Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

Almost. On the other hand, when Moffitt moved us into end game I went along with a real sense of relief; if Matty Pierce had seen through what was happening here, there would have been another fistfight in Moffitt’s acting studio, no question.

But finally Moffitt said, “Matty, I know you have to get to work, and I’d like to discuss this theme of Mr. Dante’s from my point of view. For a teacher in this profession, his ideas might be very interesting.” With an innocent gaze in my direction, he added, “If you have time?”

“Sure,” I said. “The more I learn, the better.”

“That’s undoubtedly true,” Moffitt agreed.

Pierce had been growing increasingly restless, in fact, as the conversation had moved farther away from himself, and was very happy to leave. “Don’t lose the picture and resumé, now,” he told me, shaking my hand, squeezing harder than necessary. “You’ll be able to say you knew me when.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I told him.

Pierce went hammering back down the stairs, and Moffitt and I waited till we heard the front door slam behind him. Then Moffitt smiled at me and said, “Please excuse my stretching that. I admit it was an elitist impulse.”

“It was?”

“I don’t expect a television actor to have much by way of technique,” he explained.

Was he trying to get a rise out of me, push me off-balance a bit and see what happened? I said, “Acting is acting, isn’t it?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” he said, eyes widening; I’d touched on some bugbear of his, obviously. But then he waved the matter away, saying, “In any event, it was pleasant to have my prejudices confounded. What are you working at these days?”

“I’m between jobs,” I said, that being the standard face-saving answer from an actor who isn’t working at anything at the moment.

I expected Moffitt to recognize that and respect it, and he did, with a faint smile, saying, “You should work. Exercises can only go so far.”

“If that civil court endorses the idea I’m an unconvicted murderer,” I said, “I’ll never work again.”

He raised a surprised eyebrow: “Not even as the notorious Sam Holt? Wouldn’t there be some publicity value in that?”

I shuddered. “That would be worse.”

“All of my prejudices are in ruins,” he said.

Looking at his ascetic and satisfied face, I decided I didn’t have to like him. “Not all, I think,” I said.

Surprised, he laughed and said, “My God, I’m still responding to your Mr. Dante, who wasn’t that intelligent. All right, Mr. Holt, forgive me. Let’s get down to cases. The fact is, whatever it was in Dale’s life that led someone to kill him, it would not have derived from this class, or the people he dealt with here.”

I said, “Are you sure you aren’t just defending your turf?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You see, the raison d’être of this class is its artificiality, its separation from real life. I have had my successes, Mr. Holt; there are former students of mine who have gone on to some fame and accomplishment in this profession.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“But they, I must admit, are the exceptions,” he went on, and shrugged, saying, “Which must be true, in any of the arts. The students come, they learn what they can about the art and about themselves, and then they go on, into the world, toward the narrow end of the funnel. Very few will make it, which most of them know. But it’s impossible ahead of time to be sure which ones will succeed. So they all, when they come here, have the potential , but that’s all. In their real lives, they work as waiters or carpenters or cabdrivers or receptionists or sales clerks. Here , they are stars in embryo. A great deal of passion is released in our classes, passion being, as you know, one of the tools of our trade. But none of them would carry that passion home, would mingle this world with the world of driving a taxi. Sometimes romances start in here, particularly after we do intense love scenes—” he smiled, and shook his head “—but they never last.

Never. The passion in here never survives in the air outside.”

Was that true? Moffitt, it seemed to me, was suggesting some sort of romantic Shangri-La specialness about this building, his class, himself; but wasn’t what he was describing actually the kind of office politics that exists everywhere that people work closely together with some element of competition in it?

On the other hand, what he was claiming for his class was certainly true of office politics. No matter how mad somebody makes you at work, you don’t spend your time being mad at that person on your day off. So I nodded, and got to my feet, and said, “Okay, Mr. Moffitt, point taken. Unless I find something else, while I’m rooting around, I’ll think of all this as a dead end.”

“That’s what it is,” he assured me.

We walked toward the head of the stairs together, and I said, “Thank you for not just simply exposing me to Pierce. He probably wouldn’t have been amused.”

“Not very,” Moffitt agreed, with a smile. Then he said, “Shall I take that resumé of Matty’s off your hands? You don’t actually have a purpose for it, do you?”

“No, I don’t.” Giving it to him, I said, “You’re the first person who’s seen through me. What did it?”

“This is what I teach , Mr. Holt,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. “I spend half my life evaluating performances. You did the part well enough, the stooped head to distract from your height, the insecure smile, the vague hand gestures, but the dialogue was off.”

“That’s been a problem all along,” I agreed.

“You just weren’t asking the right questions,” he said. “You weren’t interested in the right subjects. When I began to sense there was something wrong, I suggested a topic that you’d have to be interested in, if you were actually who you claimed, and you refused to be detoured away from what you really wanted to know.”

“I noticed you do that,” I said.

“Then I looked you over more carefully,” he told me, “and I saw the hair was wrong. And that moustache is pasted on, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It’s excellent,” Moffitt said, “but the hair somehow doesn’t match your head, not well enough. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, it’s very subtle.”

“It’s passed till now.”

“I’m sure it has,” Moffitt agreed, “but I think I’m the first person who began to doubt you and then began to study you. And then, when I realized you were in disguise, I knew that had to mean it was because we would recognize you in your own self, and of course that meant you had to be the celebrity connected with poor Dale’s death. Then I could see it was you.”

“You gave me a bad moment,” I said, “I have to admit that.”

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to make up for it with some good advice. May I?”

“Acting advice?”

“Of course,” he said. “And the advice is, don’t be in too much of a hurry to ask your real questions. Match the dialogue to the part. Be patient, take an interest in things you’re not really interested in. Everything you want to know will come out eventually.”

“Will it?”

“If you’re very good,” he said.

That evening, I was more discouraged than I realized. I knew I didn’t feel like discussing my day, but I hadn’t been aware just how silent and withdrawn I’d become until, after dinner with the Young family, Terry turned to me in the living room and abruptly said, “Well, Sam? Gonna quit?”

I blinked at him. The remark uncomfortably paralleled my own thoughts, except that instead of thinking of myself as on the verge of quitting I’d seen it the other way; the leads and trails had petered out, had quit me. What was I going to do tomorrow, what string should I follow? There was none that I could see. But I answered Terry’s question by saying, “I can’t quit. Not if there’s anything left to do.”