I'm Not Handsome When I Smile

At my graduation dinner, one of my rich aunts asked what was next after high school, and I, already drunk on riesling, sawed off a corner of bloody steak and said, “I was thinking of getting a motorcycle and killing myself on it.”

For a beat, the only sound at our table was the clink of my silverware. Then Dad offered a nervous laugh, and the rest of my family—my two rich aunts, my alcoholic grandmother, and her new boyfriend—joined in, relieved to not have to take anything too seriously. The handful of family friends in attendance, members of my father’s inner circle, looked at each other and smiled falsely, uncomfortably, all except Sypos, who, as was his way at the time, watched me when he thought no one was looking. The next day, Dad kicked me out, but not for what I’d said at dinner.

That was a year ago, at this same restaurant. It was jarring how a memory could pounce like that, evoked by something simple as a fork and knife, a white table cloth, a tasteful little candle, a How are you doing this evening, gentlemen?

“We’re perfect, thanks,” Sypos announced, sending me a secret smile across the table that almost made me barf. “Actually, you know, we’ll each take another glass of wine.”

The waiter agreed, we would. I pursed my lips, touched Sypos’s ankle under the table with my foot. He gave me a wide-eyed look that made him seem younger than his gray hair.

“I like dark liquor with my cake,” I said, even though we were still finishing our entrées, and the topic of dessert was far removed from conversation. Sypos bent over backwards trying to signal back the waiter.

He was eager tonight. His latest client’s gallery opening went well, better than anyone  who’d seen the work had expected, and his cheeks were already flushed pink before the waiter poured our first glass of wine. He was in a good mood, which always made him want to be in an even better mood, and Sypos’s go-to way of raising his spirits was spending his money.

Sypos, full name Charles Alexander Sypos, called Sypos by all who knew him (an unfortunate remnant of boarding school, where he’d met my father) was a painter, but that wasn’t how he made his money. I was pretty sure he’d gone to art school, back in the nineties when that kind of thing was still taboo and exciting, but pretty soon had realized he liked being rich too much to try to sell his own art. He bought a gallery with his great grandfather’s Wall Street fortune, and furnished it at his whim with the latest up-and-coming slop, which he sold at exorbitant prices to fashionable millionaires looking for tax write-offs. For these sales, Sypos received a pretty commission.

Fine art made no sense to me, much less how someone like Mr. Sypos could make more money off it than the artist. Usually, it wasn’t even good art. Not that I really knew the difference between good and bad art, only how it felt to stand in front of a painting.

Earlier, at the gallery, I allowed Sypos to introduce me to the throngs of eccentric men and their wives as “my guest, Elijah,” and I would hold out my hand and introduce myself as “Elijah Whelan, lovely to meet you.” My father’s name was not unknown among this crowd, nor was the desire to gossip, and though it had been a year since my fall from grace, those who put together my name with the features Dad and I shared did little to conceal their raised eyebrows. They looked at me, looked at Sypos, and privately marveled that we had lasted this long. I couldn’t hold it against them.

After a number of these introductions, I decided it was better both for Sypos’s image and my sanity if I kept to myself. I spent most of my time wandering the gallery, holding a little plastic plate of cheese and fruit and looking at the great rends of paint on the canvases. Abstract, had Sypos called it? No, it was something more pretentious than that, post-post-expressionism or pseudo-impressionism or who the hell knew, it all looked about the same from where I stood.

I found one piece that was six feet tall and nearly as wide. It looked like a tear in the world, a big, ugly wound. I looked at that one for a long time, found myself returning to it as I made my aimless laps. It made me feel sick, tortured, but I couldn’t look away.

At one point while I stared, Sypos sidled up behind me, put his arms around my waist, and snuck a kiss to my cheek. It must have been towards the end of the night, when most people had gone home; we must have been alone in the room for Sypos to do something like that out in the open.

“What do you think?” Sypos asked, pulling away and standing beside me at a careful distance. I kept my eyes on the painting, the giant red-and-purple-and-blue slash.

“I like this one,” I decided. It was the first one I’d ever liked.

Sypos beamed. He was handsome when he smiled—properly handsome, not like the strange, thin, awkward kind of handsome he usually wore. His eyes were softer when he actually used his crow’s feet for something.

“Really?” Sypos asked.

“Yeah.” I gave the painting a final look. “It makes me feel…”

Sypos nodded. “I understand,” he said, and I wished he would explain so that we could both understand. But I didn’t ask, and anyway before I had time to, Sypos was whisked away on the arm of some investor or artist or both. I checked my watch and went outside, where I waited on the sidewalk for a long time before Sypos finally joined me, practically bouncing as he hailed us a cab.

