New Wave
A short story about dating a maybe-sociopath in your 40s
They talk about whether her last lover was a sociopath. “Here, read this article,” her friend Jenn says. He was a man already in relationship who had rushed at a newly single mother, showering her with romantic intentions, only to panic and back out of the proposed relationship. Apparently such men can bear a striking resemblance to sociopaths.
“Are you a sociopath?” Charlotte texts him. “Y/N.”
“N,” he texts back.
When she was just out of college, the New Wave sex symbol who had occupied a great deal of mental space in her early teens came into the bookstore where she was standing at the register trying not to fall asleep on her feet. Cashiers weren’t allowed to read behind the register at that job, with the exception of the New York Times Book Review, which she would read through immediately as soon as it came out every week. Sometimes one of the assistant managers would come up to talk to her — a young man who was almost ten years older than her. When he turned 30 she had signed his card, “Wow, you’re old. Happy birthday.” And he had exclaimed, “I hope I’m around when you turn 30!” But he hadn’t been, and anyway, he would have been in his 40s by then.
Everyone at that job had a tamped down feeling about them. Selling art books to rich people in a chilly tower in Chicago was not what they had planned. So when this very tall rock star came in, her electric astonishment had been tamped down by the woman at the next register, whose name Charlotte didn’t now remember. “Who?” the woman had asked. How could she not know who?
He came to her register with his books — all she remembers is that he was buying a hardcover copy of Joyce’s Ulysses — and sized her up in her ribbed sweater. He was even taller than she would have expected, and he looked to her now, several years after her crush, older and puffier. There was a certain satisfaction in his having looked her up and down, but she also realized a glimmer of something as he had walked out, something shiny lodged in the asphalt of her mind, a clue. The impression was something akin to, “Oh, he thinks he’s the big deal.”
When she was still bantering daily with the maybe-sociopath, he’d told her that when he was in high school, he’d had a good friend, a girl, who’d tried to make him wear a gold chain. She later admitted that it was so she could pretend he was this same sex symbol, the rock star who had eyed Charlotte at the bookstore. Apparently, the girl had had a mad crush on the sociopath. Apparently? Charlotte had thought when she heard this story. Why did boys always assiduously ignore things like the girl right next to them being madly in love with them? Convenience, she guessed.
It had taken Charlotte until her 40s to reconsider her position on the appeal of boyishness. Boyish men, she thought. They may finally be losing their charm. But that was her problem — she enjoyed charm. And as a slightly cranky introvert with a sly sense of humor, she was the type of woman charmers enjoy making laugh. After she began her flirtation with the sociopath, someone she’d met on social media through mutual friends in the poetry world, she told Jenn, “I don’t get it. What’s he doing? He’s in a relationship. But he’s cute and charming and sort of a poetry-world prodigy. Well. I guess ‘prodigy’ suggests youth. He’s 51. But he still seems like a prodigy.”
She also realized a glimmer of something as he had walked out, something shiny lodged in the asphalt of her mind, a clue.
At first Jenn was tentatively encouraging. “I think this is what you need,” she said. “I mean. He’s in a relationship. And seems a little nuts. But he is charming, talented, and legitimately seems super into you. He can keep up with you, banter-wise. You need this right now. To remind you how delightful you are. These love bombers serve their purpose, but you can’t rely on them. Just take it for what it is. Don’t get attached. Don’t be human, basically.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. There’s no way not to get attached,” Charlotte said, staring into the mug of ice cream she was having for lunch. Since high school, when she got anxious she lost her appetite for most everything except ice cream. “This will end badly.”
“Or else it won’t,” Jenn replied. “Maybe you’re the one in our group who gets a happy ending. Maybe he really is in love with you.”
He did, in fact, declare his love for her after a few months of daily text exchanges. He talked her through moving out of her husband’s house, a plan already in motion when they’d started talking. They sent each other books they’d written. They admired each other’s writing, learned about each other’s lives. They developed “feelings.” Then she’d gone on a trip to New York to meet him and watch him read from a stage that she might have read from but was not invited to. He was a person whose presence seemed to extend a few feet out beyond himself. It was thrilling and a bit unsettling.
On a visit to the Whitney with him, she watched him talk to a museum volunteer, who lit up during the conversation. In Washington Square Park, he was asked to take a picture of another couple of middle aged lovers, wealthier and more suburban looking than themselves, and she surreptitiously photographed him photographing the couple, as he effusively encouraged them to look happy for the picture. Later at the hotel, he’d remarked in bed that her breasts slumping toward her armpits as she lay on her back looked like “wild apples” that his family used to drive to an orchard and pick. She was delighted by the absurdity of this extraneous lyric gesture, but also needled by the sloppiness of the analogy. “If they were in orchards, they weren’t exactly wild, were they?” she’d remarked. He ignored that. Charlotte wondered if this trip had been the very last gasp of her womanly agreeableness.
