Nicholas looked down again at the furs.

Nicholas had brown eyes which, in many lights, looked black. He had extravagant black lashes that looked false, and dark hair that even in those years he was allowed to grow so long that he could drag his fingers through it and take almost forever to come out at the end.

That is what he did then, that gesture. He pulled his fingers through his hair, raked it off his face.

“Who cares what it means,” he said, “as long as it’s as high as you can go?”

Then, as though I were not in the room, he turned to a new page of furs with florid languor.

I did not leave. I stayed and watched him while he pretended to be absorbed in the furs. He pretended to read an article in French. His hands looked trapped in his hair.

I told him brains develop in the womb, that by being born too soon he had probably lost points. I did not know if this was true, but I watched it sinking in; I watched Nicholas believing it.

Finally, he looked up at me and said what he always did when he had had more of me than he could take.

He sighed, “Oh, go to your womb.”

Much later that night, I heard my brother through his door, whispering to himself. He must have been studying his face in the mirror when I heard him whisper, “You are the smartest little boy in the world, and you also look like this.”

I have pushed the table forward with my feet to see my brother’s face inside the lacquer.

The sight of cigarettes and nitrites piled up in the glass ashtray made me want to empty it, to clean it, get it to sparkle, get it immaculate—and get a cigarette and light up.

I did all that; now the ashtray is as full as it was.

It is getting dark outside; in this room it’s getting late. I have cleaned the glasses by the bed and am about to drink what is left of the tequila. I want the bottle out of the room, away from the bed. This is a small matter, I admit, but I do not like liquor bottles in bedrooms. It is not that I have rules against drinking in bed; on the contrary, I have taken many drinks to bed. But what I take is the drink—the liquor in the glass. To make another drink, I leave the bed; I put on a robe and take the glass to the bottle, in another room. Unless I have cleared some messy evenings from my mind—which is possible, of course, but which I do not believe to be the case—I can claim truthfully that taking a liquor bottle into a bedroom is something I have never done, and which I, unlike Nicholas, would be incapable of doing.

Also unlike Nicholas, I keep a pair of coasters on the table by my bed.