I am trying to be sure about the setting, to know where, exactly, he is standing, to remember trips I know he took. In his teens, in his twenties, my brother’s life became a travelogue. Some of the trips he took, he took with me. I became, in the legal sense, his guardian, also his trustee. For the first five years after our mother and father died, when I had moved out and Nicholas lived alone in the house we had grown up in, I bought him trips with my trustee fee. I could, of course, have waived a trustee fee, but Nicholas said that I should take it. Nicholas always said the worst things in life are free. After our father and our mother died, it was his idea to keep going to Mexico every year for Christmas.

He said life goes on.

One of those times in Mexico, on a Christmas Eve in Mérida, in a bar in a hotel where the band was playing the kind of music that hotel bars in Mérida tend to play on Christmas Eve, Nicholas shouted over the music to a man who had joined us and expatiated for the man’s reluctant benefit on the distinctions between élan and panache.

Nicholas remarked that the man had élan, but that he did not have panache. I was not sure that Nicholas might not have meant it the other way around, but I was useless that night for distinctions. I had been drinking everything that night. The man without panache had bought us many rounds. I ordered drinks I never drink. I got a thirst for sidecars and grasshoppers and golden cadillacs. I got a thirst for them so that the man would have to say their names when he ordered them for me. Their names made him wince. You can get some pretty funny grasshoppers in Mérida, but I did not care how bad they were. I tried, without success, to get a pousse-café.

The man would not leave Nicholas alone. He would not stop talking about what he must have meant to call my brother’s joie de vivre, except that what came out was suave de vivre.

“You’ve got suave de vivre, kid,” the man kept telling Nicholas.

I thought I knew what the man meant, but I had no idea what Nicholas meant by panache. At the time, however, my brother’s observation of his lack of it struck me as an uncanny diagnosis of what I disliked about the man.

“You have no panache,” Nicholas told the man, “but I adore your tum-tum.”

The man had a bit of a stomach, nothing monstrous, but there was some protuberance, and I sat at the table and watched Nicholas reach inside the man’s shirt to rub his stomach. He kept telling the man that he adored it.

“I just adore your tum-tum,” Nicholas told the man. “With this tum-tum, you don’t need panache. With this tum-tum, you don’t even need élan.”