During this period I had developed a new habit. Having stopped watching TV, axing the cable in favor of fiction, music and meditation, I found myself, without realizing it, replacing the tube with the methadone fix of the new media: the Internet. Endless channels with nothing on were thoughtlessly replaced by CNN.com, the BBC Web sites, Slate, Salon, all the online broadsheet English newspapers, Matt Drudge, Sky, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, news sites from India, Pakistan and Egypt, plus news groups, weblogs, and Google searches for new news that had not yet broken. It was every bit as exhausting as it sounds, but it filled up the hours.

I had by now developed the idea that pulling away (taking the pressure off) might bring her back. And I had expert advice on my side: One sad afternoon I turned to the Internet and Googled "how to stop someone from breaking up with you." Even as I typed those words I knew I was wasting my time, but I did find something: a Web site with an e-book that claimed to show you how to stop someone from breaking up with you.

The advice was sound enough -- agree with her all the time, do not beg or plead or make her feel bad, confess your own sins, and let go. That way, either she will stay, or if she does leave, she might come back. The subtext was that once you did all of this you might no longer want her. It was bleak advice; but still, I purchased two hours' peace of mind for the sum of $30, and in my desperate state I considered it the bargain of a lifetime.

If the alternative to winning her back was letting her go, then once again it seemed that the computer would come to my rescue. I began to fantasize about how Fate was clearing the way for a reunion with my teenage crush. That Louise lived on another continent, was married and had three kids, and that I was in love with my girlfriend -- well, such details seemed less important than the apparent inevitability of it all. I had built my exit ramp, day by day, e-mail by e-mail, seduction by seduction, and now, it seemed, the time had come to test it. Louise went quiet for a while, though. She listened to my weeping and wailing but said little about what was going on in her life.

One Friday evening, as my girlfriend prepared to take a trip to the mountains and I struggled to pull myself together to go out for an evening with friends, I logged on to Yahoo. There was a message from Louise, telling me that she was getting divorced because she had fallen in love with an old school friend.

I re-read this message several times, just to make sure that she wasn't talking about me. She wasn't.

My worst, darkest, fantasy was now coming true. Having flirted with the possibilities, I was going to get my just deserts -- nothing. I was losing both of them -- the real girlfriend I loved and the imaginary lover I hardly knew. I tried not to think about what might be going on in the mountains. I negotiated my evening with all the skill of a washed-up, middle-aged loser: I got blind drunk and fell off a ladder, returning home with an enormous purple shiner. And when I got back to the computer, I deleted all of Louise's e-mails in a jealous rage, just to top the evening off nicely.

The trip to the mountains had involved more than a hike, of course. I knew that on some cellular level. That's why I fell off the ladder. A few days after that fall, I began to think about the technology that makes affairs so easy -- the cellphone. I didn't have one and I didn't need one. Because my girlfriend had one. She had a cellphone I would sometimes use if I was going to the store or setting out in the car for some location I'd never been to before. She used to offer me that phone all the time. And then she stopped doing that.

You don't need to be Bob Woodward to see that it is the coverup, not the crime, that reveals deceptions, whether they are public or private. The technologies that make affairs possible also contain the seeds of their exposure. When a shared phone suddenly isn't, there is probably a reason for the change. It is certainly clear enough that a cohabiting couple who do not share a land line are playing with fire. They should go into counseling immediately. For even if they had separate telephone lines, a third party would be more reluctant to intrude on their home life than when merely venturing into the cyberspace of the cellphone message center. Spouses don't pick up each other's cellphones. Everyone knows that. The cellphone, like the e-mail account, provides an intruding party with the illusion of detachment.

A week after I realized that I was losing two women and gaining none, still sporting a fierce yellow stain under my left eye, I left a retreat center in Northern California early -- retreating from the retreat because I could think about nothing and no one but my girlfriend. I called her unexpectedly, on her cell, to let her know that I was coming home in an hour. She was supposed to be there, but she was not. She didn't sound pleased to hear from me. Her voice betrayed everything, for it was a voice that I had never heard before. She sounded scared. And her words spoke volumes: "We don't need to call each other later. Do we?"

Now I knew, for certain, something I did not want to know: There was someone else. It was the only possible explanation. I drove away singing along to the Pet Shop Boys: "I get along/ Get along/ Without you/ Very well." But I didn't really mean it. "Stuck here with the shame/ And taking my share of the blame." I meant that bit. I arrived home in a dreadful state and stayed awake all night. The next day, a quiet Sunday, I paced about our apartment, waiting for her return.

By evening I started to worry that something worse than an affair was happening. An accident. A car smash. I called her best friend and got a machine. I was about to call her mother when my girlfriend phoned to apologize and to say that she had spent the day walking with her sister. Of course, this did not really explain why, in the age of the cellphone, she had not called earlier. But she repeated this story when she got back, late. And I believed her. Sort of.

Three days later, as my girlfriend prepared to leave for another trip to the mountains, I walked into our study at half-past six in the morning to find her sending an e-mail. In that moment I realized that I no longer believed her, sort of. When she saw me in the doorway, advancing on her as I had never done before (always wanting to respect her privacy -- the safe haven of e-mail), she signed out fast -- too fast, as it turned out. She then made redundant excuses concerning the content of her e-mail -- something to do with work -- and I knew, in a new way now, that the game was up. I didn't say anything before she left for her trip. I just helped her to the car with her backpacking gear. And then I returned to the computer. To discover that, in her haste, she had not signed out.

I clicked on Yahoo Mail. It took me directly to her inbox.

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