The Invisible Grip: The Art of Lying?

Esquire Magazine


WHEN I WAS VERY SMALL, my dad could always tell when I was lying. When I was about six years old, he told me God whispered it to him. Even though the guy never went to church or seemed particularly religious, I had to respect that. He had an in with God. I wanted to hear it. I figured if I knew when it happened, the precise moment, I'd hear the voice of God, too.

I decided to watch my dad's eyes for a sign — some twitch of recognition, some little break in his concentration, anything — that would tell me when he was hearing the voice of God. I told him easy lies, the ones I always told him: that my brother did it, or that my neighbor, a little asshole named Charlie Iker, made me do it — broke the vase, left the gate unlatched, cracked the storm window. At first I didn't even want to blink, for fear I'd miss the moment when God spoke. But the truth is, I got nothing. No sign. Bubkes. In fact, the more I looked at his eyes, the more I began to realize that my dad had no idea that I was lying. None. He looked straight back at me, waiting to hear the next thing I would tell him. In fact, he was hanging on my words. There was no voice of God. My father wasn't listening to anyone but me. He had no idea when I was lying, especially if I stared him down the whole time.

The trick, I soon realized, was simply to look him in the eye as I spoke. So it was that I became an atheist and a proficient liar in one fell swoop. Such were my salad days.

A PERSON'S GAZE has weight, resistance, muscularity. Clearly, there are people who use their eyes well. You know them: the sales rep, the fundraiser, the tyrannical supervisor. Their eyes force the question. These people may be as dumb as streetlamps, but they are an undeniable presence in the room. They know they must be dealt with. You know it, too.

It is a very particular skill set. The eye-contact specialist is like the one guy in the game of pickup basketball who knows only how to box out for a rebound. Relentless and a little annoying, he uses his skill, presses his opponents with the fundamentals. It may not work every trip down the court, but eventually things bounce his way. Over time, this habit — establishing and maintaining eye contact — creates favorable situations and produces results. The eye-contact specialist gets talked to first, dealt with most promptly, and responded to most thoroughly. He's always first in line for a reason.

And for the one who's being looked at, eye contact sends a message, signaling acknowledgment, connection, and attention, signaling something, I suppose, like empathy. Being seen is, on some level, being felt. It's nice to be acknowledged. Even so, why does eye contact, wielded freely, always feel like a weapon to me? Why do I want to smack people who stare at me deeply while I'm talking about mixed drinks or V-6 engines, about the names of banks or the price of a gallon of gasoline? Maybe the true signal is less subtle, less friendly than "I'm paying attention to you." Whether he admits it or not, that person is participating in one very large bet that you will blink first. That guy, the one who's looking at you — straight at you, right into you — is getting something that you are not. It's called the upper hand.

Well, that's my preferred hand. So I did my thing. For four weeks I tried to use eye contact to get what I wanted, with real abandon. It was no small trick. By nature, my eyes drift. I tend to look past people when I talk. I look out the window, examine the horizon. I'm sure this has cost me connection with some people who take it as a sign of being evasive or shifty. When I paid attention to it, I found that my tendency was to click in, lock eyes for a second or less, then look upward or outward into the distance. It's just not my rhythm to stare.

That was the first lesson: Eye contact is not the same as staring.

People don't like the dumb indifference of a stare. My first attempts at maintaining eye contact were so self-conscious that I took to picking a point on the person's face — as close to the eyes as possible — and gazing at it as calmly as possible. That was a disaster. I wasn't looking at people so much as I was at a blemish they happened to know very well.

If I stared at a point, say, between someone's eyes or at a mole just above an eyebrow, people knew it right away. I did this at a Smoothie King at the airport, and the girl behind the counter stood it for about seven seconds before she asked me, "What are you looking at?" She ran her finger along her eyebrow. She scooped my immune booster in a tizzy.

So I tried to concentrate on eyelashes, but this made my own eyes jump as I talked. My head bobbed, too, and I was hit with a sense of motion sickness. Women constantly excused themselves after talking to me to check their faces in the mirror. I was forced to apologize, telling them that I was just spacing out, not paying attention — the direct opposite of what I was hoping to convey in the first place. It was as if I had become a mirror in which people saw their own tiny imperfections, magnified by my glance.

Both parties in a conversation are caught almost constantly in the true focus and precise direction of a glance. I had to go for the eyes. There is no faking it.

