As we walked, I saw my brother’s face when we passed under streetlamps, and it struck me then that there is an event in the history of a face, after the extravagance of beauty has peaked and the pull of decline has just begun, when the beauty that is left to the face clings to the face in longing. It struck me that my brother had come to this event in the history of his beauty. For Nicholas, it was an event that could be called a transition.

Nicholas had an easy way of saying it.

“Have you noticed,” he asked me as we walked, “that I am losing my face?”

I answered that everyone changes with age.

My brother said, “But I expected to be spared. I never thought that anything as dull as this would happen to me.”

He laughed a little, at himself. He wanted, I think, to show me, with his laughter, that he realized he had been foolish in his notion. I was inclined to doubt that he realized this at all. It seemed to me likelier that he had laughed on the instinct that laughter was the called-for thing, the angling of the mask, but that in fact, he did not see anything unusual in having drifted through his life without it having crossed his mind, even once, that he would cease, one day, to be a creature whom others would cherish.

“This is my favorite place in the world,” my brother said when we found a booth at the piano bar.

He asked what I had thought about the young man on the pool table.

I answered, because it was more or less true, that I had not had, about the young man on the pool table, anything that I would classify as a thought.

“I want to talk about pulchritude,” my brother said. “What did you think of his pulchritude? I thought he had pulchritude. I thought he was toothsome in a sort of peaches-and-Budweiser kind of way. I mean, I thought he was comestible on what could be called a certain level.”

I agreed that the young man on the pool table had been attractive on what could be called a level. I added that he had also been attractive in what could be called a fashion.

“Everything can be called a fashion,” Nicholas said. “What do you think that kind of pulchritude gets for a night?”

I asked my brother to repeat what he had just said.

“Mon-mon,” Nicholas said. “How much do you think it costs? For a night?”

I gave my brother a look almost worthy, I thought, of looks he frequently gave me. Of course, he ignored it. Nicholas tended to ignore—or not to notice—looks he was not giving.

“Or do you think it’s by the hour?” Nicholas asked. “I would want the night, I think.”