He envisioned struggling with huge inflatable rubber starfish and sea horses, a villain puncturing his inner tube with a pin, himself propelled across the bay at high velocity while Edna was threatened by an enormous bully with designs on her virtue. Except that virtue was outdated, so perhaps a bully wants Edna to marry him so he can lay claim to a fortune. But this bothered him, too. Seeing kinetic actions first, then creating character and emotion to fill them up, like ladling sand into a sack, was too easy— everyone did it. Griffith knew how to create the most ornate spectacles, like Intolerance, hours of swinging braziers and slaves banging on gongs, chariots pulled by butterflies, and the audience was fooled into embracing it simply because of its size. Where was the small moment, the flirtatious smile not returned, the cuckold discovering a cuff link and saying nothing, the smile of a baby that somehow chills the bones? This was the hardest way to make things.

The car was now late, which caused him some anxiety. He had unexpectedly thought for several seconds about a scenario, and he was reminded of why he was alive in the first place, and now it seemed entirely possible to skip the party.

He gathered his ten postcards up, tucked them in his pocket, and went to the mirror. He drew in a breath and tried to inflate his love of people as if it were a balloon. It worked—he suddenly looked confident, dashing even. Small, but well presented. Dabbed—but not too much—with Mitsouko by Guerlain, from the fluted bottle that smelled like citrus with base notes of money. Black boots with spotless cloth tops, white linen trousers, silk vest, linen jacket, wristwatch, wallet, handkerchief, shirt with collar on—no, collar off—and then the face: freshly shaven, fiercely intelligent, a trove of black curls with the first flecks of premature gray connoting wisdom, and blue eyes that could bore through the most sophisticated chambers of any woman’s heart, and a smile that could make a whole convent choir forget that their knees were friends. Twenty-eight years old, left-handed, the son of Gypsies and Spaniards and generations of clever forebears, an Aries with Scorpio rising and moon in Scorpio, and, according to Madame Zinka downstairs, destined and cursed to illuminate the world with how mysteriously he stood at the center of all human attention, Chaplin pointed a finger at himself and whispered, “You are a dangerously handsome man.”