The look he gave me said that I was not good enough to give a look to. I had seen his face and the faces he put on it for more than half my life, and I had never seen the face that he put on it for the sake of frocks. That is how far Nicholas would go for a word he liked, for something he wanted to say, and that face is more or less the face I’m seeing tonight, the face that shines up at me twenty-five years later in the lacquer. In the mouth, in the unsmiling lips, in the dark eyes that look black in this light, I see my brother, I see Nicholas, giving me a look.

Some of the clothes that Nicholas called frocks were mine. He liked to put on my clothes in secret. He adored the shirts that could almost fit him twice, the sweaters that hung down on him like coats. He adored the trousers that came up to his ribs. One time he stole my belts and punched a hole in every one of them to make each one fit his waist.

He loved to wear the belts tight in the big trousers and roll up my cuffs and look at himself looking small.

I think Nicholas had a terror of size, of flesh, his own flesh, a terror of it. I think he would have been happier to have had no body, to have been no more than his face.

I could not stop him from putting on my clothes. I think wearing my clothes was his way of telling himself that he would always be younger, smaller, and that he would never not be cherished.

Once I saw him touching a pair of trousers on my bed. He reached down into the empty pockets, as if he would find something in them if he could reach inside them far enough, if not one time, then the next. He went from pocket to pocket in a cycle, turning my trousers front to back. He looked as though he thought each pocket would be something new each time it came around.

I stood behind the door and watched my brother reach down into my pockets. I could not believe that he would do it again—and then he would do it again. I made bets with myself about how many times he would do it. I bet that if he did it three more times we would become orphans; our mother and father would die together in a plane and make us rich.

I made a bet that every time he reached into my pockets there would be another fortune to divide.

I made a bet that if he reached in five more times, he would die, too, and I would get the fortune to myself, but that if he did it five more times after that, I would die instead, and Nicholas would be the one to stay behind and drown in all the fortune.