You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

college, after which we’d switch, so that within eight years, when we’d still be in our early twenties, we’d both have college degrees and, married, we’d be able to start a family of our own. Mostly, though, we talked about how lucky we were to have discovered each other—and about how good it felt to be able to tell each other anything and everything and to feel understood in a way nobody else ever had or, we believed, ever would understand us. We also agreed that the biggest surprise for both of us was not having fallen in love after knowing each other for so many years, but that being in love had turned out to be—the word we came back to again and again—so easy .
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    The night before our quarterfinal game against Lafayette for the Brooklyn championship, Johnny Lee came down with the flu. He suited up and kept drinking liquids, but he wasn’t himself and wound up playing less than fifteen minutes and only scoring seven points. Olen was a maniac under the boards and on defense, and, scoring thirty-three points, single-handedly kept us in the game, but by the time Jimmy Geller fouled out with four minutes left and the coach put me in, we were eleven points down. I played well enough, but the guy I was guarding, Stan Groll, their All-City ballplayer, pretty much did what he wanted with me, using up the clock by dribbling around near half-court like he played for the Harlem Globetrotters. I was able to steal the ball from him once, which, from the look in his eyes, he seemed to regard as an insult, but I also had to foul him three times to give us a chance to get the ball back, and he made all his foul shots. We lost by seventeen points.

    With the basketball season over and my father back at work, Karen and I had more time alone in my apartment, where she tried to cheer me up by telling me obvious things—that, like Olen, I’d given it my best, that there was always next year, and that—believe it or not—she still loved me even if I wasn’t on a city championship team. This helped some, but what really got me out of my doldrums was when one afternoon, as soon as we were in my room, instead of lying down on my bed, she started picking up and examining some of my model airplanes and looking through the windows of a few of the houses I’d made.
    â€œOkay,” she said. “Tell me how you make these things. I mean, how does a guy as restless as you are have the patience ?”
    So I started showing her how I put the planes together, and took a few old ones out of my closet (she remembered me bringing them into class in elementary school for show-and-tell, and flying some of them around the schoolyard at recess) to show her how much more detailed the newer ones were: pinheads on the propellor mounts to simulate bolts, blackened string next to the wheels to represent shock absorbers—and then I showed her sketches I’d been making for houses, and—I couldn’t resist—the plans for a house I was designing for the two of us to live in some day.
    The house was based on one by Frank Lloyd Wright, its main section cantilevered out over a waterfall, with enormous wraparound windows that would make you feel there was no separation between the interior of the house and the exterior. Karen liked the sketch, but what interested her more than the fact that I’d dreamt it up for the two of us, was how I was going to turn it into a model.
    For the next week and a half, whenever we were in my room, we worked on the model, which, because it had huge windows that seemed to have no supports, was more complicated than any model I’d ever built before. I made the exteriors of most of my houses out of sheets of oaktag that came in different
thicknesses, and I’d glue two pieces together, which made the finished product surprisingly strong and, unlike the kind of thin wood people usually made models from, had the advantage of never warping.
    For the