“He and Edna could even have a baby, that could be …” This was the unfortunate Maverick, who was only on the road to saying what everyone was thinking about. Instead, the staff was now fastidiously looking at buttons coming off their threads, problematic fingernails, patches of distant sky that might contain enemy aircraft.

“We’ll do a bit with shoeing a horse,” Vincent said.

“And those cows,” someone said, and then there was agreement around the table—“Cows, surely”—nods, glances to other team members to look for affirmation: cows were funny.

It was like a locker-room pep talk for a team that was going to lose this season. “Yes,” Chaplin said. “Well. We can at least know we’ll open on the Bible verse and the steeple.”

“And we can close the same way,” said Maverick, who hadn’t quite Vincent’s trick of knowing how to pretend one wasn’t making a suggestion, “the Bible verse, the steeple, the town, only by then our understanding of them will have changed, it’s epanalep—”

“No.” Chaplin shook his head. “You can open on landscape, but you can’t close on it. You close on something human.”

A shuffling of notes and a checking of pocket watches, the sounds of chair legs sliding against the floorboards, but Chaplin didn’t move, and, like a class that realizes the bell has not in fact rung, the company remained in place.

He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets, looking at the pine planks of the stage. He was trapped on the thought of marrying Edna. Foil the cops, find food or money, marry the girl—the three legs of the comedy tripod. Meet, court, lose, win, fade out. The ending was inevitable and pointless.

“Yes,” he said, though no one had asked a question. “I have an idea,” he said quietly. “We’re going to fade out on my death.”

24

That night, Chaplin sat on the top tread of the grand steps of his newly constructed home, a wide mahogany staircase that curved from the entryway to the fleet of bedrooms on the second floor. He ghost-fingered the strings on his violin, C to E. He recalled how he used to do this when voices were drifting upward in the Athletic Club (“What’s he like?”). That had been two years ago. He was trying to decide whether all the rooms he had lived in before the age of twelve could fit in his living room.