxes, all those orange flowers. I had to go out and buy some really tall vases. I don't know. He was soft-spoken and sort of quietly charming—we had great conversations. He was another academic type, like me, or so I thought. When I met him, he was working on a planning project through a friend of his at the university. Always dressed up in suits. Actually, that's where I met him, the university. Nice, upstanding place to meet somebody, wouldn't you say? He told me he thought we were a lot alike, and I guess I believed him.”

As the weeks passed, Sydney learned that since Luke had been twenty or so, he had lived with a succession of women, always in their homes, and that having a place of his own, even an inexpensive one, had been an unusual departure from his preferred situation. But she overlooked this information also, because she was falling in love with Luke. And she thought he was in love with her, too, because that was what he told her.

“I'm just a frumpy academic. No one had ever been so romantic with me. It was a good time—I should probably confess that. Too bad it had to be so short. Anyway . . . There I was, this frumpy thirty-five-year-old career type, and all of a sudden I was thinking about a white wedding, the whole nine yards. I'd never done that before. I mean, I always thought it was a silly fairy tale they tell little girls, not something I'd ever have—or want—and there I was, wanting it,
planning
it even.

“As for the fact that he'd lived off those other women—do you believe I actually felt sorry for him? I thought he was searching for the right person or something, and they usually just threw him out after a while. Now I understand why, but I certainly didn't then. I thought, How lonely, how sad. He said one of those women was actually killed in a car crash. He cried about it when he told me that. I felt so bad for him.”

Six weeks after they met, Luke moved into Sydney's house, and eight months later they were married, a big church wedding, followed by a formal dinner reception paid for by her family.

“Doesn't the bride's family always pay for the wedding?” she asked me wryly.

Two months after the wedding, Sydney discovered she was pregnant. She had always wanted children, but had believed she would never marry. Now her dream of motherhood was coming true, and she was overjoyed.

“It seemed like such a miracle to me, especially when the baby started to move. I kept saying to myself, There's a brand-new person in there, someone who never was before, someone I'm going to love for the rest of my life. It was incredible. Luke was obviously a lot less excited than me, but still he said he wanted the baby, too. He said he was just nervous. He thought I was ugly while I was pregnant, but I figured he was just being more honest than most men are about it. Ironic, huh?

“I was so happy about the baby that I didn't let myself know what I think I already knew, if that makes any sense. I think I realized the marriage wasn't going to work while I was pregnant. The doctor told me the worst risk of miscarriage was over after the first three months, and so of course I took this literally, and at the fourth month, I went out and bought a crib. I remember it was on the day they delivered it, Luke came home and told me he'd quit his job. Just like that. It was as if he knew that now he had me. I was about to have a baby, and so I would definitely take care of things. I would take care of him financially because now I didn't have a choice. He was wrong about that, but I can see why he thought it. He must've thought I'd do just about anything to hold on to that semblance of family.”

Of course, that was not what Luke said to Sydney, or to her friends or her family. He told them all that he was depressed, far too depressed to work, and whenever others were around, he fell silent, looked hangdog, and in general played the part of a depressed person. To make matters even more confusing for Sydney, a number of people told her that depression among first-time fathers was common.

“But I never really thought he was depressed,” Sydney told me. “Something didn't seem right. I've been a little depressed myself at times, and this just wasn't it. For one thing, he had way too much energy when there was something he really wanted to do. And also—this seems like a small thing, but it made me pretty nuts—he wouldn't get help. I said we should spend some money for a therapist, or maybe some kind of medication. But he avoided that idea like the plague.”

When Jonathan was born, Sydney took a two-month maternity leave from her teaching, which meant that all three members of the family were at home together, since Luke was not working. But Luke seldom even looked at his new son, preferring to read magazines by the pool or to go out with his friends. And when Jonathan cried, as newborns will, Luke would get angry, sometimes enraged, and demand that Sydney do something about the noise.

“He acted like a martyr, I think is the best way to put it. He'd hold his ears and make these tormented faces and pace around, as if the baby were crying just specifically to create problems for
him.
I think I was supposed to feel sorry for him or something. It was creepy. I'd had a C-section, and I really could've used some help at first, but I ended up wishing that Jonathan and I could just be alone.”

The same people who had told Sydney about depressed first-time fathers now assured her that new dads sometimes felt uncomfortable around their newborns and so kept their distance for a while. They insisted that Luke needed sympathy and patience.

“But Luke wasn't ‘keeping his distance' the way they thought. He was totally oblivious. Jonathan might as well have been a bundle of rags, for all he cared—an annoying little bundle of rags. Still, don't you know, I wanted to believe those people. I wanted to believe that somehow,
somehow,
if I could manage enough understanding and patience, everything was going to be okay. We were going to be a real family, eventually—I wanted so much to believe that.”

When her maternity leave was over, Sydney went back to work and Luke stayed by the pool. Sydney contacted an au pair agency to find daytime child care, because it was clear that Luke was not going to take care of Jonathan. After a few weeks, the young sitter confided in Sydney that she felt “weird” keeping the baby with the father always present but never showing any interest.

“I can't understand why he never even looks at his baby. Is he quite all right, ma'am?” the sitter cautiously asked Sydney.

Using a variant of the excuse Luke had provided, an embarrassed Sydney told her, “He's going through a hard time in his life right now. You can just kind of pretend he's not there and you'll be fine.”

Sydney recounted how the sitter looked out through the glass doors of the den toward the swimming pool, presumably seeing a relaxed and tan Luke sitting there in the Florida late afternoon. Cocking her head to one side in curiosity, she said softly, “Poor man.”

