Chaplin turned on his heel, happy to have scored a point, trying to remember where he had seen a bathroom, for he wished to freshen up his vocabulary words and then talk some more to Dexter, who could stand a few belts of meme, hegemony, and Giotto. But as he stuck his hands in his pockets, he realized they were empty. His cards were gone.

Had he left them in the car? In the street beforehand? Were they scattering on the beach somewhere? Patting his pockets (and why did people pat their pockets when they knew they were empty?), he felt eyes upon him. He saw, reflected in a window, that a man was staring at him.

He calmed down, pretended to push back his unruly hair, as if he’d been using the reflection as a mirror, and he turned back toward the patio.

Standing distinctly away from those who had come to the party for fun was a single man. He was holding a glass of water. Older, with a potbelly over which hung a limp blue tie, he stood in his shirtsleeves as awkwardly as if awaiting a doctor’s examination. He had thin salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle, watery blue eyes behind spectacles, and yellowing teeth, which he was now snarling with—no, he was smiling.

Chaplin nodded once, and the other man gave him a single wave in return. This man had nothing to do with films. He was not a banker or a businessman who wanted to invest. Those with keys to the vault were like bull’s-eyes to every pretty girl at every party, and this man had no brand-new friends. Chaplin’s immediate feeling was that he worked for the government and was there to arrest him.

In fact, the man took a step toward him, and so Chaplin turned and went inside, back into the house. By the time he’d found a nice, tall overstuffed chair in the living room, one that he could get lost in, he felt silly.

The chair was comfortable, and it gave him a view of the patio. He took a pleasant moment to consider the figures of the women outside, and felt that if they truly wanted to be considerate, they all needed to lose their towels.

“Oh—my—God, but he’s terrible!”

He recognized the voice, which was from the brass family: Katie O’Dell.

“I know. I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Neither was I!”

The voices were coming from directly behind his wing chair. He tucked his legs up under himself, folded his arms, shrank in place, and waited for more.

“I was just asking him what his new project was, and he took me by the hand and said he wanted to keep me in mind, and then he said it exactly like this.” She paused. “‘For other kinds of parts.’”