I waited while my brother shook his hair out, to give it volume for the photograph.

His hair did not need volume, his hair had volume.

But he kept shaking it.

Bent over, with his hair sweeping the top of the pyramid, Nicholas turned his head away.

“Do you know the difference,” he asked, “between beauty of the spirit and beauty that is merely physical?”

I knew that I could not give him the answer that he seemed impatient to give back. I asked him the difference.

“Physical,” Nicholas said, “the kind of beauty that is merely physical, is the kind that can’t be faked. In other words, inner beauty is what counts, but outer beauty is what shows.”

As I watched my brother paying tribute to his hair, while I thought over his remark, it occurred to me that I had probably never witnessed, even from Nicholas, an exhibit of so much self-regard accompanied by so much deserving.

I was about to take the picture when a half-dead-looking dog appeared in the frame. The dog sniffed my brother’s feet.

When Nicholas saw the dog, he waved his hand in front of his face to stop the picture. He knelt down on the stone. He said, “Poochie.”

He looked up at me. “This is a very old poochie-boy. No, this is a very old poochie-girl. Look at this beast, look at this darling old beast.”

I replied that I did not want to look at the beast, that the beast was putrescent.

The dog was everything that a dog should not be. It looked too old to be alive, emaciated, flabby at the same time, and its stringy coat was patched with dried-on mud. I did not understand how Nicholas could get as close as he was to anything that looked the way the creature did. I had seen my brother shield his face in Mexican markets to block out slightly overripe papayas. Ordinarily, he was revolted by men in short-sleeved shirts; he had a horror of clip-on bow ties. Yet there he was, kneeling down beside the creature on the stone.

It had not occurred to me to tell him not to touch the animal, until I saw my brother’s fingers slide into the filthy coat.

He rubbed the dog between its ribs, then down inside the cavity of its belly. Something that looked like gentleness showed in his fingers, and I heard my brother murmur to the dog, though I could not hear the words that he murmured.

His murmuring had the same gentleness that I had heard or actually, not heard, not exactly, when I had seen my brother murmur to babies in carriages. That was a thing my brother did. In parks, in stores, on sidewalks, Nicholas murmured to babies. The murmurs, I think, were not meant to be heard, though I suspect that Nicholas did intend to be seen murmuring.