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

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.

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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

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.