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.

“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.”