My introduction in life to the art of seducing
When I was a kid, my mother taught me how to soften my gaze when watching birds so they wouldnât feel the weight of my attention. This kind of look is just the opposite â a concentrated gaze that lands like a finger, tapping, casting the line of desire until it catches and tugs.
I looked at her, and something activated in me, responding to a set of clues telling me how she wants to be seen. âLook intently,â I told her, âbut not for too long, just graze them with it.â
âWhoa,â she said, âcareful where you point that!â She looked at me in wonder, and I felt both proud and embarrassed. âWhere did you learn to do that?â
I think of myself as someone who has always known how to do this â an intuitive seducer â but my friendâs question invited me to reconsider the origins of the impulse.
There is, of course, the mere fact of my being a woman, which means I have been consuming lessons in seduction my whole life from movies and TV. But my friend is also a woman, and she canât emit the smoldering atmosphere to reel someone in. Whereas I can do it on command, as if it were my job. As we watch our meals arrive I ponder this, and something clicks. For many years â sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly â seducing people was my job.
Both my parents grew up working-class, sometimes working-poor, and I was raised with an ethos of scarcity â we wasted nothing, ate down to the rind of everything and tried not to buy anything on credit. Though my family was solidly middle-class, my classmates often assumed I was poor because I wore discount shoes and generic brand clothes all through grade school, until I switched to thrift stores as a teen.
My parents werenât cheap, exactly, but they didnât locate status in commodities â my mother once told me that driving a luxury car was like giving the finger to all the poor people in the world â and they believed in work. The week I turned 14, the legal employment age in Massachusetts, my dad took me to city hall to get a work permit.
That year, I started working as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant. Dressed most days in a pair of faded overalls and Doc Martens, I would peer out at the front of the house and watch the wait staff â mostly 20-somethings who held the glamour of low-level celebrities to me.
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Tidy in their identical aprons and T-shirts bearing the restaurant logo, they all seemed kind of hot to me in an ineffable way that had little to do with their looks. The source of this attractiveness, I eventually realized, was the skill with which they deployed charisma.
They were practiced seducers, flitting around the dining room, calibrating their affect to suit each diner. The ones with the tallest stacks of bills at the end of a shift cultivated a flirtation with their tables that hit exactly the right note to release money. As if every diner were a slot machine played less by chance than by skill.
At 14, I already had a keen sense that I ought to appeal to people, men especially, but âsucceedingâ at this had mixed results. Early sexual development had left me vulnerable to early sexual experience â I didnât really learn how to say no until adulthood â and mostly it had left me feeling powerless and numb. Using my drive to be liked in a context whose endpoint wasnât sex, and which promised material reward for success, seemed a much safer forum. The idea felt empowering, even, as it gave me control over the encounter.
My first job waiting tables was at CafĂŠ Algiers, a landmark Middle Eastern restaurant in Harvard Square in Cambridge that catered to professors and graduate students. I was 17 and happily living in a squalid apartment with four friends in Somerville. Amid the wobbly octagonal tables, I balanced silver pots of mint tea and plates of hummus and practiced my approach.
I learned that if my gaze was too intense, the men (and occasionally women) asked sotto voce what time my shift ended; if it was too subtle, they ignored me and left disappointing tips.
The trick was to kindle the right feeling in myself â I have something they want and I want to give it to them, but not yet â to render the plates of food a symbol for something else, to exude an air of slight withholding. I learned what all good salespeople understand: If you suggest that a person wants something with enough confidence, thereâs a good chance theyâll believe you.
Every shift was an exercise in the art of seduction, and each one ended with a tally of tips that amounted to a kind of grade â numeric feedback on the degree of my success.
I honed my skills quickly. After just a few weeks, I could balance five entrees on one tray, instantly calculate a bill in my head, and just as instantly read the customers. I could tell if a diner wanted me to tease them, treat them with mild disgust (rare, but they did exist) or welcome them like a long-lost family member. My scatterbrained nature, which made me clumsy in my everyday life, was focused by the stream of social cues. I intuitively understood the rhythm of it, like a dancer catching a beat. When I was working, I didnât think and I didnât make errors â which was good, because my livelihood depended on it: In 1996, the minimum wage for tipped employees was $2.13 per hour.
My second job as a server was at the Greenhouse, another storied Cambridge institution. The overpriced diner had an iconic green sign and a dining room that was perpetually fogged with cigarette smoke. The female professors generally tipped big and wanted a dry little flirt, sprinkled with irony, as if we were in on the same joke. The blue-collar guys who ate at the counter liked to trade endearments, to be teased a little. A natural mimic, I sometimes dropped my Rs when talking with them. You want that on mahble rye?
After the Greenhouse, there were eight or 10 more restaurant jobs â the Jewish deli where families came for brunch, the bakery frequented by moneyed lesbians, the Mexican restaurant that hosted a lot of tourists and bachelorette parties. Whatever their differences, every restaurant was a microcosm of larger social hierarchies. I once worked a brunch shift in Belmont with a guy I was dating. He often got high before work and was terrible at his job. He never thought about what the customer wanted, never read their faces for subtle cues, never seduced anyone. He didnât have to. He could get orders wrong, mix up tables, spill water on a customer, and still end the shift with a tall stack of tips. Meanwhile, my earnings dropped if I smiled too little or too much.
I came to learn that this was a rule in restaurants: No matter the quality of their service, male waiters got bigger tips. They also rarely had to put up with the kind of abuse that we did.
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CreditâŚAntoine CossĂŠ
I remember one table I had during my stint at the Mexican restaurant. It was a big family, replete with a preening patriarch who emanated insecurity that he expressed by treating every woman in sight like garbage. I smiled through it, even when he patted my ass in full view of his wife, who then glared at me.
A knot of shame and fury tightened in me. I ignored it and imagined the tip this kind of treatment inevitably led to â a ten, maybe a twenty, even. I smiled at that vision and then directed it at the table. But in this instance, after theyâd left as I cleared their oily dishes, I realized the man had stiffed me. I seethed for days. It stoked a fire in me that felt elemental. More than 20 years later, I can feel its heat. It wasnât so much the money as the humiliation.
Over time, exposure inured me to the humiliations of the job. A person can get used to almost anything given enough time â personality will grow around adversity the way tree roots will grow around a rock, shaping itself in response to the immovable.
Plus, I needed the money. I was a teenager for most of the years I worked in restaurants. I didnât have a degree, or even a high school diploma (unless you count the G.E.D.). Even though I was occasionally stiffed, it was the highest-paying job I was qualified for, by a long shot.
The humiliations inherent in waiting tables were also made tolerable by the satisfaction of being good at my job. While I held less power than the diners in many ways â I was there to literally serve them â I also had a subtle control over them, one they couldnât see and which grew stronger the longer I exercised it. I worked them, like a salesperson or a petty con artist, and they were my chumps, my suckers, my johns.
A skilled seducer can invert a power dynamic to their advantage. The knowledge of how to do this was, I realized, a valuable skill and one I later employed to much more lucrative ends.
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