“Why would I sing like myself? ” my brother asked me. “I have never done anything like myself.”

I wondered if Nicholas believed this.

I wondered if it was true.

Behind the mirrored doors, in the back of a drawer, under turtlenecks arranged by color, in envelopes marked by year, I find photographs of Nicholas, recent photographs, photographs that he did not blow up and frame as large as life.

I do not think that he would have called them shots.

Turtlenecks arranged by color, I gather, were my brother’s filing system. What strikes me is that Nicholas had no need to keep these photographs and less need to hide them. No one but Nicholas lived here, no one was likely to look through his drawers, no one but the Spanish cleaning man who came twice a week, and I doubt that Nicholas would have worried about a cleaning man sneering over unbecoming photographs.

I spread them on the cashmere blanket to compare the best and worst. The difference is not between one and another. The difference is between these hidden photographs and the figure in the Japanese robe.

The difference is between the hidden photographs and Nicholas.

What I am wondering is why he kept these photographs, why he hid them, and why he hid them where he did, in a place where they could so easily be taken out and looked at. If they had been mine, I would have put them at the bottom of a chest, a deep chest packed inside with things impossible to move. If I were going to take the pains to hide a thing from sight, I would take the pains to make it hard to see.

More likely, I would have thrown them away.

I am wondering why Nicholas did not. I am wondering if now and then he took them out from under the turtlenecks to look at them, to study them, perhaps, and if he did, how often, and why, and what, I wonder, did he think when he studied them.

There is no ball-point on these photographs.

No blue hollows carved into the cheeks.

And when the young men came into this room, the young men my brother paid, when they saw the blown-up, life-size photograph from years ago, the photograph in the mirrored frame of the creature in the Japanese robe, how, I am wondering, did Nicholas answer the question, which one young man or other must have asked—the question of who the figure in the Japanese robe, in the mirrored frame, was.

Who it had been.

I am wondering if my brother smiled, laughed, gave the young man a remnant of a look, pointed to the photograph, then at himself, and asked the young man why he thought he was being paid.

That is what I would like to think my brother did.