My memory of that period is tied up with sounds and smells: rain rattling on a corrugated tin roof, the scent of wet eucalyptus, raised voices inside the house that brought my heart to my throat, the telephone shattering against a wall, wood smoke from the fireplace, and, worst of all, silences that settled like a shroud and heightened until they w

auscultate

After winning Wimbledon in 1920 at the late age of twenty-seven, Tilden did not lose a match in the next six years—a feat of domination that is inconceivable in modern tennis. Like a slugger batting a thousand for six seasons.

The sky was now blotted out, replaced by a brown-gray canopy, except to the far west where an orange, perfectly round fireball had formed, looking like light at the end of the tunnel.

“Love” was such a poor word to describe the tempestuous, tortured, raging, ecstatic tsunami of emotions that threatened to undo him.

The bar was filling up. The faces of the people walking in seemed relaxed, their lives uncomplicated by the sorts of things we had just traded across the table. “When

“Within your secrets lies your sickness,” Dr. Talbott had said to me when I talked to him long after David’s death. If David never sustained a lasting recovery, it was because he never let go of his secret, there were some bars that never came down. His secret is still with him. He still walks alone.

Still, my instincts often ran ahead of my accumulated index cards, just as on the court one had to produce shots before there was time to deliberate about them. Perhaps that was why I often kept one hand in my pocket, on my blue book.

palaver