Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

“Think of it as an acting exercise,” I suggested. “Practice in maintaining concentration on the part during a brawl.”

We were in Vitto Impero, as planned, for our lunch, and Brett was pretty sure he hadn’t gotten that part. The fact is, he had not managed to maintain his concentration during the brawl, which had been brief but dramatic. After I’d knocked Wormley down, a couple of the other auditioning actors carried him out and the wheezy stout man told Brett to go ahead, the distraction was over and everything was all right now. But it just hadn’t been the same. Brett’s reading with the girl was slow and wandering, as though his attention were elsewhere, and none of the intended lightness in the lines came through. At the end, I could see the disgusted expression on Brett’s face when he went through the final sidebar colloquy with the clipboard man, a disgusted expression that remained intact all the way up Hudson Street, as we walked along and I explained who Dale Wormley was and why he felt he had a gripe against me. “He’s got a great sense of timing, anyway,” Brett said. “I’ll give him that.”

“I don’t want him in my life any more,” I said, “that’s all I know.”

At the restaurant, Anita was too busy running the place to sit with us, though she did come over and chat from time to time. She and I were getting along very well, having become reacquainted the first two nights at her place upstairs from the restaurant and last night at mine, and she went so far beyond her normal style in the expression of her approval as to rest a hand on the back of my neck while she stood at the table to talk. From most people I wouldn’t have cared for that gesture, as being a little too cloyingly proprietary, but Anita’s so independent, so like a cat in her self-sufficiency, that I could accept it from her as simply a comradely statement.

A tall and sharply good-looking woman, slender to the point of skinniness, Anita runs her life to her own plan, and has done so for at least eight years, ever since her husband, the man for whom the word “feckless” was invented, skipped out and left her with a failing restaurant and a sense of deep irritation. She rescued the restaurant, got over the irritation, settled down to an independent existence, and then met me.

Am I good for Anita? I know she’s good for me, a sharp-witted, sharp-tempered woman who keeps me in line and makes me laugh. We’re together as much as possible when I’m in New York, but that means for half the year we don’t see one another. I hang around instead with Bly Quinn out on the Coast; what Anita does then, I don’t know. I’ve never asked, and she’s never volunteered. She knows about Bly and mostly keeps her attitude to herself, only occasionally making an unfair — but usually funny — remark about my bubbleheaded Hollywood starlet. (Bly may look that part, but in fact she’s a TV scriptwriter, with her own brains and wit.) Maybe the truth is, to have a fella like me for just a few months at a time is best for Anita, all the involvement her spirit can accept. I hope that’s it.

Anyway, Vitto Impero does a good lunch trade, and not just of neighborhood people. Its reputation draws lunch customers ranging from midtown admen to lawyers from the courts way downtown. Anita prowls the place like a leopard, keeping it smooth and efficient, making a relaxed place by never relaxing herself; which meant Brett and I were left mostly on our own. There was a lot to get caught up on, we not having seen each other since spring, but Brett just couldn’t leave this morning’s experience alone. We’d talk briefly about a play he did in Canada in August, or about my recent near-miss in getting to perform Brick in a revival of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in LA — the financing disappeared, and it would have been too uncomfortably like a vanity production if I’d financed it myself — but then Brett would veer off again, and be right back with this morning’s disastrous audition. He knew he’d done badly, he knew what he’d intended to do instead, and he just couldn’t seem to get it all behind him.

So we were there again, rehashing it yet once more, when Anita finally felt she could join us, a little after two. At that point, of course, the entire story had to be given a complete airing all over again for Anita’s benefit, to bring her up to date. She knew about the PACKARD lawsuit against Kwality FoodMarts, but I hadn’t seen any reason to mention the scene on the sidewalk, so she was hearing the whole story of the active and truculent Dale Wormley for the first time. Listening, managing to be both sympathetic toward Brett and amused toward me, she heard the whole saga out and then grinned and said, “You really slugged him?”

“He wouldn’t stop swinging,” I explained. “What would you have done?”

“I’m not saying you were wrong,” she assured me. “I just wish I’d been there to see it.”

Which was when Brett finally lightened up. With his own reluctant grin, he said, “It was pretty impressive, actually, Anita. I’ll have to use it some time, in the right part. Sam didn’t even stand up. He just leaned forward and wham .”

“Sitting down? ” Gazing upon me in mock wonder, she said, “That’s what I call insouciant.”

“I’ve never called anything insouciant in my life,” I said.

“Now, don’t get bad-tempered,” Anita told me, patting my arm.

“You’ve got to look out for him when he’s seated,” Brett warned her. Anita’s presence at the table had done wonders for his mood.

“The question is,” I said, “what am I going to do about Dale Wormley?”

“I thought you’d already done it,” Anita said.

“I hope so. But what if I just made him madder? I don’t want him hanging around, pestering me, lousing things up all the time.”

Anita said, “Did you talk to Mort?”

Mort was Morton Adler, my New York attorney, who was taking part in the Kwality FoodMarts suit. “I mentioned the sidewalk thing,” I said, “when I talked to him day before yesterday. You know, just in passing. I haven’t called him today. Why? What do you want me to do, get a court order against the guy?”

“Why not?”

“It’d be kind of like running to the principal for protection,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

She shook her head at me, impatient with the tender sensibilities of the male. “Life is not a schoolyard, Sam,” she said.

“May I quote you?”

“You may heed me,” she said.

“Anita could be right,” Brett told me. Even males don’t worry a lot about the tender sensibilities of other males. “You can’t just go around laying the guy out every time you see him. Sooner or later, you’ll be the one in the wrong.”

“All right,” I said, reluctantly seeing the sense in it. “If he shows up again, I’ll put Mort on the case.”

But Dale Wormley never showed up again. He didn’t get the chance.

I was in my lap pool when the police arrived. In Bel Air I have the normal swimming pool, but it’s hard to find ways to exercise those long torso muscles back east, so when I bought the townhouse in the city I had a lap pool put in the basement, and a certain period down there every morning is a part of my routine. The in-house communication system includes a loudspeaker and microphone behind a grid high in the tile wall above the lap pool, and that combination of tile and water creates the only really good echo effect in Robinson’s life these days. He loves opportunities to talk to me from upstairs when I’m down there, and enunciates even more unctuously than usual. Even with one ear in the water and both arms churning up spray, I had no trouble making out the reverberating tones of his, “The police are here.”