Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 7: The Table Where Hemingway Sat
By the second week of July, Conner had been in Paris for five weeks. He had moved from the Left Bank to the Right, from the Fifth Arrondissement to the Sixteenth.
The Sixteenth was the Paris of wide avenues and nannies in starched uniforms pushing prams along the paths of the Bois de Boulogne. It was quieter and much, much cleaner.
The Sixteenth was the Paris of grand old buildings. The stateliest was the old Hotel Majestic, an enormous building that took up most of a block. It was famous for one thing above all others, for it was there that, for five long years, the Americans and the North Vietnamese had sat across a table, first arguing about its shape and then about everything else, until finally the war in Vietnam ended.
Conner’s hotel room was four streets away.
He could have stayed at the Ritz or the George V. The blue folder of traveler’s checks from the Rue Scribe was still almost full, and there was more in a vault at his grandfather’s bank.
He found the room the way he had found everything else in Paris: by walking until something caught his eye.
This time it was a card in the window of a tabac: Chambre de bonne à louer. 6ème étage. Eau chaude. A maid’s room, to rent, sixth floor, hot water. The landlady was a widow named Madame Picot with a mustache and three canaries. The room was at the top of a hundred and eighteen stairs, under the zinc roof, with one window facing east. It had a narrow bed, a desk, and a washbasin. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom that he shared with a Portuguese housekeeper and a Vietnamese engineering student. It had a shower that ran hot, if you let it run long enough.
It was everything he needed. He put Louis Bertin’s guitar case in the corner and his notebook on the desk.
He had been there a week. And for all of that week, he had been a waiter.
His new adventure began with food, a preposterous lie, and a woman who laughed.
The cheese shop was on the Rue de Longchamp. It was a narrow, dark little place that smelled so strongly of ripe cheese that walking into it felt like being gently hit in the face with a warm, damp, smelly cloth.
There were wheels and wedges and pyramids and logs of cheese everywhere: on marble counters, on straw mats, on wooden shelves up to the ceiling, under glass bells, wrapped in chestnut leaves, dusted with ash. Behind the counter stood a tiny old man in a gray coat who spoke of each one the way other men spoke of their children.
Conner had gone in for a piece of Comté for his lunch. He had ended up staying for forty minutes, because the old man, finding out that the enormous young American was interested, happily explained the difference between a Comté aged twelve months and one aged thirty-six. Then without taking a breath, he moved on to the difference between a raw-milk Camembert and a pasteurized one, which he told Conner was the difference between a woman and a photograph of a woman.
He cut slivers of things for him to taste. Conner stood there with his eyes closed and a sliver of Époisses dissolving on his tongue, thinking that this was possibly the most remarkable thing he had ever put in his mouth, when a woman’s voice beside him said:
“It smells like a dead horse and tastes like heaven. That’s the Époisses. It was Napoleon’s favorite, you know.”
Conner opened his eyes.
She was a woman of about fifty, small and plump and pretty, with soft brown hair going gray, pinned up any old way, and a round, rosy, lived-in face. She was wearing a flowered dress with an apron over it. She had a string bag over her arm.
“Is it really? Napoleon’s favorite?”
“So they say.” She shrugged. “They say everything was Napoleon’s favorite. Paris is full of Napoleon’s favorites. I think the poor man must have been very fat.”
Conner laughed. The cheesemonger laughed. The woman laughed with them, and held out a plump hand with a wedding ring on it.
“Bérénice Lacombe. My husband has the bistro on the Avenue Kléber. Chez Lacombe. You seem like an American.”
Conner, who had been in Paris four weeks and in those four weeks had been asked that question a hundred times, suddenly felt that the truth had grown boring with use. He looked down at her with his most serious, most earnest expression and replied in flawless Parisian French:
“Non, Madame. I only sound American. It is a disguise.”
Bérénice Lacombe’s eyebrows went up. “A disguise.”
“I’m afraid so.” He lowered his voice and glanced toward the door, as though a spy might be listening. “My mother was an actress, French, very famous in the 40s and 50s. I can’t tell you her name, you understand, it would cause a scandal. She made eleven films and fell in love only once in her life. That man was my father.”
“And who,” said Bérénice, whose eyes had begun to sparkle, “was your father?”
“A count,” said Conner gravely. “From Luxembourg.”
The cheesemonger made a small, strangled noise and turned away to rearrange his Roqueforts.
“Luxembourg,” said Bérénice.
“Yes,” Conner explained. “My father owns a vineyard and a lake. When I was born, there was a terrible to-do. My mother’s studio was furious. My father’s family was furious. The Grand Duke himself was consulted, and it was decided that I would be sent to America, to be raised in secret, and taught to speak English so that no one would ever guess I was French. I was eleven before anyone told me I was French.” He sighed. “It’s been a great burden.”
Bérénice Lacombe looked up at him, at his sincere blue eyes, and she began to laugh.
It was a wonderful laugh. It started as a giggle, high and helpless, like a schoolgirl’s, and it grew. She put her hand over her mouth, and gave an unladylike snort, which only made things worse. She had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling.
The little cheesemonger was laughing too, wiping his eyes with his gray sleeve. Two elderly ladies who had just come in to buy Brie stopped in the doorway and looked at the three of them as though they had all gone mad.
