Chapter 7 Wild Card
Owen Bell arrived at breakfast like a force of nature: suddenly, comprehensively, and with no respect for anything already on the table.
He set down a plate assembled in open defiance of everything ever written about moderation, dropped into the chair across from Theo, and confiscated the untouched half of Theo’s toast as an entry tariff.
“Wild card,” he said, by way of good morning. “Look at you. A charity case with a fresh haircut.”
“It’s not charity, it’s marketing.” Theo moved his coffee out of the blast radius. “They ran the numbers. I sell more tickets losing than half the seeds sell winning.”
“He likes espresso.”
“I’ve shared locker rooms with that man for six years.
He has said seven total words to me, and four of them were ‘you are standing there.’” Owen chewed, unhurried, his gaze doing the thing it did at net: reading the whole court while appearing to study one ball.
“You had his coffee waiting, Theodore. Timed.”
“It’s called being a good doubles partner.”
“I’ve had thirty-one doubles partners. Not one of them ever learned my coffee order, and two of them were my brothers.”
“Your coffee order is ‘the largest one.’”
“And still.” Owen pointed the fork at him, generous and unconvinced, and let it go the way he let lobs go that he could have chased: on purpose.
Theo’s phone went off against the table, MARSHA lighting the screen, and the joke left the room. He turned it over twice in his hand, a coin he already knew the toss of, and answered.
“Theo! How’s the capital.” Marsha never punctuated questions; questions implied the other person got a turn. “Listen, three items. One: Halcyon.”
Theo looked at his left wrist, at the middle band of three, the one whose logo had faded to a ghost of itself in too many machine washes. Halcyon Athletics, the last major name on his arm, the one whose renewal had been “in discussion” since March, which in sponsor language meant on a ventilator.
“They watched Atlanta,” Marsha said. “They watched the doubles. Theo, they love it. Fire and Ice, golden boy and the ice man, the whole bit. Engagement’s up four hundred percent. They want to renew.”
“That’s the first good sentence you’ve said to me since May.”
“Here’s the second half of it. The renewal is built on the story. Joint content through the Open, the bromance angle, behind-the-scenes, mic’d practices. The partnership IS the deal. The number is good, Theo. The number is the only number left.”
There it was. Theo watched Owen pretend to read the room-service menu of a buffet restaurant. “And if the story ends?”
“Stories don’t end, baby, they get rewritten.
” A pause, the length of Marsha remembering to be human.
“Just don’t let this one end before Labor Day.
Item two, the Washington media day, Thursday.
Item three, you’re trending in Japan, don’t ask, it’s the towel thing.
Call me after the contract lands.” Gone.
Theo set the phone face down. Theo looked at the faded logo on his wrist and hated how obvious it suddenly seemed.
“Good news?” Owen asked.
“The best. I’m worth money again.”
“You look thrilled.”
“I’m delighted.” He drank his coffee. It had gone exactly cold enough to taste like the conversation.
“It’s just that the money is contingent on a story, and the story is contingent on a schedule, and somewhere in there is an actual human Hungarian who thinks schedules are sacred and stories are what liars tell. ”
Owen raised both eyebrows, which on his face was a standing ovation. “That,” he said, “is the most words you’ve ever used to not tell me something.”
“Eat your tariff, Bell.”
“Eating it.” He did. But the look stayed on Theo a beat longer, the net-man’s look, reading the whole court. “You’ve got that face, you know. The second-week-of-a-Slam face. You only get it when something matters.”
The thing about Owen was that he had earned the surveillance.
Fifteen years ago, the Bradenton academy had hired a young Owen to hit with the juniors, work that paid in court time and cafeteria credit, and put him with a teenager who had a big lefty serve and no idea yet what to do with it.
The kid lost his opening match and went to pieces behind the equipment shed, and Owen, a few days into fixing that ball toss, was the one who found him.
“I’ve got eleven dollars,” Owen had announced, “and there’s a pizza place on Cortez that doesn’t check math.”
They had been splitting things ever since: hotel rooms through the wilderness years, a dying Corolla, and every secret either of them could afford.
Owen had been there for the ascent, the billboard Theo once drove out of his way to see and then felt sick about, and the slide, when Owen called every week and never once asked about tennis.
