His stare seemed to fix her in place. She was fearful and a statue. Galatea. Here, then, the wicked side of the Pygmalion legend: getting exactly the girl you have carved.

“Go to bed,” he said.

She turned her lips inward, biting down on them. As if she were letting herself go aloft in a balloon, she eased back her shoulders and dropped her kimono to the floor. It pooled about her toes in a slippery pile. Outside, an owl hooted twice, a soft, low, curious query. Mildred swallowed, her eyes luminescent, a rabbit caught by firelight.

“I told you to go to bed.”

Her eyes were warm, they were almost overflowing, and when she spoke next, she said, “Please,” with a slight lisp.

“Oh, God, you aren’t even as smart as clay.”

“Charlie?”

“Clay knows how to obey the potter.”

“But—”

“Go. To. Bed.”

…

The next morning, he went to the studio (“He’s here!”) and impatiently gave a winning smile to everyone, then called Alf, Charles, and Eddie into his office. There was no reason to do a pastoral. A pastoral wasn’t better. He wanted a museum set. Find some photographs of the Louvre and build it.

“What paintings do you want on the walls, then?”

“Gainsborough,” he said. “No, get me a book on the history of art. We’ll have a survey. The Little Fellow will interact with everything from Praxiteles to my friend Picasso. We need to hire life models. Consult the local art schools. And tell the musicians to prepare suitable music.”

“Suitable music, my son?” Alf asked. Alf, like Chaplin, was small, but, unlike Chaplin, was wizened. He had worn the same battered derby since 1903, and the same black suit since 1911. When he made points, he illustrated them by gesturing with a cigar, a stogie like an extra knuckle. “Suitable for what?”

“The history of the world shown through artistic ambition.”

“Right-o.” Alf knew enough not even to exchange glances with the other men. Instead, he left before the orders could be rescinded, and he walked into the courtyard. There he found the members of the septet that had been hired to play mood music. “So how much music do you brilliant chaps know, then?”

Back in the office, Syd was sitting on the other side of Chaplin’s desk. Chaplin was drumming his fingers restlessly on a pile of books.

“I was going to have them strike a copy of Her Friend the Bandit so we can re—” Syd began.

“No. No, no, no. I’ve been thinking,” Charlie said. “We know how comedies end, but what about tragedies?”

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Syd. “Haven’t we— Oh, sweet Mother Mary. Yes, all right, what about them?”

“He dies at the end of this.”

“Who? Oh, no. No.”

“It doesn’t mean he can’t come back in the next picture. He’s hardly even real, you know.”