“It’s lucky to be stunning,” Nicholas went on. “I adore having drop-dead bone structure.”

He turned to me, though I would not say he gave me his attention. He asked when I had first learned that I was stunning enough to get men to buy me drinks.

It was a topic I did not feel inclined to pursue in front of the woman from San Francisco, and even less so in front of the man. I replied, to end the matter, that it was not a thing I’d learned, it was what I’d always known. I said that everyone ever born should be stunning enough at least once in his life to be bought a drink by someone.

The sister, who had made a dour face when Nicholas asked me the question, kept making it after I had answered.

“I had to learn,” Nicholas said to me, but really to the man. “I was twelve years old, having a Coke at the Empress of China. I did not usually have Cokes at the Empress of China, and I don’t think they encouraged children at their bar, but I’d been having lunch with my mother, our mother, and in the middle of cashew chicken she said she had to run an errand. She told me to wait for her at the bar. So I went to the bar when they brought the tea. I loathe tea. All my life I have loathed tea. So I was sitting at the bar of the Empress of China at three in the afternoon, and the only other person there was a little Japanese man, a darling little businessman in a seersucker suit. I mean the blue-and-white-striped kind, not the gray-and-white or brown-and-white, and he asked me, this little Japanese man, if I would like to taste his Scotch.

“You know, take a sip. A quick sip was what he had in mind. He said we could be discreet, that no one need be the wiser. I remember very clearly that he said no one need be the wiser.

“He was so furtive about it, so sort of clandestine, I knew I shouldn’t take a sip of his Scotch, so I told him that he could order a martini for himself, that I would drink it, and no one need be the wiser.

“Of course, I didn’t think he’d do it. But he did. He ordered a martini and set it next to me and watched me drink it. That’s all he did, he just watched me drink it, nothing else, except that two or three times while I was drinking it, he reached down into his trousers, I assumed to make some minor adjustments.”