“What does the boy want?” the man asked me.

“I think he wants to know how much mon-mon you have,” I said.

“Doesn’t it break your heart,” the man asked me, “that something that looks like this is like this?”

The man winked at me again.

Nicholas put his hand on the man’s arm and smiled back at him. It was all bright teeth between them at the table.

“Nice cuff links,” my brother told the man. “I’m mad for ostentation.”

My brother played his fingers on the cuff links: There were small diamonds in them. Nicholas covered the diamonds with his fingers. He made his fingers look musical.

“I dote on ostentation,” Nicholas said. “Tell me numbers.”

“Is he like this all the time?” the man asked me.

Nicholas pulled his hand back. “You’re not going to tell me how rich you are?”

The man smiled at my brother in a way I found obscene.

“It is a shame,” Nicholas said, after a bit. “I love Chichén Itzá, but you can never get a decent dinner here. They have never heard of cooking here. Look at these Mexican pommes frites.”

Nicholas held up a strip of fried potato, examined it. He took a small bite, made a critical face, then deposited what was left of the potato onto the edge of the man’s plate.

“These Mexican pommes frites can go to hell,” my brother said to the man.

He dropped his napkin on the table. Then he left the table. He slipped through narrow spaces between other tables, moving toward the bar. At the end of the bar, he turned a corner, disappeared. As exits go, it had played well; the man with the cuff links had watched it. Everyone had watched it.

“You don’t look a lot alike,” the man said to me when Nicholas was gone.

I must have said something.

“It’s an act, isn’t it?” the man asked me. “The brother bit? The pretty one likes to pretend, so you keep him happy, you go along with it. Am I right?”

I must have said nothing.

The man leaned forward. I watched his hands slide across the table, toward mine. Without my brother’s fingers over them, the diamond cuff links did not look like much.

The man touched my hand.

“I’m right,” he said.

Across the street, where the mannequins stay lighted through the night, young men gather, late, to lean against the glass. Dressed for summer, for conquest, fit, tanned, gleaming, they share the street with the sculpted figures on display. They arrange themselves, these living specimens of youth, and each one lets the light strike his premium places. Once the young men find the light that suits them, they do not move, they rarely even shift, and all down the block, window after window, the street would be in stillness, if it were not for the reasons that they come, each one of them, with the insolence that is the other side of yearning.