“What’s got you all excited?” I asked.

“It’s a surprise,” was all he said, and when we arrived at the restaurant—one of the nicest in town, the kind of place where the courthouse judges ate their lunch and groped the waitresses—I assumed that the surprise was the dinner reservations.

Now, the waiter came, collected our plates, and dropped off our brandy and, soon after, our cake. I never thought there was anything sexy about watching someone eat, but I made sure to lick my fingertips when I accidentally got chocolate on them, just because I liked how Sypos’s eyes followed the motion. It was part of what drew me to him in the first place, back when I was in high school and looking for activities that would shock my father. Sypos would be around our house—for dinner, for drinks, to see Dad and their friends—and he would watch me. My mouth shaped around the end of a spoon; my teeth sunk into the end of my pencil when I sat at the kitchen table doing my homework; my fingertips when I licked them to turn the page of a book I read, curled in the corner armchair while the adults socialized in the living room: of course Sypos watched. I’m not sure when it began, but as soon as I noticed, I invited it, as I did now.

When I met his eyes and smiled to let him know he’d been caught, he went red and looked away. I signaled our waiter for the check.

We went back to Sypos’s apartment. He could afford a house, but he preferred to live in the city, and more than that, he couldn’t stand the idea of living alone, preferred to be in a building chock full with neighbors, neighbors who definitely heard us when we got home and fucked on the big feather bed.

Afterward, we lay there, me on my back staring at the ceiling with my legs all tangled in the sheets, Sypos stretched out with his arm tucked under his head. It was quiet, peaceful. Moments like these reminded me of what it was like sneaking around, back before Dad caught us; when I would go out to a “friend”’s house and really just wind up here, exactly like this, if you squinted.

Once his breath evened out, Sypos sighed, sat up, tossed off the sheets, and padded, barefoot, into the bathroom. Water ran. If I turned my head, I would see him standing in front of the sink, naked and grimacing as he cleaned himself off, threw the condom away. I would prefer not to see it; I didn’t turn my head.

I waited for Sypos to return and offer me a warm, damp washcloth, which I used to wipe come off my stomach before it started to congeal. I was glad he didn’t try to do this for me. It was disgusting enough to do it for myself.

Sypos pulled on a clean pair of boxers and sat at the end of the bed, not quite looking at me. He tapped his fingers on his knee. “Your dad called,” he said.

I didn’t react, except to toss the washcloth into the bathroom. It just made it to the tile. It became clear that Sypos didn’t plan on saying anything else until he got a response.

“Yeah?” I prompted, flippant. “What did he want this time? You to kill yourself, or me?”

Sypos’s breath hitched. “That’s not funny. That’s really not funny.”

“No.” I looked away. “No, it isn’t, you’re right. Sorry.”

I really shouldn't have said anything. Now he was upset, frowning at the wall, hands wringing the sheets under him.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he told the wall. What the hell was I supposed to say to that?

“Of course there is,” I said, patiently. “There’s something wrong with me, too. There’s something wrong with everyone.”

“Your dad’s right, I’m taking advantage of you.”

“If anything, I’m the one taking advantage of you.” There was more truth to this than I cared to admit. Ever since Dad kicked me out, I’d lived with Sypos, both because it had seemed to Sypos to be the natural progression of our relationship, and because I had no other options unless I wanted to be homeless or get a job. I could get a job; I’d entertained, for a moment, the thought of being a librarian, until I learned what librarians actually did and that they had to go to college to do it. I did not want to go to college, nor did I want to work some useless job of the sort they left for people with high school diplomas to do. So I stayed with Sypos.

I propped myself up on my elbows. “Anyway, we’ve talked about this a hundred times. I’m nineteen, not twelve.”

“I know how old you are.” Sypos stood up, drifted over to the bureau, sifted through the top drawer until he found a half-crumpled cigarette box. “You were a baby when we met, you know.” He grimaced around the words. A true yet unsettling assertion—he’d known Dad long enough that he’d even managed to know my mother, who left before I was old enough to remember her face. There were no photographs of her in my father’s house. My family never talked about her. I asked Sypos, once, to describe her to me, and when he did, he included a description of me as a baby in her arms. He had no business remembering me as a baby. I was angry at him for it, as I was now when he brought it up again.

“Well, you weren’t thinking about fucking me then, were you?”

Sypos fumbled and dropped the lighter. “No, of course not. Christ, the things you say sometimes—”

“You’re the one talking about me as a baby.”

