“And this one,” he said, showing me yet another netsuke, yet another present from a man. “This one is a mask, an exact miniature of what the lead actor wears on stage. Notice this,” he said, and slowly turned and angled the mask. “Now notice this.” He turned it again, to another angle, then slowly to another. At the different angles, the small carved mask in my brother’s hand took on different expressions—anger, scheming, grief, remorse.

In my brother’s hand, the mask changed face.

“That is what the actors do,” my brother said. “They get every expression, convey every emotion, just by turning their heads, like this, like that. They play their part, their whole character that way, just by turning the mask. That’s their whole performance, just the angling of the mask. The mask stays the same, of course. It is the same mask throughout the play, it is only the angles that change.”

The mask, he said, was carved from lacquer, from thousands of layers of lacquer. He told me of the skill required to carve such detail into so brittle a material. He told me to imagine the patience.

“Actually, there is a difference,” Nicholas said, “between taking presents and taking money. It is the difference between a tribute and a transaction.”

I expect that Nicholas did believe this.

“I never take anything that does not delight me,” he said. “I never take things from more than one man at a time, and I never take anything that I could not buy myself.”

I expect that Nicholas believed that these were points of honor.

I am even inclined to believe that he meant it when he said, “There is nothing wrong with Sugar Daddies, per se. Sugar Daddies are only tawdry when one needs them.”

I took notice of the words.

Apparently, we had come to the year of per se.

The photograph of my brother in the Japanese robe may have been taken by the man in Chichén Itzá, not the year that we were there, but later, a year they may have gone back together. The man in Chichén Itzá was one of the men Nicholas knew for a while.

The diamond cuff links are here, in this room, in a box.

I think the man in Chichén Itzá was the malachite man. I do not think he was the netsuke man.

I did not lose track of the men; I never kept track. It was not that there were so many, but I tried not to hear about them. This was not difficult, until the last one, the one who left Nicholas, rather than the other way around. Until the one who left him, whom I heard about then, I heard more about the presents than about the men who gave them.

The man who left my brother was the one who gave him the lacquer table. I know this because the year that the man left him, Nicholas offered to sell me the lacquer table at what he called a “nothing” price. The figure that he named was not a “nothing” figure.