Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 9: The Théâtre Souterrain
Conner quit Chez Lacombe two days after Sara left.
It wasn’t dramatic. He did not throw his apron at Henri. He finished the dinner service, folded the apron, laid it on the corner of the stainless steel counter, and stood there for a moment looking at it.
Henri, at the stove, did not turn around. “You’re going then.”
“Yes, Chef.”
“Because of the little American with the glasses?”
When Conner didn’t answer, Henri turned and looked at him over his shoulder, and his thundercloud face was, for once, not thunderous at all.
“It’s not fun for you anymore?”
“No, Chef. It’s not.”
Henri grunted. Then he wiped his hands on his jacket and did something he had not done in the weeks Conner had worked there. He held out his hand.
Conner shook it. Henri’s grip was like a vise.
“You were a terrible waiter,” said Henri Lacombe. “The best we ever had.”
Out front, Bérénice cried. She made him promise to come back and eat. She pressed a paper parcel of rillettes and a bottle of wine on him. And then, as he was going out the door, she caught his sleeve.
“Conner. I forgot. There was a woman.”
He stopped. “A woman?”
“Two Saturdays ago. The night you took the little American to the cellar on the Rue de la Huchette. She came in at eight, alone, and asked for you by name.” Bérénice frowned, trying to remember. “Short dark hair. Very straight back. A newspaper under her arm. When I said you had the night off, she smiled, very politely, and said it didn’t matter.” She looked up at him. “She didn’t leave a name. I’m sorry. With everything, I forgot until now.”
Conner stood on the terrace of Chez Lacombe in the July sun with a parcel of rillettes in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, and felt the ground tilt gently under him, the way the deck of the lake steamer at Geneva used to tilt in a crosswind.
“Thank you,” he said at last. “It doesn’t matter.”
Bérénice looked at him for a long moment with her round, kind face.
“Chéri,” she said gently, “you’re a very bad liar when you tell the truth.”
The Russians did mourning the best, he thought: whole novels of it, men lying on sofas for four hundred pages staring at the ceiling. The Romantics were good at it too; Byron had practically invented the poetry of it.
When Conner’s grandmother had died, his own grandfather had gone to Maine to sit alone in a fishing shack on Flagstaff Lake for a month. He came back thinner and quieter.
So he didn’t fight it. It seemed to him, having been given the extraordinary gift of that week, that the least he owed it was an honest grieving.
He took Louis Bertin’s guitar and wandered Paris. He found himself in the vaults of Gare du Nord, a vast underground labyrinth where five lines crossed and long tiled corridors ran under the city like the arteries of some enormous monster. A hundred thousand people passed through every day. He found a spot at the bend of a corridor, where the tiles made for good acoustics. He opened the case and played.
He played Spanish laments that Señor Albéniz had taught him, ones about dead lovers and lost villages. He played “Girl from the North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice” and “For No One.” He played “So, we’ll go no more a-roving,” slowly, to the melody he had made up at Josephine’s.
The crowds flowed past him like a river. No one stopped. Occasionally a coin would clink into the guitar case. A pair of policemen walked past, looked at him, looked at each other, and kept walking.
That was all right. He didn’t care. He was a sad young man playing to mourn the loss of his first love.
He moved from station to station: Saint-Michel, packed with students of the Sorbonne, to the Gare de l’Est, full of travelers and businessmen with briefcases.
He played for six, seven, eight hours a day. His fingertips toughened on the steel strings. At night he went home to the garret and lay on the narrow bed where she had lain, with the window open and the lights of the Étoile.
First loves, he discovered like many a young man before him, were devastating.
The sadness lasted fourteen days. Then, one afternoon, it simply ran out, the way a fever breaks.
He was sitting at the bottom of the long corridor at Montparnasse, at the end of the moving travelator, playing a Catalan lament about a shepherd whose sweetheart had drowned in a river.
A fat man came gliding toward him on the walkway out of the distance: a very fat man wearing a derby, casually eating a sandwich, with a dachshund under one arm. As the walkway delivered the man to the end of the corridor, he failed to notice that the walkway had ended, and had to take three flailing steps to keep his balance. He held his sandwich high above his head like the Olympic torch, the dachshund started barking furiously, and his derby flew off and landed with perfect precision in Conner’s open guitar case.
The fat man looked at Conner.
Conner looked at the fat man and began to laugh.
He could not stop. He laughed until the tears ran down his face, and then he laughed some more. The fat man, after a moment of outrage, started laughing too. He retrieved his derby, dropped a five-franc coin into the case, and walked off still chuckling, with the dachshund’s head poking out from under his arm, barking back at Conner.
When he had finished laughing, Conner sat for a while in the corridor with the guitar across his knees.
He thought:
Please God, something ridiculous, as soon as possible.
Something ridiculous arrived the next day in the form of a woman with black hair and green eyes.
It was a good spot, at the bend of the long corridor between the Line 1 and Line 4 platforms, where the tiles made the sound ring and the crowds were thickest.
And that morning when he arrived with his guitar case, there she was: a young woman of about twenty-four, small and slim, in a man’s black vest over a red peasant blouse. She had a mass of wild black curls tied back with a scarf, tanned arms jangling with silver bracelets, and eyes of a startling shade of green. There was a battered tin cup at her feet. She was singing with no accompaniment in a high, sweet, clear, pure soprano, an old French folk song about a girl waiting for a sailor.
Conner stopped and listened. He could not help it. The voice went up into the tiled vault of the corridor and hung there like a lark over a field.
