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

Keep the ball in play. Keep your eye on the ball. Follow through. These were admonitions for both tennis and life, and they spilled over from the one into the other.

A newcomer is unencumbered by his past, his mistakes and secrets unknown. This is the great promise of moving: that if you fold your life into a U-Haul truck and put it on the road, you will be given a clean plate with which to approach the buffet.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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