“That wasn’t my point and you know it. I just mean—“ He picked up the lighter. “—Your dad and I were—have been friends for a long time.” Sypos loved to insist that his friendship with my father was still intact, that this was a momentary blip in their otherwise rock-solid relationship. “I understand where he’s coming from. In many ways, he’s not—” He lit the cigarette on the third or fourth try. “He’s not wrong.”

I fell onto my back, listened to him push open the window.

“If you look at things from his perspective, I mean,” he continued.

Delinquent boy orchestrates torrid affair with rich man over twice his age.

My father’s main problem was that for my entire life, despite my constant, bullheaded insistence, he had refused to give up on me. Not when my mother left him with an armful of toddler to deal with on his own; not when I got called to the principal’s office in kindergarten for trying to cut the teacher’s hair; not when he had to have parent-teacher conferences every week from fourth grade on; not when I began to act out in high school, not when I stole his credit cards, drank his liquor, crashed his cars. People said it was a miracle I graduated, but it was not a miracle, it was Dad’s fault.

He was so pleased at my graduation dinner. He got to wave me in his mother’s, his childless sisters’ faces—see? he said, with just his smug eyes, it was worth it, after all. All the screaming matches, the lost nights’ sleep, the money spent on tutors who quit as soon as they were hired. But, he would find out soon—very soon, in the course of only an hour—it wasn’t worth it, after all. Before everyone even finished their entrées, my grandmother, noticeably high on whatever prescription painkiller she’d bribed her doctor to be on, would stumble accidentally into the men’s room, where she would find me and Sypos, flushed red and disheveled, bursting out of the stall. Just another betrayal in a long line of betrayals, but for whatever reason, it was the last straw. Finally, my father gave up on me.

“I wish he’d just let me talk to him,” said Sypos. “Really talk. Then maybe he’d understand. It’s not like what he thinks, I’m not some—“ Sypos curled his mouth around the cigarette, didn’t say the word we both thought: pedophile. “You’re the one who started it, anyway. I barely thought of you at all before you—and I tried to resist it, I knew it was… inappropriate.”

“I’m just so charming,” I supplied, lifting my head a bit to peek at him, standing by the window, and he looked over as though surprised to see me there. He smiled his proper, handsome smile, shook his head to himself.

“You don’t take anything seriously, do you?” he asked.

I held out my hand for his cigarette, and he passed it without complaint.

“You really don’t care what he thinks of you?”

I exhaled smoke into the air and gave back the cigarette, which he stubbed out on the windowsill before he sat back on the foot of the bed. Of course I cared what my father thought of me. My entire life had revolved around getting his attention, one way or another.

“He’s going to think shit about me, whether I care or not. Might as well not.”

“He’s your dad.” He said that like it made a difference. I shrugged. He stared at me for a while, then looked back at his knees.

“I wish I didn’t care what people thought,” he admitted.

“Just stop taking everything seriously.”

“You’re teasing me.”

I grinned. I was not handsome when I smiled. He didn’t seem to mind. I tipped my chin at him and spread my legs, and he fell easily into my arms.

After a while, as he pressed my hips into the mattress, he paused, and looked into my eyes in a way that made my stomach drop.

“Can you—“ he began, then stopped.

“What?” I panted, touching his cheek, hiding my impatience with tenderness. He leaned into my touch like a puppy.

“Call me Charlie,” he said. “Please, when it’s just us.”

Charlie. I had never heard anyone call him Charlie. It was always Sypos, or Mr. Sypos, or, very rarely, from strangers, Charles. I squinted at him, trying to picture it.

“Charlie,” I tried, and he sighed like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and rolled his hips down into me. “Charlie.” He kissed my cheek. I thought he might cry. “Charlie." A little boy’s name. That’s what he looked like when I said it; a little boy, lost in this expensive apartment. I wanted to laugh. I didn’t.

When I got out of the shower, toweling my hair dry, he was gone. I wandered into the living room and found him setting up a flat, oversize package against the far wall. He must’ve had someone sneak it into the apartment while we were at dinner, and I just noticed. The surprise. It wasn’t dinner, after all. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at me, almost shy.

“I got you something.”

“You shouldn’t have.” I recognized the dimensions of the package, and meant the words as more than a courtesy.

“I wanted to.” He waited, expectant. I stood where I was, naked except for a large t-shirt, holding my damp towel. He fidgeted. “Go ahead, open it.”

Dutifully, I walked up to the package, pinched it at the top corner and peeled a wide swath of the brown paper away. Through the tear, the painting looked even more like an open wound than it had hanging on the wall, the vibrant colors in stark contrast against the plain beige wrapping.

I turned away. “Don’t they need it at the gallery?”

“They’ll hang it back up in the morning, but it’s yours. After the exhibit closes, you can have it back.” It was obvious this wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. “I wanted to surprise you.”

