The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss

“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.

Beneath that old canopy of stars, perhaps two thousand feet below me, El Paso and Juárez came alive to the night. The white, sober streetlights of El Paso gave way to the shimmering green lights of Juárez, a tropical and brazen green that seemed to throb and surge, that seemed to say, Ni modo—anything goes.

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

stand lead-footed, watching the ball skid low, graze the inside of the line on its way to set the chain-link fence into song.

My right hand supports the fingers, the fingers of my left hand slide down the ball of the thumb, down that familiar incline, into the groove between the flexor tendons, to the radial artery. If I were a cellist, this would be my fret board.

No one ever seems out of place in a coffee shop.

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

It was a sad thing to realize that your childhood dreams weren’t going to come true. In my case, the tennis dream became a fantasy so early that it never cost me any time. David had come much closer.

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