Dear Charlotte J. Nolan...

A letter to a vanished nom de plume...

So whatever was the story about the ticket agent at the bus station buying you a ticket? You noted once at _iwenthome that you were waiting a couple of months later for new checks (a Baltimore bank?) to arrive so you could pay himback. Whatever happened? Where was the ticket to in the first place? You turned the story into the passage in "Revolver, Dauphin" Nr. 5 where he bought you not just a ticket but breakfast as well and shared a flask of cheap whiskey with you on a morning after your father threw you out of the house. You wrote a long time ago that you'd always seen your life as a film that was a collaboration between Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, and it's hard to disentangle the short story life from the ordinary biography, to separate out Melia and Charlotte J. Nolan from the real-life girl in Wilkes-Barre or Baltimore or the Skinny Island.

Wm. Spackman's characters in "As I Sauntered Out One Midcentury Morning" and "An Armful of Warm Girl" and even "Heyday" are always spending summers in dower houses and carriage houses, always leaving Princeton or a first marriage for Pennsylvania estates with dower houses and carriage houses. But did Melia--- or Charlotte J. Nolan ---ever really meet a boy at the Baltimore Amtrak station and go off to a carriage house in Silver Spring to be naked on a couch at fifteen or sixteen? How much of that is from a real First Love, and how much is part of the Anderson-Coppola film?

I'll never know that. I can ask other girls for Stories and accounts of Adventures in Mexique and London--- I might even get those. Melia/Charlotte in the carriage house, Charlotte/Melia at the bus station--- those I'll never know. Or about New Year's Eve between the Year Six and the Year Seven, drinking vodka at hookah bars on the Baltimore waterfront.

Another Lost girl told me a few nights ago about lying naked in bed with an older, hipster lover when she was in high school, smoking joints and listening to Ravi Shankar. I suppose I envy that. I have no Stories these days; I'm unlikely ever to have them again. Though it seems desperately important to have done the things the girls I Obsess over do, to have Stories as good as theirs, to be as good as they are.