A Smile
Men have described my smile as naughty. As boyish. As charming. As bad in a good way—that particular phrase arrived more than once, from men who didn’t know each other, which made me think it was pointing at something specific rather than simply reaching for a compliment.
Sweet and wicked appeared, which is contradictory and probably accurate. Not one man, in all the years, used the word malicious.
I am not aware of how my smile looks. I am aware of what produces it—the moment I am in, something a man has said, the particular quality of something unexpected arriving between two people in a room—but the face that the smile produces I only know from what people tell me about it. There is no mirror positioned where I would catch myself without being obvious. What reaches me is the description, which arrives after the fact and which I can only place next to the experience that produced it, without being able to see whether the description fits.
This creates an odd situation that I have been thinking about for years. A man looks at my face and makes a decision about what he sees there. The decision produces a word—naughty, boyish, bad in a good way—and he offers the words to me, and I receive them without being able to verify. I can only take what he says and run with it, which is a phrase I use deliberately, because it describes both my response to the funny thing he said that produced the smile and my response to the description of the smile itself. In both cases I receive something I cannot independently check and proceed from there.
I notice, when I turn this over, that the same absence operates in the other direction. He cannot see what I am responding to when I smile. He can see the face the response produces. From that face he constructs a reading—naughty, sweet, bad—and the reading is genuine, based on real information, but the information is the expression rather than its source. The source is mine and I don’t share it directly. He sees the smile and decides what kind of smile it is. I smile because I am enjoying the moment or he has said something funny or the situation between two people in a room has produced something that I find, briefly, delightful. The delight does not show as delight. It shows as naughty. Or boyish. Or bad in a good way. Something in the translation between what I feel and what arrives on my face produces these readings, and the readings are presumably consistent enough to be reported back repeatedly.
What I find interesting about the descriptions is their range without being its contradiction. Naughty and sweet and wicked and boyish and charming are not the same quality, but they share a family resemblance—they all belong to the area of mischief rather than the area of hostility, to something alive rather than something managed, to a face that has escaped whatever professional expression the room might otherwise invite. I had not thought of my smile as an escape from anything until men started describing it in those terms and I began to understand that they were noticing, in it, the absence of something they might have expected to find. The managed face. The professional warmth. The expression calibrated to make the encounter move smoothly through its stages.
Sometimes a man asks me not to smile. This happened on enough occasions that I cannot treat it as an anomaly. A man would say it directly, or would say something more oblique—something about needing to take what we were doing seriously, or about finding my expression distracting—and I would understand that the smile had produced something in him that was not working in the way smiles usually work. I found myself wondering what he was seeing. Not what he said he was seeing—sometimes the explanation was absent, sometimes it was too general to be useful—but what specific quality in the expression had produced the need for it to stop. The word malicious never appeared in the descriptions, and yet the request to stop suggests that sometimes a man saw something there that carried an edge he didn’t want to be on the wrong side of.
I think—and this is the point at which I move from what I observed to what I constructed, and I want to mark the distinction clearly—that what a man sometimes saw in the smile was a reflection. Not of me specifically, but of something he brought to the room with him. If you carry an expectation that the person across from you is finding you amusing in a particular way—scoring you, quietly, against some standard you can’t see—then a smile that is simply a smile can look like confirmation of that expectation. The naughty in the smile becomes the naughty of being caught. The wicked becomes the wicked of being judged and found wanting. The expression on the face takes on the meaning the observer was already carrying.
I cannot know whether this is what happened. I am describing what seemed, from where I sat, to be occurring—the man’s face reading mine, the reading producing something in him, the something becoming a request. I did not press, when the request came. I adjusted the expression to whatever was more useful in that particular room with that particular man. Whether I managed to stop smiling entirely I doubt; the smile tends to come from somewhere that is not under close supervision. But I could moderate it, make it less present, give it less room.
The men who described it in the positive terms—the naughty, the boyish, the bad in a good way—were usually men who had already settled into the session, who had lost the initial careful posture of someone managing his arrival in unfamiliar territory. The description would come somewhere in the middle or toward the end, arriving as a kind of accounting: this is what I have been noticing about your face while we have been here together. It was offered as information, and sometimes as a small gift, a particular version of you that I can see from here that you cannot see from there.
What I find when I sit with those descriptions—the whole range of them, placed next to each other—is that they describe a face that is present. Not performing. Not holding itself carefully in a professional arrangement. A face that has, at the moment of the smile, forgotten to maintain whatever it was maintaining when the session began, because something in the moment was more immediately interesting than the maintenance. The smile arrives because I am there, in that specific exchange, and it shows on my face in ways I have only learned about from the men who saw it.
I do not know what my smile looks like. I know that it reads as naughty to some and boyish to others and bad in a good way to enough men that the phrase has its own specific texture in my memory. I know that it has, on occasion, needed to stop. And I know that not one man, in all the years, said it looked malicious, which is the one quality that would have troubled me had it appeared, since malice is the one quality I can say with certainty is not there.
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