Others come—paler, older, strolling. Some stroll dogs on leashes, others offer cigarettes when they stop to chat.

Eventually, the young and old pair off.

This, also, is what my brother could look out on every night. I would not live over this.

I do not know the going rate for youth today. I never have known. The closest that I came to knowing was when Nicholas took in what he referred to as his chess winnings. For about ten years, until the end of his twenties, Nicholas referred to the cigarette cases, the clothes, the paintings, all that he was given by men, as his winnings.

“Look at my new frock,” my brother would say, his voice up an octave with delight.

“Look at my new bibelot.”

Gimcrack.

Cadeau.

Objet pas exactement trouvé.

One year, from one man, Nicholas acquired items of malachite. From another, he became a collector of netsukes. The Japanese robes, if I am right, were gifts from more than one man. When I asked him, once, how he felt, taking money from men, Nicholas insisted that he did not take money from men, he took presents from men.

I suggested that taking netsukes instead of money did not make him less a catamite. For a minute, I thought Nicholas was offended by the word. I watched him turn a netsuke over in his palm. It was ivory, an insect on bamboo, with black coral eyes inlaid. Nicholas turned it over more than once, holding it at different angles, as if it were vital to choose the most becoming, and when he looked at me, his face made me wish that I had said anything else.

“Don’t you think you’re being a trifle technical?” he said.

I replied that I had not intended to be technical.

“Let’s don’t linger over it,” he said.

I saw in my brother’s narrowed eyes that he could read my thoughts and never miss. He could make me embarrassed, ashamed, because he, unmistakably, was not. I was convinced that Nicholas could read the grammar of a thoughtwave.

“This is a dragonfly at rest on bamboo,” he said. “Notice how the ivory simulates the grain of bamboo.”

Nicholas held the netsuke to the light for me to see. I could see the simulated grain, but I wondered, and I asked, why the artist had not used bamboo.

Nicholas overlooked my question with an eyebrow. “Did you know,” he asked, “that dragonflies are so light, so weightless, that they can stay in the air with perfect stillness?”

It occurred to me that Nicholas must have meant this information to mean something.

My brother took up another netsuke. “This one,” he said, “is a cicada emerging from its chrysalis. Its wings are carved from tortoise. Look how my finger shows through it. Did you know that a cicada lives ten years in its chrysalis, feeding underground on the sap of roots?”

I did not find it necessary to say I had not known this.