“Sweetheart, she doesn’t care what we’ve seen,” Nicholas said. He leaned forward, facing the woman across the table.

“I expect you pride yourself on being unaffected,” my brother said to the woman.

“I do,” the woman said.

“I don’t,” my brother said. “But I wonder all the time, who are people trying to fool, when they go through all their lives just acting like themselves.”

He paused because he had come to a pause. After the pause, he said, “A little affectation now and then is just a little generosity.”

That night, listening to my brother’s unornamented voice in the garden above the Spanish Steps, it crossed my mind to consider what he’d said, and even as I tried to, even as I made a note to ask him later what he’d meant, I became aware that I would be unlikely anytime soon to shake off the image that had come to me of a Japanese businessman in a seersucker suit making minor adjustments at the Empress of China.

When the hotel bar began to close, long after his sister had excused herself, the man from San Francisco recommended a place open late, where, he told us, we could see the most beautiful men in Rome.

“They’re all the most beautiful,” Nicholas said when we were there.

“They think so, too,” said the man from San Francisco.

Nicholas was right—every young man in the place could have passed himself off as the most beautiful in Rome. And the man from San Francisco was right that they all knew it.

It was a place where men could dance together, and most of the men were dancing, but not together.

There were no pairs; there were mirrors.

There were mirrors on walls, on columns, and the most beautiful men in Rome were dancing alone, each one by himself, watching himself, entranced with himself.

The men made eye contact with their own eyes.

The one wall not covered by mirrors was covered instead by a mural of opulently muscled, overgendered men, half or more undressed. The illustrator must have tried to capture how men might look if they could issue directly from each other in a womanless world, and in the mural the lewdly virile specimens, cartoon ideals, regarded each other with untender admiration.

The men on the dance floor, the most beautiful in Rome, did not regard each other at all. There was humor in the mural, in the illustrator’s spirited excess. It was clear about the men in the mural that, made flesh, they would adore being what they would be. But the men on the dance floor gave no appearance of enjoying their beauty. Abandoned to self-study, their faces were intent, critical, unamused.

Nicholas looked at me and put my thought into words I might have chosen if he had not beat me to them.

“If you’re going to fancy yourself, you should have some fun with it,” he said.

“Look at them,” the man from San Francisco said.