I almost told my brother that it seemed to me that he would know this sort of thing better than I would. I almost told him to take the cost of the average netsuke and divide it by the toil of its acquisition. I did not say this. What I did say, because it was the truth, was that I had no idea.

“Neither do I,” Nicholas said. “But it’s time that I found out.”

I asked why it was time.

“I am not going to lower my standards,” Nicholas said. “With two people, it only works if one of them is stunning.”

I said that it had been known to work when both were stunning.

“No,” Nicholas said. “It does not really work between equals. I mean equal specimens. One person must be amazed to be with the other.”

I suggested that it occasionally happens that both people are amazed.

Nicholas said, “There has to be gratitude in the act.”

I told my brother that there often was.

“One person,” my brother said, “must be more grateful.”

I asked what made him think this.

My brother called me my name. It was one of the few times I could remember that Nicholas did not call me one of the endearments that he had for everyone.

When he spoke, he gave each word equal time.

“We are talking,” he said, “about different things.”

I said nothing. I knew we were.

“Now someone else,” Nicholas said, “has got to be the stunning one.”

In the piano bar, Nicholas drank beer from a bottle. He watched a woman stand behind the piano and sing a song that a famous singer had made her own. As he listened to the woman sing, my brother peeled the label from his bottle and stacked the shredded paper in the ashtray. When the woman held a note longer than required, Nicholas rolled his eyes.

“One can always depend,” he said, “on the wrong people to have all the nerve. Some people should remember that there is a reason modesty is called a virtue.”

When the woman finished, Nicholas did not applaud.

He went to the piano and spoke to the piano player. They had some discussion, and after it my brother wrapped his hand around the microphone. He made his fingers look long.

The piano player began the song, the one the woman had just finished singing, and Nicholas closed his eyes, made his face look rapt, raised his free hand to his face, touched his neck, his throat, arched his head back in the spotlight, and, starting slowly, released a long and quiet note.