“Bacon!” Doug called out, and then “Coffee! Sowbelly! Hotcakes!”— as if each were enough to keep any rational man from committing suicide.

Chaplin thought about telling Doug of his troubles, but Doug disliked difficulties. Further, there was a complication: Douglas Fairbanks, proudly married to Beth Fairbanks, was sleeping with Mary Pickford.

Chaplin accepted a plate of food graciously. Doug was telling him a joke of some sort, but ceased. “Yes, that look.”

“What?” he chirped, as if Doug might have read his mind.

“Are you all right? Are you actually all right?”

“Of course. Actually, has anyone ever sent you a medical bill? Someone named Black just billed me for—”

“Positively never. Aha! Did you pay your taxes?”

“Yes, I paid my taxes, Doug.” Actually, he hadn’t, and Syd had told him he really should, and Chaplin had told him he worried too much, and Syd told him to worry more, and then it turned into their usual discussion about whether iodine was a preventative or actually a cure.

First serving finished, Doug banged his metal plate down on a rock. “Perfect!” Patting his stomach. “This is all you need, Charlie. Never mind all that slacker business.” He sucked the remains of some egg from his fingers. “You just need to get out and be reminded of the goods.”

“What are the goods?”

“Us talking like this. You’re twenty-seven years old—”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight years old, young, handsome, and at the top of your game. And look at this view. God created it for a reason. He gave it to you and to me. And he put us here to see it for a reason, too.”

“All right,” Chaplin said slowly. “Then why does he let Jack Warner see it, too?”

Doug tossed his coffee out of his Sierra cup and handed it over to a waiter for more. He put his fists to his hips. “Now, none of that.” Chaplin recognized this pose from one of Doug’s movies, perhaps more than one, and it made him love Doug, who was now accepting a fresh cup of coffee.

“That might be all there is for me.”

“What if you showed them all and enlisted anyway? You’d like it if you had to fight for something, Chaplin. I know it.”

“You’d fight for a few pepper trees and some oranges? And to protect the liberty of Adolph Zukor?”

“You’re not that cynical. You’d like to be a hero.”

“My only hero is William G. McAdoo.”

“Pardon my ignorance, Charlie, but—”

“Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo. He signs the dollar bills. I love him.”

Doug grabbed a stick, the tip of which had been burned long ago to charcoal, and poked at Chaplin, leaving soot on his dungarees. “I believe you think more of the world than that.”

“I believe there are better ways to live in the world than being shot every day of it.”