When she finished and saw him standing there with his guitar case, her green eyes narrowed.
“This is my place,” she said, in rapid French with a strong southern accent. Marseille or Toulon.
“I’ve been playing here for two weeks,” said Conner reasonably.
“I’ve been singing here for two years. I went to Brittany for the summer. Now I’m back.” She folded her bare arms. “So get lost.”
Conner considered her. “We could share,” he said. “You sing. I’ll play.”
“I don’t need a guitarist.”
“Everybody needs a guitarist. It’s a known fact. Look.” He opened the case, took out Louis Bertin’s old Selmer and without asking permission, began to pick out the chords of the folk song she had just been singing, the girl and the sailor, exactly in her key.
She stared at him. Then, grudgingly, she began to sing again. It was better with the guitar under it, and they both knew it. A man in a blue pinstriped business suit stopped and dropped two francs in her tin cup.
“Hm,” said the green-eyed woman.
“Conner,” said Conner, and held out his hand.
She did not take it.
“Odette.” She jerked her chin at the guitar. “Do you know anything American? The tourists like American.”
“What do you want?”
Odette thought about it. Then a slow, dangerous, green-eyed smile spread across her face.
“‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.’”
He knew it. Everyone knew it. He played the opening, the famous descending bass line, walking down the low strings, and Odette put her hands on her hips and began to sing it, in her strong southern-accented English, and as she sang she turned toward him, glaring.
She aimed the song at him, every word, with her green eyes blazing and her chin up and her silver bracelets jangling. He was the faithless, lying, no-good man in the lyrics, and she had finally had enough, and a small crowd began to gather, because there is nothing in the world that will stop a crowd faster than a beautiful woman visibly furious with a man.
And Conner, who had spent a week at Chez Lacombe telling the tourists about Gertrude Stein, felt the old familiar tug of nonsense pulling at him.
He stopped playing.
Odette stopped singing, mid-line, startled.
“Is this about Monique?” said Conner loudly. He stood up and assumed an expression of wounded innocence. “Because I have told you a thousand times, Odette. Monique means nothing to me. Nothing! She was helping me with my accounts!”
There was a pause. Maybe two or three beats where Odette’s green eyes widened in total incomprehension. And then, the spark caught. She saw the door he had opened and walked through it.
“Your ACCOUNTS?” she shrieked, in a voice that made him wince. “Your ACCOUNTS? At three o’clock in the MORNING? In your BATHROBE?”
“It was a very complicated audit!”
“You don’t HAVE any accounts! You haven’t got a SOU! You haven’t had a sou since your father threw you out of the CHÂTEAU!”
The crowd, which had been perhaps eight people, was now perhaps twenty, and growing. Commuters on their way to the Line 4 platform were slowing down, stopping, turning around.
“Don’t you DARE bring my father into this!” roared Conner, with enormous dignity, clutching the guitar to his chest. “My father is a COUNT! Our chateau has forty-two rooms!”
“Your father,” spat Odette, advancing on him with her finger pointing, “never accepted me! Never! Not once! Not for one DAY in seven years! Not when we married! Not when Jean-Baptiste was born! Not when the twins were born! He sent the twins a card addressed to ‘The Children of That Woman’!”
“He’s an old man! He’s set in his ways!”
“He called me a GYPSY at your cousin’s WEDDING!”
“You ARE a gypsy!”
“I am from TOULON!”
The crowd roared. There was a crowd now. They filled the whole bend of the corridor. Some were grinning at the comedy of it all. Some weren’t, but all were fascinated, the way you watch an accident unfold.
“Seven years!” cried Odette, her voice breaking with magnificent, operatic grief, one hand pressed to her heart. “Seven years I’ve given you! Three children! My youth! My VOICE! And you, you spend your nights in your bathrobe doing ACCOUNTS with MONIQUE!”
“Odette. Odette, ma chérie.” Conner dropped to one knee on the grimy tiles of the Châtelet interchange, clutching his guitar. “Let me explain.”
“There is NOTHING to explain!”
“Then let me SING!”
And he did the only thing he could think of. He struck a chord, a big, warm, open chord that rang off the tiles and filled the corridor, and began to sing, “Hey Jude.”
He sang it with everything he had. And Odette, who stood over him with her finger still pointing and her mouth still open to shout, slowly, as the song rose, lowered her finger.
He watched her face change. He watched the performance of fury soften and melt and become the performance of a woman being won back against her will; and then, underneath that, he saw something else, something real, a flicker of genuine surprise and respect in the green eyes, as though she had not expected him to be able to sing, not like that.
When he reached the long, wordless refrain at the end, she joined in. High and sweet and pure, above his baritone, like a bird over a field. And astonishingly, the crowd joined in too: fifty, sixty, seventy people in the tiled corridor of the Châtelet interchange at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning—businessmen and students and tourists. All of them singing the refrain together while Conner played on his knees with Odette standing over him with her hand on his shoulder, singing like an angel.
When it finally ended, there was a moment of silence, and then the applause came down the corridor like a train.
Money rained into the guitar case. Coins, then notes, five francs, ten, twenty. A Japanese tourist dropped in a fifty.
An old woman came forward and pressed a whole baguette into Odette’s hands, and kissed her, and said, “Forgive him, chérie. They’re all idiots. Mine was an idiot for forty years, and I miss him every day.”
Odette looked down at Conner, still kneeling on the dirty tiles, with the guitar in his arms and his blue eyes shining with joy.
“Who,” she said, in an undertone, over the applause, “the hell are you?”
“A student,” said Conner.
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