He just narrated his own catastrophes until Theo laughed, which was the entire mission.
“Here’s my whole thing,” Owen said now, gathering his plate, his credentials, his enormous morning.
“I’ve got maybe four more hardcourt summers in these knees, and I intend to spend every one of them being a problem.
You, though. You’ve got a window open that everybody else thinks is a comeback story.
” He stood, and put one hand briefly on Theo’s shoulder, a baseball mitt of a hand, fifteen years in it.
“Do me a favor and notice what it actually is.”
He went off to terrorize the omelet station before Theo could ask him what he meant, which was, Theo suspected, the point of the timing.
“It’s a 500 in August.”
“Sure it is,” said Owen, and stole the rest of the toast.
* * *
Theo walked onto Court 4 to find Kas already there, which was not a surprise, and already serving, which was: a hopper at his feet, a target cone on the ad-side line, and a ball frozen at the top of its toss like a held note.
The serve came down clean. Theo watched the next one from the gate, then the one after, the toss rising into the white morning sky on its old rail, no drift he could see. He let the gate clang so his arrival would be data rather than ambush.
“Four minutes early,” he announced. “Check the model.”
“The model has been updated,” Kas said, and fed another toss.
A fraction of an inch was nothing and everything; Theo had spent a whole Atlanta morning learning that toss the way other men learned a face, and so he stationed himself across the net in the deuce court, hands on knees, and watched the toss.
“Drifted left,” he called.
“It did not.”
“It drifted left, and you adjusted late, which means you felt it too.” Theo straightened, spun a ball on his strings. “You want a liar, hire a line judge.”
A pause at the baseline, a beat long, that he had learned to read as Kas conceding without expending the words.
The next toss went up true. The one after that, true.
Theo called the drift when it came, an inch here, nothing for a long stretch, an inch again when Kas changed sides, and somewhere in the middle of the bucket he understood the strange mechanics of what was happening: the toss steadied when Theo was talking.
Noise as ballast. The man had built a career on silence, and his serve had just voted for the opposite party.
Theo did not say this out loud. Some data you sat on, like match film of a friend.
They moved to patterns after the bucket, the doubles grammar, and somewhere in the middle of it, an accident became a play. Kas went at the body on a practice point; the return floated middle; and Theo crossed a full beat before he had any right to and buried the volley behind it.
Kas stopped. “You left early.”
“I left correctly.”
“You guessed.”
“I read.” Theo spun his racket once, caught it. “Your shoulders open a hair when you’re going at the body. Nobody can see it from the other side of the net. I know because I spent years on the other side of the net not seeing it.” He shrugged. “I’m not on the other side of the net anymore.”
Kas stood at the baseline, visibly working it through. “If you know it is coming,” he said slowly, “you do not need to see it. You need only to know that I know.”
“Two fingers,” Theo said. The idea arrived in both of them at once. “Behind your back, before the toss. I cross. You cover behind me.”
They ran it over and over. It worked more than it didn’t, and the failures were calibration, not concept: half a step of timing, the kind of error that practice existed to eat.
Somewhere in the run something had shifted, a play existing where no play had been, a sentence in a language with exactly two speakers.
Benedikt appeared at the fence for the last of the reps, arms folded, mirrored shades unreadable. He watched the cross, the cover, the put-away. Then he turned and walked back toward the clubhouse without a word, which Theo had learned, by now, to read as a parade.
They drilled returns after, then the doubles patterns, the I-formation, the fake poach, the play where Theo’s lob bought Kas the net, and the patterns kept arriving early, the two of them in each other’s space without negotiation, a half-step that had spent weeks learning to close now closing on its own.
By midday, when the next pair came to claim the court beside it and found it empty, Theo realized they’d run the whole session on one court without deciding to.
Owen turned up at the fence around the last bucket, enormous iced coffee in hand, sunglasses up in his hair, spectating with the open shamelessness of tenure. “Callahan,” he called. “Since when do you do other people’s drills?”
“Since they started winning me money.”
“Uh huh.” Owen’s gaze went from Theo to Kas and back, slow, like a line call he wanted reviewed. “Varga. Your toss looks good.”
Kas zipped his racket away. “I know,” he said, and Owen laughed, delighted, a man collecting characters.