As her ﬁfteen-month suspension lifts, Maria Sharapova sits down with Jonathan Van Meter to discuss what happened and what comes next.

I would not have taken Maria Sharapova for a tea person. But here we are, standing in her kitchen parsing the finer points of grated ginger and stainless-steel infusers. I don’t even drink tea, but we both have rotten colds, so Sharapova has conjured the most delicious hot beverage I’ve ever tasted in a teapot made entirely of glass. The elixir is electric greenish-yellow—the color of a tennis ball—and one of the only splashes of color in the pristine white-and-gray Minimalist house that Sharapova spent three years building in Manhattan Beach, California.

You would never know a tennis player lives here. “Nowhere will you find a clue,” she says, laughing. But you will find other clues—about its occupant’s interest in modern art, architecture, and good design. There are large paintings by Joe Goode and Chris Gwaltney; a floor lamp topped with a white-feather shade that, when lit, looks like a giant peony; and a framed black-and-white photograph of a very young Marilyn Monroe. A glass wall runs the length of the kitchen and living room, with sliding doors opening to a pool that laps right up against the side of the house. “This was as close as they could get it,” she says.

Sharapova trains at the Manhattan Country Club, about ten minutes from here, and we were supposed to go there yesterday—a Monday, her day off—to hit some tennis balls and have a boozy lunch (her idea) but . . . well, tea instead. I must admit, I was surprised when she suggested the plan. Playing one’s sport and drinking are not the sort of things world-class athletes do with journalists, but Sharapova, who failed a drug test in January 2016 and was banned from competitive tennis for fifteen months (more on that in a minute), has had some time on her hands. “This past year, my intake of alcohol was so much more than ever in my life,” she says. “But it was because I actually had a social life!”

When she emailed a couple days earlier, apologizing profusely for having to postpone (she is not a canceler, this Maria Sharapova), I told her I was doing just fine, watching the Australian Open and eating French fries in my hotel room. She wrote back: “French fries and the Four Seasons, yes please! Being sick and watching tennis, not so much.” It was a reminder that Sharapova has a peculiar relationship to the sport she has been at or near the top of since winning Wimbledon at seventeen—and that made her the highest-paid female athlete in the world for eleven years in a row.