The sociopath broke it off with her after a series of discussions about boundaries that her therapist had encouraged. Finally, the boy wonder had said inscrutably, “I think we should stop.”
“Stop what?” she’d replied. “We didn’t even get to actually have a relationship yet, and now we’re having to have a break up. I thought we agreed we wanted more than an affair.”
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” was all he could say. All he could keep saying. She suspected he felt terrible about becoming the kind of man he’d assiduously avoided being since moving in with a woman from high school he’d reconnected with over ten years earlier. This woman, who he was still living with, had used him to get out of her marriage. And now he had used Charlotte in a similar way. And apparently it was too stressful to look for apartments with Charlotte wanting to know how the search was progressing.
“I’m letting everyone down. Just like I knew I would,” he said mournfully.
“Have you ever heard of the term ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’?” she asked.
Then he launched into a story about how he’d been picked last for kickball in middle school, last after even the boy with one leg.
“Wait. You’re breaking up with me. I’m the one not being picked.”
“He used to joke about not having a leg. He seemed to have a sense of humor about it,” was all he said.
“Hm. I wonder what happened to that guy.”
In some ways, Jenn was even angrier than Charlotte was. The sociopath-prodigy had actor parents and at 18 had had a bit part as a “punk rocker” in a movie that had influenced every girl she knew in high school. He’d gone from being the kid not picked for kickball to being a really cute punk dude with a drug problem. (Dreamy.) This was before becoming a sober poetry teacher with a manic need to charm the pants off everyone. And now he had, in short, ruined Jenn’s favorite movie.
“Tell her I’m sorry. I really am,” he’d said to Charlotte on the phone.
“Nah, I can’t tell her that. She’s way too mad.”
“Well, I am. Truly.”
Charlotte’s own anger didn’t fully hit her until about six weeks after the “we should stop” conversation. She began to realize he was never coming back. That she’d never have his full attention again.
“It’s like being famous to one person when someone is that into you,” she told Jenn. “It’s such a rush.”
“Here, I’m sending you an article on narcissism and ‘wonder boys.’ It’s a thing. The talented, ineffectual, ‘why do you expect me to be a grownup?’ type.”
“M’kay. Yeah, that does sound like him, but hey — did I tell you about how I think he’s an Enneagram 2? Apparently, they like to be seen as caretakers. They love making people feel good. But unhealthy ones over-extend themselves and then become avoidant. Wait. Do you think men ever send each other a bunch of articles trying to figure out our personality types?”
“No,” Jenn said. “They don’t.”
As menopause approached, and she began producing a smaller amount of agreeableness hormones, it was as if a veil lifted.
A few weeks later Charlotte carried her yoga mat to the Sunday class that is mostly lying on the floor. If she could get to the class and lie on the floor, maybe her mind would loosen its hold on the rage threatening to subsume her late-40s body. She thought she would be exempt from such indignities as “aging” and “not being able to sleep at night because her hormones had turned against her.” She thinks of herself as striding forward in a determined fashion, but probably looks more like a shuffling mom-type, a woman of negligible age. Someone who lately is being aggressively “ma’am-ed” from all sides. Yoga pants and a thousand-yard stare. When a frat boy in a group walking three-abreast doesn’t yield to Charlotte on the sidewalk, she wants to screech like a middle-aged banshee and never stop.
She had grown so used to seeing the narrative through men’s eyes — any narrative, the text that is culture — that as menopause approached and she began producing a smaller amount of agreeableness hormones, it was as if a veil lifted and she became astounded at what she’s put up with, all the witnessing that men require. All those times she was dragged to Tarantino movies. All the Lynchian bullshit she sat through. All the Bruce Lee movies boyfriends watched her watch. Only at the beginning of relationships would any man sit through Jane Campion with her, though it’s true that her son’s father went with her to the theater to see a new adaptation of Anna Karenina when she was nine months pregnant, the last movie she’d see for a while. But we know what happens to Anna.
After several weeks of not speaking to him, she finds an excuse to text the sociopath, and then continues texting him daily for several days, discussing poetry and life, circling around the hurt. He is visiting his aging father in a state even closer to hers than the state he’s normally in. She finds herself cleaning her house in case he unexpectedly visits. (He won’t visit.) She sends him a sad poem that made her think of their doomed affair. When she gets up to go to the bathroom, she looks in the mirror and thinks, “I’m too old to pine after a boy.” It’s possible that they are both just tired and middle-aged. Tired wonder boy. Poor thing, she thinks. He writes her back to say, “Oh, Charlotte.” All her relationships seem to get to this point. Then he says he must rest, that his sister is sleeping in the same hotel room with the light on and he will be required to put on an eye mask and earplugs for her snoring. It’s all very glamorous, their life. “Good night, bunny,” he writes. She won’t hear from him again. Good night, bunny. Good night.
