And there it sat. Chaplin knitted his hands and cracked his knuckles. The spout was beginning to go warm with steam. He had the terrible feeling he’d been playing cards and hadn’t known it and had just woken up to an unfortunate hand before him. He wanted to say, “If all they can do is bring my mother here …” but he knew McAdoo wouldn’t understand how having his mother in California could be bad, or part of a scheme. The neck of the kettle was sweating, and the base was beginning to glow. He felt a net beginning to draw shut around him.

“Try not to think about it,” McAdoo said, and gave Chaplin a friendly pat. “You’ve got your farm film done, and a lovely wife, and, golly, a baby soon. Your mom is here, you can finally take care of her. That’s a kind of satisfaction no one can take away from you.”

“Yes,” Chaplin said, fingers swimming back and forth in the steam.

The conversation wound down, and McAdoo said he should really let Chaplin get back to work, and Chaplin agreed, and they shook hands, and Chaplin pretended to go into his office, but simply watched where McAdoo had gone.

Chaplin gave McAdoo five minutes, exactly, and then darted to Edna’s bungalow. He rapped on the door and, without waiting for a response, twisted the knob and threw the door open, like a husband returning from a business trip.

“Well,” he said, before seeing anything. His fists were on his hips, and he was ready to lecture on all the ways he had been disappointed. The room was cozy and tidy, a mock cottage, with flocked wallpaper, two bouquets of flowers (he paid for them to be changed twice a week), and a pair of ornate, weathered velvet wing chairs flanking a Batchelder-tiled fireplace. McAdoo was sitting, tie still noosed within his collar, legs crossed with ankle over knee, showing a length of black silk sock, a sheaf of papers in his lap.

In the other chair, in a simple velvet dress, hunched with concentration, glasses on the end of her nose, was Pickford.

43

“Oh,” Chaplin said. And then “Oh!” For coming upon Pickford and McAdoo in a tête-à-tête led his mind to horrific images. And Doug!

“Charlie,” Pickford said. “Sit.”

“I’m not—I’m not your lapdog, Mary.”

He noticed a traveling projector and screen set up. She tossed down a folder of legal onionskin. “You’re involved in this. Bill wanted to wait until we had run some figures.”

“What are you talking about?”

McAdoo had said nothing. A man profoundly uninterested in surprises, he looked off balance.

“If you’d like to leave us alone, Bill? Please, sit down, Charlie,” Pick-ford said. McAdoo folded up his papers. He hesitated by the door, as if searching for a good parting word, but couldn’t find one. The door closed quietly behind him.