Then the even bigger one also shifted in his chair, spread his legs apart even wider, and it was hard to decide which one of them to look at.

Still in profile, Nicholas leaned toward me and whispered, “Bless their hearts, these big ones.”

The one who was disappointed about the bullfights became sullen and told the one who had proposed the nightclub that they could go to dinner, but he did not know about the nightclub. He did not know about the nightclub, he said, because he had to think about the time change. He had to think about the time change because he had to call Florida.

“I’ve got to call Mom,” said the one who was maybe not as huge.

When Nicholas heard that, he turned face-front in the couch. He spread his legs apart as far as he could spread them, leaned toward the men across the table, and in a voice I had not heard from him before, a deep, forceful voice that was not his, he spoke to the huge young men directly.

“Fuck Mom,” Nicholas said.

The two huge young men stared across the table at Nicholas. The one who had to call Florida brought his knees together and cupped his hands in his lap.

“Go see those female contortionists,” Nicholas said in the unknown voice to the young men in crew cuts and military uniforms that night in the bar off the lobby of the Ritz in Madrid. “Go see those female contortionists dance.”

A week later Nicholas was still talking about the huge young men in crew cuts.

“Bless their hearts,” he said. “They wanted to do their own contortions, but there was nothing to do but eat some eels.”

Nicholas was always blessing men’s hearts.

Once he blessed the heart of a man in a river.

It was a man he never met, never spoke to, but whom we saw together once, a lean, finely made man stripped to the waist, rowing a one-man craft one late morning, in summer, in Rome, in the Tiber.

Together, we watched the man rowing.

He was so finely made.

Ordinarily, we would have watched him from a bridge and would not have seen as closely as we did how finely made he was. In Rome, the bridges are high above the river, unusually so, as are the streets, the buildings, the city itself. If we had watched the man from so high up, we would have seen him, I think, as any man, rowing in any narrow river, anywhere; we would not have seen what he became for us.

For both of us.