Just a smile

Having spent my whole life in European and American cities, I am well aware of the laws governing interaction between strangers. Avoiding eye contact is now second nature.
Here I should add with a wink that ignoring other people comes naturally to a Frenchman, but I do not agree that this trait is one more evidence of arrogance or dislike of strangers. I strongly challenge the latter and ascribe the apparent French aloofness to a lack of social training early in life. Things have changed, I’m told, since I left Paris, but the fact is that social-bonding events such as proms and graduation ceremonies were totally unknown when I was a student. My business school diploma came in the mail. Campus life was nonexistent – there were no campuses – and organized mingling events were rare. As a product of that system and era, I came to America less than adept at dealing with strangers in social settings.
But, again, one law makes perfect sense in a big city crowded environment and it is even more strict between genders: Don’t make eye contact. Period. Unless, of course, you do want to make eye contact, but this is a different matter.
I was on the subway with my wife, Toni, the other night, returning home after dinner at the China Grill, when I noticed that a woman in front of me kept looking in my direction. Sitting next to her were a young girl, her 10 year-old daughter I assumed, and an older woman who seemed to be the grandmother. The younger woman, a New York City guide on her lap, was in her early forties, casually dressed in jeans and barely made up. She was not glamorous, but I could see that, with a little effort, she would be quite attractive.
The little girl was playing with a rag doll and the older woman resembled very much the babushkas my wife and I had seen on the streets of Kiev and Moscow. The same deeply lined face, the same shabby clothing and woolen cap. Having said that, they could have also hailed from Albany, Baltimore or Kansas City. No way of knowing.
The subway car was almost empty at that late hour so I found it impossible to avoid periodically glancing at these three fellow passengers just in front of me while my wife was busy checking her iPhone and this is how I became aware that the younger woman was looking in my direction and holding her stare a fraction of a second longer than it is usual. Maybe I reminded her of someone she knew. It took me a couple of subway stops to become aware of the situation.
And then, out of curiosity maybe, I found myself holding the woman’s stare. She didn’t look away. I was aware that we were breaking the unwritten law, but when I smiled at her – eyes more than lips, but a smile nonetheless – and she responded in kind, I realized that we had both – for different reasons possibly – acted out my fantasy of a different society, one free of hypocritical correctness, one where words like friend or like haven’t lost their meaning, one where cowardly haters don’t hide behind the anonymity of the web. Two strangers had acknowledged that they saw something they liked in one another, nothing more, but already a lot.
I smiled – inwardly this time – at the thought that I had never done this, except many years ago and in less innocent circumstances. This time felt better.
When we finally looked away, I knew that this was the last time our eyes would meet even if there were many stops ahead of us. I understood that she would never look again in my direction and I was totally fine with it.
At West 4th street, we all left the train and went our different ways, but the truth is I’ve been thinking about that smile ever since.