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN people in my life who were good at using their eyes. My tenth-grade English teacher. My shift boss at a Mexican restaurant back in 1986. My friend the newspaper reporter. My accountant. My girlfriend. I don't know if I trusted each of these people because they looked straight at me or if they looked straight at me because I trusted them. Yet each could lock and hold my glance for minutes at a time, while I was feeling sick after fifteen seconds. What exactly did they see? How did they do it?

It was clear that the idea of eye contact is not simply to point your eyes in a given direction. You have to use your eyes. I had to have a move. I sucked it up and started to lock in on the pupils. It took some doing, but I found I could make my- self relax and hold the glance if I simply stopped working to figure out what the other person was thinking. I had to force myself to stop reading every twitch, every sideways glance, every brush of the hair. I had to stop treating the world like a poker game, in which every movement might be a tell. When I walked in the door, when I stuck out my hand, when I said "How are you?" I turned my gaze toward the pupil of the person's eye. It really was a process of searching it out, looking at the black of the eye only, holding my glance there, and waiting until the eye color registered in my periphery.

It worked, too. Women held my glance longer; men moved faster. This worked with waitresses. With clerks at hotel desks. It worked with bartenders. Even with cabdrivers, whom I looked at in their rearview mirrors. I began to gain better control over these transactions by searching out their eyes. It took only a few seconds, but I could plainly see what they were looking for. Here is what I saw: No matter how much attention they appeared to be giving me, no matter how slowly they spoke or how long they paused after greeting me, it was evident that these people were initially treating me like every other schmoe who walked in off the street — trying to figure me out and see how fast they could get me what I wanted before moving on.

The eye contact changed all that. I'd compare it to using a Sawzall for the first time, that moment you realize you could cut through pretty much any wall in the world if you had the right blade. With my eyes, I calmed them, slowed them down, and did so without knocking them over or humiliating them. I used my eyes to upset the speed and indifference of their routines and simply register my presence by asking them to do a double take. It worked every time. They didn't know me, but then, suddenly, it seemed they did. I thought of it as a kind of dominance, holding them in the kind of invisible grip you might have once seen employed by a villain in a DC comic. I got discounts I didn't deserve, a room facing the water. I was warned off the calamari and onto the crab cake. The desk clerk perked up when I arrived at the hotel and stood up straighter when I checked out.

I tried it with people who knew me well, too, people who see me all the time. The Indian guy at the local gas station. The woman I've worked with for seven years. A guy I play cards with on weekends. In each case, upon greeting them, I'd search out their pupils and hold my eyes on theirs for a minimum of three beats. Just as with people I didn't know, time seemed to slow down and routine moments became unpredictable. Not just because three beats is an eternity when you have nothing to say except "What's happening?" but because it meant they had to look at me at least once, and often two or three times, before they spoke.

While I may suck at eye contact naturally, there are people who are worse, much worse, in every ring of my life. The more I practiced, the more hapless they seemed. It's the law of dominance, I think, that the more dominant you become, the more you want to stay dominant. I found I liked backing people down. I began to look at them long enough that I began to sense when they were about to look away. The truth is, instead of them seeing me, it ended up that I could really see them. They were just like I was, a little afraid of eye contact, a little leery of connection. I meant well, so I pressed on. People gave me apologies I didn't ask for. They invited me to lunch.

Sometimes I pushed it too far. The gas-station guy, so used to staring out his windows at the world passing by, was alarmed by my glance after four beats. "Yes?" he said. "Yes?" And I held my gaze, because I had nothing to lose. He reached under the counter, and I thought for a moment that he was pulling out a gun. But he pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds. "Here," he said. "Take one. You may have one, of course."

I took one, too, just for good measure. It seemed a small sort of bullying. I could do far worse with my eyes. Anyone can. The tool can always become the weapon.

WITH ANY GESTURE of influence, the danger lies in not knowing what you are after. I fell into an easy routine after several weeks of making eye contact. One afternoon, while negotiating the price of an antique gold watch I was buying for my son's birthday, I was staring into the eyes of a jeweler, trying to figure out what color his eyes were, when he suddenly dropped the price by $75, to $200. I'd been threatening him somehow and hadn't known it. I didn't break away. I didn't look down. While I hadn't expected as much, now I had to see where I could go from there.

His eyes jumped back and forth, from the counter to the watch to me, then back again, in reverse. His eyes were green, I decided. Green.

"Two hundred," I said. "Flat price. No tax, right?"

He nodded and looked back at me then, long and hard. We were in agreement, though neither of us said a thing.

My eyes are brown.