Chaplin wished he could see her, if only to see how she’d imitated him. No one ever got it right.

“He told me he’d just arrived,” the other woman said, “and he asked where to get a cup of tea,” she said. When there was no response, she continued, “But it was the way he said it. It was obvious what he actually meant.”

There was more general agreement about what a toad he was. Chaplin considered rising in the chair slowly, as if he were a periscope breaking the waters. The women wandered off, and he put his hand over his brow.

When he took his hand away, sitting on the coffee table as quietly as if she had floated there was Frank.

“How are you?” She had a drink in her hand, and there was lipstick on the glass.

“I want to leave,” he said.

“We just got here.”

“And yet I’ve been here a very long time.”

“I suppose I have, too. There are many seventeen-year-old girls in swimsuits, hoping to be given screen tests. I wish we all did something more honest, like white slavery.”

“Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”

She shuffled through her purse. “I thought gentlemen of your stature carried things to write on.”

“I do; they just seem to have vanished. Heh. Heh-heh.”

His public laugh was always more demonstration that he was having a good time than actual pleasure. This, however, came from private stock: Heh. Heh-heh. Much darker.

“Mr. Chaplin?”

“I had an idea. A fan asks for an autograph. I obligingly search for a pen, but can’t find one—no, I get an old deaf-mute to give me it, someone truly decrepit, Loyal Underwood, only he thinks I want a pen-knife. I return to the fan gaily, but I carve right through the scrapbook, and then cut through a photograph of myself. I realize I can’t sign anything with a pen-knife. By accident, I draw the blade across the tip of my finger and open a vein; then there’s some business with that, but after the first geyser, I am still accommodating. I sign the fan’s paper in blood. He’s thrilled. All of his friends come around. They have increasingly difficult requests. Can I sign their shirts? Can I inscribe photographs for each member of Congress? There’s a child who won’t take his bottle—do I mind if he uses my finger? Can I write out the Song of Solomon in my blood? And I pass out and die. The end.”

“No, not the end.”

He regarded her with irritation, but she continued anyway.