“We may not know each other well, but we do seem to get along. My guess is that we’d enjoy knowing each other better — I certainly would, and I think I’ve found a way of doing that that would be easy and even entertaining. My idea is that each of us take turns telling a story. Not necessarily stories about ourselves, although obviously there’s nothing wrong with that, but also stories we’ve heard from other people, or remember from books and plays. Stories that we’d love to tell or retell ourselves or, perhaps more accurately, that we’d love to hear told. Even stories made up out of whole cloth, why not? All that’s up to the narrator. The one thing that I’d ask of you is not to choose a story because you think it will impress the rest of us. Let the story choose you! What do you think?”
Margot: “I think it’s a great idea. I love stories.” Geoffrey: “It makes me a little nervous. Will I have to produce mine this evening?” Andreas: “I imagined one story at a time. I hope we’ll be having more dinners.” Margot: “Of course we will.” Berenice: “That way you’ll all have time to prepare, like me — as a forewarned hostess I thought I’d go first. O.K.?” There were no objections.
“This is the story of one man, a ‘man’s man,’ a professional valet and a good one. I didn’t witness most of what I’m about to tell you, only one evening towards the end after I’d been called in in a professional capacity.
“The valet’s name was Hubert. He felt great esteem for his employer, and discreet but genuine affection as well. He did everything in his power to satisfy his master’s small needs and see that he was kept neatly elegant for his social and professional engagements. Hubert enjoyed his work, which — conscientious as he was — kept him as busy as he could wish. He was given every other Sunday off, as well as any workday evening when the gentleman he served had no need of him.
“On a Sunday in late March, a sunny Sunday full of portents of the nascent spring, Hubert arrived by streetcar in the center of the sizable city where he had always lived. He got off at a stop opposite the main entrance of Fosdick Park, the largest in town. As he stepped to the curb, he at once became aware of a sensation that would gradually envelope him, and would subsequently haunt him for the rest of his life.
“The spring sun was hot, the air was still — utterly still. There was not the breath of a breeze. It wasn’t only that no leaf or blade of grass so much as quivered: something like an inverse wind had apparently emptied the air of its invisible stuff and fixed leaves and grass in an immobility as absolute as that of a photograph. A ways inside the park, Hubert felt himself sucked into a comparable equilibrium — he could still move without the slightest hesitation, but he sensed, moving or not, packets of an indefinable substance falling away from him into the weightless air, first from the skin of his limbs (calves, small of back, shoulders), then from muscles (slender triceps, stubborn hamstring), from stiff bones (knee caps), and even from his brain and its subversive nerves, until at the end a bar of steel that stretched from shoulder to shoulder across his sternum, of which he had never been aware, was gently lifted from him. This released a spurt of joy, also unsuspected grief upwelling, so as he delightedly smiled, tears rolled down his cheeks to drench his chest. He hid behind a tree so as not to be seen crying. He raised his arms as if in salute, not of any god, idea, or force of nature, just the unnamable source of his release. He quickly thought: ‘I have to tell the world about this.’
“Still tingling with weightlessness, on his way home he reminded himself, ‘I should let people know,’ and already a seed of doubt dropped into his mind. He could never realize this wish, he admitted — at least not alone: alone he would be merely a ranting idiot. He needed at least one person beside him who had shared, or at least believed in, his improbable experience; that would give him a first semblance of plausibility, which he might then develop. But how could he win over this first disciple? Why should anyone believe him? Why should he have been chosen for such exotic joy?
“Hubert was not alone for long. One person in the Sunday park had noticed him; she never quite understood why, or why she kept watching him and so witnessing a transfiguration that bewildered and intrigued her. A small, slender man, fine-featured but less than handsome, was slowly invested before her eyes with a visible ecstasy that had no visible cause. She did not understand, but he radiated such happiness as made her yearn to partake of his feelings. When he left the park, she walked after him, took the same streetcar as he, and followed him all the way home.
“Her name was Rachel. Comely, not tall or short, her head capped with auburn curls, her body compact, lithe, and soft. That day she wore a yellow blouse, blue jeans, and penny loafers. She worked in a scholarly bookstore, selling the works of Spinoza, Walser, and Groddeck to ‘serious’ readers young and old. She lived alone in a very small flat near the university.
“Hubert had disappeared through a back door of
