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.

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.