Sydney told me, “I'll always remember that. ‘Poor man.' Poor Luke. It was how I felt about him, too, sometimes, despite myself.”

But the truth was that the person Sydney had married was not “poor Luke” at all, nor was he a depressed first-time father, nor was he going through a hard time in his life. Rather, he was sociopathic. Luke had no intervening sense of obligation to other people, and his behavior, though not physically violent, reflected this dangerous fact. For Luke, societal rules and interpersonal expectations existed only to serve his advantage. He told Sydney that he loved her, and then went so far as to marry her, primarily for the opportunity to ensconce himself as a kept man in her honestly earned and comfortable life. He used his wife's dearest and most private dreams to manipulate her, and their son was an aggravation he moodily tolerated only because the baby seemed to seal her acceptance of his presence. Otherwise, he ignored his own child.

Soon he began to ignore Sydney as well.

“It was kind of like having a boarder, a boarder you don't like very much and who doesn't pay rent. He was just kind of there. For the most part, we lived these parallel lives. There was Jonathan and me, always together, and then there was Luke. I really don't know what he did most of the time. Sometimes he'd leave for a day or two. I don't know where he went—I stopped caring about it. Or sometimes he'd have a friend over for drinks, always unannounced, which could be kind of a problem at times. And he'd rack up big phone bills. But mostly he just sat around by the pool, or when the weather was bad, he'd come in and watch TV, or play computer games. You know, those computer games thirteen-year-old boys play.

“Oh, and I nearly forgot—for a couple of months, he collected lithographs. I don't know what put him onto that, but he was really excited about it for a while. He'd buy a new one—they were expensive, let me tell you—and he'd come bringing it in to show me, like a kid, like nothing was wrong between us and he wanted me to see the new addition to his art collection. He must've collected about thirty of them—never framed them—and then one day he just dropped the whole business. No more interest in lithographs. Over.”

Sociopaths sometimes exhibit brief, intense enthusiasms—hobbies, projects, involvements with people—that are without commitment or follow-up. These interests appear to begin abruptly and for no reason, and to end the same way.

“I had a new husband and a new baby. It should've been one of the happiest times of my life, and it was one of the worst. I'd come home from work, really tired, and the sitter would let me know that Luke hadn't so much as glanced at Jonathan all day, and after a while my own husband began to disgust me so much that I couldn't even sleep in the bedroom. I'm ashamed to tell you this, but I slept in my own guest room for a year.”

Overall, the greatest difficulty Sydney had in telling me her story was her painful embarrassment about what had happened to her life. As she put it, “You can't imagine how humiliating it is to admit, even just to admit to yourself, that you actually married somebody like that. And I wasn't a kid when I did it, either. I was thirty-five already, not to mention I'd been around the world several times. I should've known better. But I just didn't see it. I didn't see it at all, and, to give myself a little break, I don't think anyone else who was around at the time saw it, either. These days, everybody tells me they never dreamed he'd end up acting that way. And everybody has a different theory about ‘what's wrong with Luke.' If it weren't so embarrassing, it would be funny. Different friends have decided it's everything from schizophrenia to something like attention deficit disorder. Can you imagine?”

Unsurprisingly, not a single person guessed that Luke simply had no conscience and that this was why he ignored his obligations to his wife and his child. Luke's pattern did not fit anyone's images of sociopathy, even nonviolent sociopathy, because Luke, though he had a high IQ, was essentially passive. He did not go about cutting throats, either literally or figuratively, in an attempt to achieve power or wealth. He was no corporate shark, and certainly no fast-talking, high-octane Skip. He did not have enough vitality even to be an ordinary con man, or enough physical courage to rob banks (or post offices). He was not a mover. He was, in effect, a nonmover. His predominant ambition was to be inert, to avoid work, and to have someone else provide a comfortable lifestyle, and he exerted himself just enough to reach this middling goal.

And so how did Sydney finally recognize his remorselessness? It was the pity play.

“Even after that really ugly divorce, he still hung around the house, and I do mean nearly every day. He got another crummy little apartment, and he always slept there, but during the day he'd hang out at my house. I know now that I shouldn't have let him, but I felt sorry for him, and also he was paying a little more attention to Jonathan. When he'd come home from kindergarten, sometimes Luke would even meet him at the bus, walk him home, give him a little swimming lesson or something. I felt nothing for the man. I really never wanted to see him again, but I wasn't going out with anyone—like I'm going to trust another man, right?—and I thought it was a good thing if Jonathan could get to know his father, get a little attention from him. I figured it was worth the nuisance if my child could have at least part of a dad.

“Well, that was a mistake. My sister was the one who called the shot. She said, ‘Luke doesn't have a relationship with Jonathan. He has a relationship with your house.' And oh boy, was she ever right. But then I couldn't get rid of him. Things got really awful and complicated and . . . creepy. It was really
creepy.
”

She shuddered, then took a deep breath and went on.

“When he—Jonathan—was in the first grade, I realized I had to get Luke out of our lives once and for all. There was just no peace, no . . . well, I want to say joy. When someone doesn't care about you at all like that, having him around you so much really sucks out the peace and the joy from your life. He kept just showing up. He'd come in, or go out to the pool and make himself comfortable, just like he still lived there, and I'd get really morose, really tense. I'd stay in the house with the shades drawn just so he wouldn't be in my line of sight. It was crazy. Then I realized—Jonathan's spirits were going down, too. He didn't really want Luke around, either.