Open Heart Read Free Page B

friend in high school and have been talking with him regularly in recent weeks. Eli, who remains close with many of his high school friends, says something about how lucky I am to have remained friends with guys like Arthur—smart, successful, menschy guys who grew up rooting for the Dodgers and who have turned out to be delightfully quirky: Where’s the downside? he asks.
    Arthur was vice president of Erasmus when we were juniors and, when we were seniors, in a class of more than twelve hundred students, was voted Boy-Most-Likely-to-Succeed. (Jerry Friedland was elected our senior class president.) Arthur, too, is a doctor, though not an M.D. He is a psychologist, formerly chief of psychology at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and now in private practice. He tells me that Jerry called him with the news. Jerry and Arthur, good friends at Erasmus, roomed together for a year in an Upper West Side apartment during our college years (the three of us went to Columbia together), and though both acknowledge they made lousy roommates, they have remained close friends ever since. (Arthur was best man at Jerry and Gail’s wedding.) Arthur and I talk for a while, and—as with Phil, Jerry, and Rich—though I’m happy to have him calling to wish me well, what pleases more than anythingwe say is the knowledge that, before and after our talk, he, Rich, Jerry, and Phil will be talking with one another about me. How’s Neugie doing? I hear them ask. And: The Neug seemed in such great shape, and things seemed to be going so well for him…
    Given that, unlike my four friends, I have been living without a wife or companion for the past dozen years, the thought that while I am asleep in the operating room, my chest open and my heart disconnected, these four guys who have known me, and one another, for nearly a half century will be taking care of whatever needs to be taken care of, provides more than comfort. Largely because I cannot know but can only imagine what they will think, feel, and say, my sense of their concern and affection enables me, even before my heart is emptied of blood, to see myself in a life that will be mine after my heart is repaired. Among other pleasant fantasies, I picture myself at Miriam’s wedding, scheduled eight months hence; and, too, I watch myself at my desk, alone in my third-floor office after my return home, going through notes and sketching out scenes for a new novel.
    Now, and later on during my recovery, when I once again rely on these friends to get me through matters both medical and personal, I will find myself seeing us as boys, back again in Brooklyn and doing what we loved most of all: playing basketball. I see us in our favorite place—Holy Cross schoolyard on Church Avenue—and I imagine that we are a team: Phil and Jerry at the forwards, Rich (who is six-foot-two and played college basketball and baseball) at center, me and Arthur (who once scored 59 points in a league game when he was thirteen) in the backcourt. Four Doctors and Neugie , I think—five pretty good ballplayers ready to take on all comers: five guys who loved nothing more than to be away from our homes, sweating it out on a baseball field, or in a gym, or a fenced-in schoolyard—five guys who loved nothing more, win or lose, than to hang out together afterward, talking and laughing about shots made and missed, about passes threaded and passes gone wild, about girls we were going out with or dreamt of going out with—five guys who would have loved nothing more than to have gone on talking forever about those things—sports, girls, the Erasmus basketball team, andthe Brooklyn Dodgers chief among them—that mattered most in the world to us in those days.
    The next morning I telephone my brother Robert, who has been a patient in state mental hospitals for most of the last thirty-seven years and for whom I’ve been primary caretaker. I tell him (and the chief of