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.

When my brother was thirteen, he asked our mother if my bones had stopped growing, and when our mother told him that they had, Nicholas bought me a gold ring. It was, he told me at the time, technically, a wedding ring for a man, and inside it, all around the band, Nicholas had ordered an inscription. There are reasons that I have not worn the ring, and until two days ago, I had not looked at it for more than twenty years. But I have carried the inscription in my mind. Nicholas had the ring inscribed in Hebrew, a language he did not know. The inscription is not a line from the Old Testament; it is from no Hebrew source. It is a sentence Nicholas made up and had translated. He could have chosen Greek, he could have chosen Japanese, but Nicholas chose Hebrew. I did not ask why, because the year Nicholas gave me the ring was the year that Elizabeth Taylor had become a Jew.

Nicholas told me that he had paid for the ring by dressing up poor and singing on streets. It is possible, though not very, that he did this. At the time I wondered, what, exactly, Nicholas would have chosen to dress up in to look poor. If he dressed up poor, if he sang on streets, it was not in order to pay for the ring. Nicholas paid for the ring with money that he took from our father’s armoire, from a drawer that was supposed to be secret. I know this, because when our father noticed the loss, our father, then well into his sixties, called me in to his dressing room to ask me what to do about a thirteen-year-old boy.

I told our father to let it go.