Douglas & Holly

My name is Douglas Watkins. I'm 22, I live in Pittsburgh, and I work the overnight shift at a copy shop, which means I spend my nights making other people's résumés and term papers look good and my afternoons asleep. A year ago I didn't know anyone west of Ohio. This page is about Holly Forsman, who lives in Portland, Oregon, about 2,500 miles from my apartment, and about how we got to know each other one letter at a time.

Holly has read this page and approved every word, except for one sentence, which I took out.

How We Met

In the fall of 1994 I was reading rec.arts.mystery on my breaks, the Usenet newsgroup for mystery readers. On Tuesday, October 4, I posted a long, slightly pompous article arguing that Gaudy Night isn't really a mystery at all, that Dorothy L. Sayers had written a novel about Harriet Vane and work and love and hid a mystery inside it so her publisher wouldn't notice.

Most people ignored me. One person, a bookstore clerk in Portland, wrote a reply that took my argument apart politely and completely, one paragraph at a time, and ended by saying I was right anyway, but for the wrong reasons. I read it four times at the counter at three in the morning.

I didn't want to keep arguing in front of the whole newsgroup, so on Tuesday, October 11, I sent her a private e-mail to say thank you and to defend myself a little. She wrote back that afternoon. I wrote back that night. Neither of us has missed a day since.

The E-mail Count

I print every one. I know how that sounds. But they are the best letters I've ever gotten, and the screen doesn't feel like it will keep them. They go into three-ring binders on the shelf over my desk, in order, hers and mine together, so you can read the whole conversation straight through.

The one-word e-mail was "Yes." I'll get to that.

For the record, I print them on my own paper and pay for my own copies. My manager, Jorge, reads this page.

The First Phone Call

We wrote for three months before we ever heard each other's voices. That was partly nerves and partly money. On Sunday, January 8, 1995, at eleven o'clock at night my time, eight o'clock hers, I finally called.

We talked for three hours and twelve minutes. She laughs more on the phone than she does in e-mail, which I would not have thought possible. Her voice is lower than I expected. She said mine was higher than she expected. We decided we were even.

The long-distance bill for January came to $187.40. I paid it in two installments. After that we made a rule: one call a week, Sunday nights after eleven Eastern, when the rates are lowest, and everything else in writing. We have mostly kept the rule. The e-mail doesn't cost anything extra, and it turns out we are better at writing than at talking anyway.

Her Visit

Holly flew to Pittsburgh for Memorial Day weekend, Friday, May 26 through Monday, May 29. I got to the airport an hour and a half early and read the same page of a paperback about forty times.

I showed her my city. We rode the Monongahela Incline up to Mount Washington at dusk and looked down at the three rivers and the bridges and all the lights. We spent most of Saturday in a used bookstore on the South Side, where she found a first American edition of a Josephine Tey for four dollars and nearly cried. My mother made pot roast for her on Sunday and asked her approximately two hundred questions, and Holly answered every one.

On Monday at the airport neither of us could think of anything to say, so we didn't say much. Late that night there was an e-mail from her, written on the plane on the back of her boarding pass envelope and typed in the minute she got in her door.

My Visit

In August it was my turn: Saturday, August 12 to Sunday, August 20. I had never been west of Chicago. Holly met me at the airport with a sign that said WIMSEY, and everybody near the gate thought it was very funny.

Portland is green in a way that Pittsburgh isn't, and there are bookstores everywhere, including one downtown that takes up a whole city block. Holly took me to the little mystery bookstore where she works, and the owner gave me a good long look and then sold me a book at the employee discount. We drove up the Columbia Gorge to Multnomah Falls. We walked through the Rose Garden in Washington Park on a clear evening when you could see Mount Hood, which is where the roses on this page come from.

Her roommate, Laura, told me on my last night that Holly had been checking the mail on the store's computer every hour for ten months. I told Laura that I had been doing the same thing every hour at my counter. Laura said, "Well, then." That about covers it.

Our Favorite Mysteries

Mine:

• Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. Obviously.
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey. A detective solves a five-hundred-year-old case from a hospital bed. I've given away three copies.
• The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins. Long, and worth it.
• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. For the sentences more than the plot.

Holly's:

• The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers. She says I'm wrong about which Sayers is best and she will say so in print.
• A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peters. The first Brother Cadfael. She's read the whole series twice.
• An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, P. D. James.
• A Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman. She sells more Hillerman than anything else in the store.

The Big News

I'm moving to Portland.

I asked Holly in September whether she would mind very much if I came out there for good. She answered in one word. That's the shortest e-mail in the table above, and the best.

I've given my notice at the copy shop, and the same company has a store on the east side of Portland that needs someone on nights, so I'll be doing the same job with more rain. I have a room lined up in a house in Southeast Portland with two of Holly's friends from the store, eleven blocks from her apartment. She has walked it to check.

The U-Haul is reserved for Saturday the 25th, two days after Thanksgiving, which I'm spending with my family. Then it's west on I-80 across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, onto I-84 in Utah, and up through Idaho and along the Columbia River to Portland. Five days if the weather in Wyoming cooperates. I've bought chains. My mother has packed enough sandwiches for the first three states.

The binders are riding up front with me.

Next update from Portland!