I said yes, that he probably would have said frocks.

Then the woman gave us more vermouth and told me step by step how to make lentil soup.

When he was little, one of our grandmothers told Nicholas that little boys who stare at themselves too much in mirrors grow up to be ugly men.

Nicholas asked if the same thing was true for little girls.

Our grandmother told him it was not.

“Then why,” my brother asked, “are there so many ugly women?”

I reminded Nicholas of this the morning of the day that we saw the dog on the pyramid.

From my bed, I could see my brother in the bathroom mirror. Nicholas always kept the door open while he scrubbed his face, as if each inspection of his cheekbones should be viewed as an event.

In the same mirror, I could see myself in bed as I watched him.

I looked at my brother in the mirror and repeated what our grandmother, years ago, had told him.

It was to the mirror that my brother answered back.

“Lamb chop,” he said, “I have been staring at myself my whole life, and I’m not ugly yet.”

He kept scrubbing his face.

“Anyway,” Nicholas said, “there is one thing you can always say back to the dead about the claims they made. You can always say, ‘Honey, look who’s dead, and look at who’s alive.’”

The night of the day that we saw the dog on the pyramid, Nicholas insisted on inviting the man in the short-sleeved madras shirt to join us for dinner. The man, thank God, did not wear the madras shirt. He wore French cuffs—a tad de trop for Chichén Itzá.

Nicholas made a show of being annoyed by the man’s attentions to the bus boy.

“Trust me,” Nicholas told the man. “You don’t want anything to do with that one. That one has been around. That one is not exactly a pristine commodity. All the perfumes of Siberia could not get that one clean.”

The man gave me a wink. It was not his first wink of the night. “He’s jealous,” the man said to me. “He loves me already.”

“You’re sweet,” my brother said to the man. “But you are ancient enough to be my father.”

The man said, “I’m a father figure.”

“I’ve had a father figure,” Nicholas said. “My father was a father figure. But you are also old enough to be my Sugar Daddy. Are you rich enough to be my Sugar Daddy?”

“Is he drunk?” the man asked. The man had an irritating habit of speaking to Nicholas through me.

Nicholas said, “I am not drunk. How rich are you?”

Nicholas never knew when he was drunk. When he was drunk, Nicholas thought he was captivating.

The man smiled at my brother, a broad, slap-on-the-back kind of smile.

“Yes, I can see them,” Nicholas said. “Handsome, costly looking teeth. But tell me in numbers. How much mon-mon do you have?”