The night that Nicholas tried to sell me the lacquer table, the night I heard about the man, we were having dinner at what had been our father’s club, a place we had often been to as children, a club to which I still belong. This was the night that I watched Nicholas devour four triple lamb chops. Two years before, I had seen him order shrimp and only suck the shells. In Rome, I had seen him move a fork around a plate of porcini and never take a bite. But at our father’s club, Nicholas gnawed bones and told me, in detail, the history of the lacquering technique. He told me about the monks in Japan. I gathered that Nicholas did research on his winnings.

He also told me that when the man gave him the lacquer table, he, in turn, gave the man, for his forty- seventh birthday, forty-seven presents.

Nicholas described each one of the forty-seven presents. “I thought that it was time,” he said, “to try out reciprocity.”

My brother told me that when the man left him, he used to look for the man’s car on streets outside the all-night bars. Nicholas had never been in one of those bars, he told me, until he went looking for the man. I did not know why Nicholas was telling me this, and I did not know why he wanted me to buy the lacquer table. He wanted me to buy the lacquer table, he said, with the understanding that he could buy it back from me, for the same price, if he changed his mind.

Nicholas used the word proviso.

When I told him that I saw, in these terms, no advantage for me, Nicholas waved his hand in front of his face.

“Let’s skip it,” he said.

I was willing to do just that, and then a waiter brought my brother’s second plate of lamb chops.

Nicholas cut into the flesh.

“I cannot imagine,” he said, “how anyone could get tired of me.”

When I said nothing, Nicholas said, “I mean, I find it unimaginable. “

Nicholas went on about how unimaginable he found it.

I drank a B&B and watched my brother eat. I was baffled by his greed for food, but I wondered even more about his lust to sell a present. He claimed that he had never sold a present, and I was inclined to believe that he had not.

I thought about presents, I thought about money.

Tributes and transactions.