“Oh,” gasped Bérénice. “Oh, mon Dieu. Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve heard in a year.” She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “What do you do to earn a living, Monsieur le fils du comte?”
And here Conner had to pause, because he had not planned this far ahead. But the lie was in full sail now, and he was reluctant to stop.
“I’m a waiter,” he said finally. “It’s how I’ve supported myself all these years. A very good one, if I may say so. The best. I’ve waited tables in New York, in Geneva, in Buenos Aires.”
He had never waited a table in his life.
“Just now, though, I’m between positions. I’m taking a little time off to study something else.”
“What?”
“Women,” said Conner. “How to approach them. How to talk to them. I was locked away for a long time, Madame. I’m very behind.”
Bérénice Lacombe stopped laughing. She looked at him for a moment with her head tilted to one side, a long, tender look, the way one might look at a large, friendly dog that wandered into your kitchen, sat down, and stared at you for a treat.
“A waiter,” she said slowly. “A good one.”
“The best.”
“One of ours quit this morning. Jean-Luc. He threw his apron at my husband and walked out in the middle of lunch. It was the third one since Easter.” She sighed. “My husband is a genius, but he is also impossible. We are very short-staffed, and we have forty covers booked and no waiter.” She looked him up and down again, all six foot three of him, measuring. “You have a white shirt?”
“I have two.”
“Black trousers?”
“I can get some.”
“Can you carry four plates at once?”
Conner had not the faintest idea.
“Five,” he said.
Bérénice laughed again, picked up her string bag, and took his arm, as though they were old friends out for a stroll.
“Come,” she said. “Come and meet Henri. Don’t be frightened. He’s not as bad as he sounds.”
Chez Lacombe was on the Avenue Kléber, about three hundred meters down from the old Majestic, on the ground floor of a tall, cream-colored building. It had a green awning and gold lettering on the window that said CHEZ LACOMBE — Maison fondée en 1905.
Inside was a long, narrow room with a black-and-white tiled floor, dark wood paneling darkened by years of cigarette smoke. There were marble-topped tables, a mahogany bar, and globe lamps hanging from the ceiling on brass chains.
And on the walls, crowded frame to frame, were photographs. Old ones, brown and cream, signed in faded ink. Men in wing collars and women in cloche hats, seated at these same tables, raising glasses to the camera. There were sketches too, done on menu cards and napkins: a caricature of a fat man eating an oyster, a drawing of the Arc de Triomphe with a cat sitting on top of it.
Outside, a half dozen tables were set out on the wide pavement shaded by plane trees, where you could sit with a glass of wine and watch the whole of the sixteenth arrondissement walk by.
“Henri’s grandfather opened our bistro,” said Bérénice. “Everyone came. Writers, painters, poets. Some of them paid in drawings when they had no money. Henri’s grandfather took them. His father took them, but Henri would rather die.” She raised her voice just slightly. “Henri doesn’t believe in art.”
“I believe,” came a voice from the kitchen door, “in people who arrive for work on time.”
Henri was a big man, not tall but broad, thick through the chest and shoulders in a pure white chef’s jacket and a white cap. He had a heavy black mustache. He was not impressed by Conner.
“Who is this?”
“A waiter,” said Bérénice brightly. “The best. From Luxembourg.”
“He’s American.”
“It’s a disguise,” said Bérénice and Conner together, with perfectly straight faces.
Henri Lacombe looked from his wife to the enormous young man and back again. Something moved in the muscles of his jaw. Then he said merde and turned around, and went back into the kitchen. A moment later there was the sound of a very large pan being set down on a stove much harder than it needed to be.
“He likes you,” said Bérénice.
“How can you tell?”
“He didn’t throw anything.”
As it turned out, Conner was a very good waiter.
It astonished him almost as much as it astonished Bérénice. But when he thought about it that night in his little room under the roof, his feet aching, he realized that he had in fact been in training for it for eight years.
He knew how to stand. Herr Brandt and the Deportment masters had seen to that: shoulders back, head up, weight balanced. He could move through a crowded cafe without seeming to hurry or ever bumping anything.
He knew the correct side to serve from, the correct side to clear from, and the correct way to hold a bottle of wine so that the label faced the guest. This was because he and the other senior boys had served the masters and their guests at the High Table on feast days.
He had an excellent memory and could hold an order for a table of eight in his head without writing any of it down. He could add up a bill faster than the till.
Plus, he spoke five languages. In the course of his first evening, Conner took orders in French from a table of French lawyers, in German from a Bavarian couple, in Spanish from an Argentine diplomat and his mistress, and in Italian, haltingly but charmingly, from an elderly Milanese widow. And in English, from several tables of American tourists who had come to see the Arc de Triomphe and had wandered down the avenue looking for dinner.
He carried four plates at once by the end of the first night, and five by the third. He dropped only one, on the second evening—a plate of céleri rémoulade, which he caught in midair six inches above the floor with reflexes that Okada-sensei had trained.
By the third night, Bérénice had stopped watching him nervously and started watching him the way you watch a play.
Because on the third night he had started having fun.
The Americans had started it.
They were a couple from Ohio, in their sixties, sitting at a table under the awning: he in a sport coat and she in a pink dress. Both had the dazed, footsore look of people who had been walking around Paris all day and seen too much. They were looking at the menu with some anxiety. It was all in French.
“Excuse me,” the husband said, looking up at Conner. “Do you speak English? What’s good here?”
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