One of his whims. Sypos had expensive, extravagant whims. I was flattered, in the distant way I was always flattered when he did things for me. To me, it felt like he was showing himself off, making a spectacle of his power and influence, of which, granted, he had a lot. How ridiculous the whole thing was, to go to all that trouble for this one moment of reveal, but how like him, too. He probably felt like a child waiting for a parent to hang his macaroni art on the fridge. Craving the validation, the praise. Look at me, look at me. Charlie.

“What will I do with it?” I asked, staring at the thing. It wasn’t like I had my own apartment, and we both knew I wasn’t welcome in my dad’s house, where my room was too small to display the thing anyway.

“Whatever you want. It’s yours.”

“Whatever I want?”

I didn’t look, but I knew he nodded. I spent some time peeling back the rest of the packaging paper, leaving the strips of it in a mess on the floor. Then I wandered into the kitchen, attached to the living room in an open floor plan, and chose a knife out of the block on the counter. I held it in my hand, felt the weight of it, looked it over.

“Elijah…” said Sypos. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Why don’t you come sit down?”

I sat by him on the couch, still holding the knife, the painting propped grandly against the wall beside us. His eyes flicked between the two objects.

“You’re nervous,” I said.

“Well, yes.”

“What would happen? If I did cut it up, I mean. It’s yours, isn’t it? Well, mine.”

“Well—technically, yes, but. It would be awfully rude, I think, to the artist.”

I stood and walked up to the painting, touched it with the point of my knife. I heard him suck in a breath through his teeth.

“How much money would I be destroying?”

“It’s not about that, necessarily.”

“How much?”

It made me giddy to see him squirm. I’d never pushed him this hard before.

“I paid a hundred-twenty thousand,” he admitted, at last. My heart sped up. I stared at the tip of my knife where it touched the paint.

“I wonder how much I’m worth.”

He sighed, a short, sharp sound. “Seriously, you’re being—“

“How much you’ve paid for me, I mean, over—what, the last year?” I turned to him, let my knife hand fall to my side. His shoulders relaxed, though only marginally.

Sypos didn’t say anything. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t know what to say to me, either. While I waited to see if he thought of something, I looked again at my knife. It was a little thing. A paring knife, I think, for peeling potatoes and cutting up apples and things like that. I couldn’t tell just from looking, but I was sure it was very sharp.

I had never wanted to kill myself, but I had imagined it many times. My fascination was not with death or a desire to be dead. I just wanted to know how people would react. If they would feel sorry for me, if they would fall to their knees and wail, if they would feel nothing at all. My father would blame himself, if he cared to blame anyone, I was sure of that. My grandmother, my aunts, they would blame him, too. And secretly, silently, they would all be relieved. I didn’t know what Sypos would do.

I held the paring knife against my wrist, glanced up at his face. It went pale.

“How much money would I be destroying?” I wondered, and before I could smile and tell him it was a joke, he shot to his feet and yanked the knife out of my hand.

“Stop.” He threw the knife away. It skidded across the floor until it hit the baseboard of the kitchen island. He took me by the arms and sat me down on the couch. “Just stop, okay?”

I went stiff, and he realized he was holding my shoulders too tightly. He loosened his grip, instead gently rubbed the sides of my upper arms, up and down, up and down.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as his eyes searched my face. “You must know you can talk to me, right?”

The idea of being open with him, or anybody, gave me hives, and I looked away. He was quiet for a minute and stopped rubbing my arms, but he left his hands, warm and solid, pressed against them.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry for?” Surely it was me who should apologize, for being the way I was.

“For not being able to help you. I wish I could take it all away—“ I didn’t know what he meant by it. “—I wish I could just take it away.” He looked like he meant it, like he was about to cry from it, and I wondered if what he said was true, and I wished, for a moment, that he could take it away, take it all away, whatever it was. It must be something awful in me, to make him look like that.

“I wasn’t really going to,” I told him. “I was just joking.”

He blinked at me. “About killing yourself?” His voice was soft as anything I’d ever felt. “Why would I laugh at that?”

My mouth parted, but I didn’t say anything. I thought back to graduation dinner again. I could still hear Dad’s nervous laughter. I could still taste the steak.

“I don’t know,” I said, as Sypos brushed a tear from my cheek. I hadn’t even noticed I’d started to cry. “I guess I just confused you for someone else.”

Dakota Edwin Collins (he/him) is a fiction writer from Nashville, TN. His unpublished novel, For the Realm, was shortlisted for the 2024 William Faulkner — William Wisdom Prize. He holds an MFA in Fiction from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.