My Friend Nolan: Part II

After Nolan and I left Auburn in the summer of 1982, we kept in touch. It’s fuzzy how much or how often; I’ve been surprised by how time erodes essential elements of the memory. I went to law school where Nancy and I met and married, and he went to the University of Iowa and completed a Ph.D in American lit. Nolan, for all of his goofiness, was scary smart, but he didn’t let on about it.

On one of our first trips as a married couple, we flew to Chicago for a few days and then drove on to Milwaukee to meet Nancy’s German relatives, including her grandmother, an aunt, and Nancy’s Polish husband, who grabbed me in a big bear hug. It was a wonderful trip. Then we drove down to Iowa City to see Mike.

He wasn’t at his apartment when he said he’d be, so we waited out on the curb. Eventually he came strolling down the street in his up-and-down gait, flipping through paper magazines. He eventually spotted us and greeted us as though we had just stopped by from the next block. He held up the magazines in explanation: “The new editions of all the comics come out on Fridays.” He wouldn’t apologize; comics were more important.

I didn’t see him at all through our time in Delaware. He had finished the Ph.D. and settled in with an instructorship at Augustana; they apparently liked him well enough to find him courses to teach in both English and journalism. Helen was a star in the Business School, so perhaps Augustana tried to find a place for him to keep her. I have no real idea how those things work.

Eventually we moved here to Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle, and we saw him a couple of more times as he had a friend who lived just north of downtown Seattle. Nothing had changed: we weren’t quite good enough to stay with, but he and Helen would come out to Bainbridge to see us. He called once to let us know he was in town: “I’m just enjoying coffee here on the deck on Phinney Ridge,” he said, which felt somehow like reproach; he was familiar with and at ease with Phinney Ridge, which of course was the place to be, there with a superior friend—I think he was a physician.

He came over to Bainbridge when Kate was a toddler. He wasn’t easy with her. He and Helen hadn’t been able to have children. They’d had tests; “I’m still pumping out the old Esso Extra,” he said. But he wore a starched white shirt and was balding. Nolan had grown up, as happens to pretty much all of us. He had even edited a book on American humor, which I loyally purchased. That was his only book publication.

We kept in touch by email when that came into general use. Nolan wrote with surprisingly indiscretion from a university server: “Well, I have to stop now as I’ve become faculty advisor to the Big Breasts Club and they have a meeting.” Or, that he’d run into Helen and another woman on campus and asked, “Is this where all the hot girls are hanging out now?”

I saw him one more time. He again came to Phinney Ridge, and we met for a beer downtown. Things had changed for him. Augustana had created an odd deanship for him, something in the line of quality control. Apparently this was a New Thing in academia. He was gamely trying to master it and make it mean something, but it wasn’t literature.

When we were younger, poems and novels were things that Nolan had definite, objective ideas about, as he did about women: Beauty was not at all in the eye of the beholder. You could say that this poem or that woman was objectively beautiful or that it was not. I don’t know if he had softened, changed his stance. We didn’t talk about such things anymore; I was a lawyer, and he had never really paid any attention to my literary taste anyway. He did say that he had run into Annie, my old girlfriend at Auburn who finished her Ph.D. at Ohio State and was tenured at one of New York’s state universities. “Her work now,” he stated definitively, “is pretty much dross.”

He was in fear of being let go, which in itself was notable; with Nolan, the subtext was that things would always work out for him. Helen had tenure, and she wasn’t going anywhere. I could tell that Nolan felt let down—betrayed by the college he loved may be too strong a word. But, as many of us can say, things hadn’t worked out as he had expected, and there was a completely unusual and unsettling air of disappointment about him. He was subdued, and he made none of the old jokes.

One day not long after, Nancy, Kate, and I were in line at the ferry, and I received a call from Nolan’s sister. He had died, perhaps of a stroke. He’d had an auto accident the day before and had totaled the car. Were the events connected? The obituaries were unclear. It would be like Nolan to think that nothing was wrong with him. Helen had been on a teaching gig in Vietnam and, arriving home at the airport, he wasn’t there to meet her.

There was a service in the Midwest that I couldn’t attend. I emailed his friend from Phinney Ridge remembering Mike and expressing regret. In a fashion probably typical of Nolan’s friends, I didn’t hear back.

Memory attends oddly to the sudden disappearance from the scene of someone who had been so present. Anxious to reconnect with someone about Mike, I got back in touch with three friends from Auburn days. One, the fellow who stole Else from him, was somewhat defensive in tone, and I didn’t keep him on the phone. Another, who’d been an undergraduate woman who I definitely remembered being at a party we’d all attended, had no memory of him at all; another woman remembered him very clearly, though I have no idea how they would have met.

When Nolan and I were young, we talked about our eventual demise. I’ve always had a death wish, and I said something about being glad to pass on from this vale of tears. Nolan said, “Not me. When they bury me, I’m going to be scratching at the top of the coffin, screaming, let me out, let me out!” He’s doing that now, I bet. And wishing he could pick up the Friday comics.