ANDREW

by Anne Kaier


“Andrew,” she said, “don’t stub your cigarette out in my pansies.” She felt like a jerk the instant she said it. His hand was shaking, there in her walled garden. The last guest had left after the reading he’d persuaded her to hold so he could sell more copies of his memoir. She was pissed because she’d corralled people on a beautiful spring day to hear a middle-aged bipolar guy read about his adventures in manic depression though he never came to her readings. Not even when she launched her first book of poems.

“Look, I’m just squeezing out the last bits of tobacco. It’s good for the plants.” He rubbed the stub with his thick thumbs and put it in his pocket. In the afternoon sunshine, the blue-black marks under his eyes looked even darker. “I’ve been depressed for the last four days.”

There it was: depressed. The word was strangely intimate spoken just between the two of them. In his book, she thought, he writes superbly about depression and mania. You feel like you’re on a crazy-wired ride with him. And all afternoon he’d propped his leg on a wrought iron bench and talked brilliantly, entertaining an audience of her friends and people they both used to work with. But he never talks about his down feelings, she thought, not to me anyway. For that matter I haven’t laid eyes on him for months. Just emails. Late at night.

Suddenly, she was afraid he’d start speaking in a simple, straightforward way. She pushed up the sleeves of her lavender linen jacket and leaned down to deadhead some pansies. “Not to worry. It went really well, don’t you think?”

He sighed, took another cigarette from the packet that jutted above his paunch. “Hey, we even sold a few copies. That shrink friend of yours, Julia, she bought three. That’s my kinda lady.”

Sure, she thought, a gay shrink who’s even crazier than you are. Who talks a blue streak. See how long that would last.

She and Andrew had been friends for seventeen years, starting long after his divorce, but before he took up with bug-eyed, blue-eyed Lisa. He had been the best copywriter in the same corporate Marketing Communications department where Helen kept clients happy as an Account Executive. When she was thinking about leaving to teach English lit, he sent her an email, telling her she had the right to be happy. No one had ever put it quite that baldly to her. She printed out the flimsy email, took it down to the garden and read it over and over, sitting under the yew tree. Two months later, she had a teaching job.

Now, the late afternoon light glimmered on the garden wall; clouds moved faster across the sky. She tucked her auburn hair behind her neck with a comb. “It must have been harder for you today, with people who used to know you at work, in a different way.” Perhaps if she stuck to what they had just shared, she could comfort him and duck the thuggish arm of depression that threatened him.

‘‘Christ, yes. Always is. It’s like being naked and having a physical in front of your high school classmates.” He gathered up the left-over Doritos he’d brought. Then he opened his arms and embraced her. She could smell the sweat on his neck. His voice filled the small garden: “Can’t thank you enough.” On his way through her yellow living room to the front door, he looked back and smiled: “Keep the salsa.”