Chapter 18 The Draw
The city came at him all at once: heat off the subway grates, the honor-guard of yellow cabs on the bridge, the Open’s grounds already spinning up days out like a turbine.
His credential photo, taken at the bottom of the slide, showed a man trying very hard.
Security waved him through without looking, which was its own kind of comeback.
His locker stall, when he found it, had his name printed on the brass-look plate: CALLAHAN T.
, spelled correctly, positioned in the main room and not the annex where they filed the qualifiers and the wild cards of sentimental value.
He stood in front of it longer than a nameplate deserved.
The last time he’d played this tournament, his stall had been by the showers, between a lucky loser and a doubles alternate, and he had made a bit of it for the cameras, prime real estate, great water pressure, then gone home that night and not slept.
The room had moved him back toward the middle.
He hung his bag and did not perform anything for anyone, which was, these days, its own kind of form.
Media day put them at adjacent tables for a stretch, an accident of scheduling the photographers treated as a gift.
A reporter asked Theo, with Kas in earshot one table over, how the partnership would survive the singles draw if the bracket brought them together.
Theo leaned into the microphone with a career’s worth of timing and said, “On court, nothing changes. Off court,” a beat, the room leaning in, “he still won’t tell me where he gets his espresso.
” The room laughed, and the question moved on.
One table over, Kas answered a question about hard-court speeds without a flicker. The exchange had held.
“Well,” Theo said at last.
“Yes.”
“The universe has been reading the rider.”
“The universe,” Kas replied, “has poor boundaries.”
Theo laughed in his hotel room, a few blocks from a man he could not walk to, in a city about to watch them very closely.
The doubles draw came out the next day. Callahan/Varga, seeded twelfth on the strength of one title and a hashtag, opening against a pair of Australians. Fine. Good. Expected.
The singles draw came out an hour later. Theo was standing in the players’ café with Owen when the bracket loaded, and Owen, reading over his shoulder, made a sound like a man watching a car crash into a wedding.
Wild card T. Callahan, first round versus a qualifier. Winner to face the twenty-eight seed. Winner of that, third round, projected: K. Varga, nine in the world.
“Well,” Owen said. “That’s the universe showing off.”
Theo stared at the bracket. Two wins, and he would walk onto a court to play Kas.
A hundred and twenty-eight players in the draw, and somehow it had found him.
Around them the café carried on, players scanning their own fates, and his phone was already buzzing: Marsha, then Marsha again, then a number he didn’t know, then Marsha.
“The narrative,” Marsha said when he picked up, breathless, delighted, a man watching his quarterly numbers achieve sentience, “writes itself. Fire versus Ice. Partner against partner. Theo, if you get there, that night session is the biggest audience of your career, win or lose. Halcyon is losing their minds. They moved the renewal signing to that weekend. They want banners.”
That morning he had practiced with a French lefty who needed a southpaw tune-up, and a crowd stood several deep along the walkway, phones up, the kind of attention his practices had not drawn in years.
Afterward, a boy of maybe twelve in a knockoff Halcyon tee asked him to sign a tennis ball and then, with the complete mercilessness of his age, said, “My dad says you used to be famous for being famous, but now you’re good again.
” Theo signed the ball, laughing, and wrote under his name the only coaching he fully trusted these days: check the size.
The kid read it, baffled, and ran off. Theo walked to the players’ café feeling like a man who had finally figured out what to put under the autograph.
Owen was still mid-meltdown about the bracket at lunch.
He pulled it back up on his phone and whistled the whistle he reserved for car accidents and seeding committees.
He was in the doubles himself, paired this fortnight with a cheerful Brazilian he described as “all hands, no plan,” and he set down his tray, confiscated half of Theo’s untouched sandwich on ancient precedent, and studied the draw.
“You know what this means,” he said.
“It means I play the love of my…” Theo caught it, two tables from a journalist, and rerouted at speed, “…the best doubles partner I’ve ever had in the third round of a major.”
Owen’s eyebrows did not move, which cost him visibly.
“It means,” he said, with enormous gentleness, “you’d better win two matches, because if this tournament gets that night session and you’re not in it, I’m asking for the wild card next year.
