The fact was that Nicholas could not possibly have adored the man’s stomach. The fact was that Nicholas had a revulsion to excess flesh. To avoid having it himself, in fact, Nicholas frequently took ipecac. I could not tell whether my brother was going out of his way to be kind to the man, or going further not to be, but watching Nicholas rub the man’s stomach under his shirt that night made me feel almost sorry for the man. Anyone could tell how much the poor fool loved it.

The next day I asked Nicholas how, given his revulsion, he could have brought himself to put his hand on the man’s stomach.

We were at a table, and Nicholas picked up a knife to look at his face. He checked his eyes for bloodshot. His eyes, of course, were not bloodshot. His eyes, in those years, were never bloodshot.

“I’ve got suave de vivre,” he said.

In the years that his life was a travelogue Nicholas had what he called his favorite places in the world. He would say of one place or another that it was his favorite in the world, the one place he loved more than any other, though there were, in fact, quite a few places that Nicholas claimed to love more than any other. The places that Nicholas claimed to love more than any other tended to be indoors and to be, in one way or another, mercantile. The places that Nicholas called his favorite in the world were places where clothes or drinks or objects could be bought, and where people could be seen wearing or drinking or buying them. They tended, actually, to be places that one could know about and even claim to love, if one wanted to, without necessarily having been to them.

For a few years Nicholas’s favorite place in the world was the bar off the lobby of the Ritz in Madrid. He was partial especially to the skylight ceiling and to the light that he said came through it in the summer between seven-thirty and nine o’clock in the evening. He said that it was the best light for bone structure, and he appreciated, too, that men were not admitted without jackets and ties. Nicholas maintained that God had not yet made the man who did not look better in a jacket and a tie. What he meant was that he preferred men in expensive clothes. In those years, and maybe still, the bar off the lobby of the Ritz in Madrid was frequented between seven-thirty and nine o’clock in the evening by men who were not staying at the Ritz. There were tables where you could sit on low couches or chairs, and Nicholas held it as an axiom that there was no one who did not look better on a low couch or chair than on a barstool. It was, specifically, one of those low tables that was his favorite place in the world, and there were two weeks in a summer nineteen years ago—the year, in fact, on the bottle in the photograph—during which we found ourselves every evening at that table.