He wondered where Edna was. He wondered where Frances was. The gang at the Athletic Club. He used to go to boxing matches or Barney Old-field’s. It struck him that he was old enough to have lived his life in layers; when he left one place for another, the residue of friendship only existed like scars or wrinkles.

It wasn’t just friends; he shed old qualities of life. The contest for the Twelve Immortals of film—had that ended? Were the winners ever announced?

The back room was strangely empty. He heard laughter from the main part of the café, and, finishing his soda, he stood, fitted on his hat, wincing (he’d forgotten the bump on his forehead), and walked past the bar, where about a dozen women were in a loose circle around one leather stool whose occupant was leaning back and allowing himself to be admired.

Chaplin recognized him: it was a man called Max Eastman. His silver hair was slicked into place, his nails were buffed, and he somehow made his fifty-cent tie and one-dollar shirt and six-dollar jacket look as if they cost a mint. Eastman was a bohemian, a poet, a leftist, a psychologist, and not quite a cad, but highly successful with the ladies. Chaplin had seen him lecture once on politics, and had found, to his discomfort, that Eastman also had theories on humor. But the several times they had run into each other, he had never brought them up again.

Eastman caught Chaplin’s gaze, and his eyebrows went up. But he did not invite Chaplin, no “Char-lee, how-are-ya.” No fictive kinship. Instead, Eastman gave a microscopic shrug of acceptance. It said that if Chaplin wanted to help himself to a stool, he was welcome.

Which was how Chaplin missed dinner. Eastman had been describing his trip into Germany, which he downplayed as hardly worth mentioning.

“Why were you there?” Chaplin had to ask.

“I was selling stolen musical instruments, actually.”

The girls laughed beautifully, and Chaplin had to say, “Oh, do tell.”

Tell he did, ceding to Chaplin at the right moments. “Eastman, you’re a crook and you’re in the right town for it,” Chaplin said.

“Well, of course, that was when I was under arrest,” he said in answer to something Chaplin had said, and soon they were discussing the inequities of the Sedition Act, Upton Sinclair’s The Profits of Religion, the imperial nature of the U.S. postal system, and whether Eastman’s old journal The Masses was progressive or essentially conservative (with Eastman taking the latter position).