” He bit the sandwich. “Also you just said it out loud in a players’ café, so we’re working on the careful part, I see. ”
“I have to win two matches first.”
“So win two matches. You’re playing the best tennis of your life, everyone says so, even the people with no stake in saying it.
” A beat, and then Owen’s voice did the thing it rarely did, set the bit down entirely, went quiet at the edges.
“Theo. Whatever happens in that third round, somebody you have dinner with is going to lose it. You ready for that?”
No, Theo thought. “Sure,” Theo said.
* * *
The practice desk made the error on Tuesday afternoon, hours after the draw came out: a double-booking of Court P6, CALLAHAN, T.
and VARGA, K. in adjacent grid cells. By the time both camps noticed, the tournament’s content team had noticed first and asked, with no innocence at all, whether the two men would mind sharing the hour.
“Great visual, with the third round projecting and all.”
Protocol said decline. Every careful thing they had built said decline.
Theo looked at Kas across the desk attendant’s clipboard and said, “We’ll share,” because the alternative was a story about why they wouldn’t, and Kas said, “Fine,” because refusing would make a louder story.
That was how they came to play one publicly witnessed tiebreak against each other, singles, first to seven, on a Tuesday afternoon, in front of a crowd that assembled out of nowhere.
It was supposed to be light. It was light, for a few points.
Then the rally happened: a long one, both of them forgetting the audience completely, the ball giving them the only language they still trusted.
Drop shot, get, lob, overhead, get. The crowd around P6 began making a noise practice courts do not make, and somewhere inside it Theo hit a backhand pass that had no business existing.
Kas stood at the net, looking at the mark and then at him with an expression the internet had already learned how to misread, and the phones, a wall of them by now, recorded all of it.
Kas won the breaker. They did not play a second. They put on jackets and signed autographs at opposite fences, the model professionals, and the footage led every preview package for the third round.
“We just sold out our own collision,” Theo said.
“We gave them a trailer,” Kas agreed. “They have misunderstood the genre.”
* * *
The players’ party happened Wednesday night, the tournament’s annual exercise in enforced glamour. They arrived separately, a careful gap apart, and spent the night on opposite flanks of a Manhattan rooftop dressed by a sponsor in linen and string lights.
It was, Theo discovered, its own variety of athletic event. He worked his side of the roof on autopilot: handshakes, the broadcast laugh, a selfie with the women’s third seed, an actual friend, who whispered “you look like you’re at your own wake” into his ear mid-photo.
The entire time, his positional awareness ran on the other man like court sense.
Kas at the bar declining canapés. Kas cornered by a federation official.
Kas enduring the men’s eleventh seed’s impression of someone telling a story.
The whole width of the roof between them, and they had a better half-step across a crowded rooftop than most teams had at the net.
The one exchange they permitted themselves was administrative and public: drinks acquired at the same bar through scheduling coincidence, two professionals nodding.
“Callahan.”
“Varga.”
A photographer caught it. The picture ran the next morning captioned FRENEMIES, and only two people alive knew that under the bar’s lip, for the duration of one pour, Kas’s smallest finger had rested against the back of Theo’s hand. A few hundred people stood around them. No one saw.
“This is insane,” Theo said into his glass, smiling at the skyline.
“This is the protocol,” Kas said, to a passing tray. And then, barely a movement of the mouth: “You look very good. It is a problem.”
He was gone before Theo’s pulse had any chance to settle, and Theo stood at the bar of a rooftop in Manhattan grinning at New Jersey with nowhere useful to put it.
He found Kas at the practice courts early the next day, the far one, the one with the broken camera mount that no crew bothered with, which was not a coincidence because nothing Kas did was a coincidence.
They hit for a while without discussing it, the bracket between them whether they named it or not. Finally, collecting balls at the same corner, close enough that the conversation could happen at the volume conversations like this required, Theo said, “So. Third round.”
“You must win two matches first.”
“That’s what I said. Everyone keeps saying it like it’s reassuring.” He straightened, hopper on his hip. “Kas. If I get there. What do we do?”