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T A B L E__T A L K Do virtual communities really exist or is this just another catchy buzz word? Join the discussion in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Epistolary romance, digital style By Jenn Shreve E-mail has changed how we start relationships, how we keep them going -- and how we wreck them (04/27/98) Love is blind By Lisa Palac She met her sexual soul mate online -- but he wouldn't let her see what he looks like. Excerpt from "The Edge of the Bed" (04/27/98) Do computers boost productivity? By Andrew Leonard According to one student of the numbers, the answer is: No way (04/24/98) You are what you type By Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell Why do people love taking personality tests online? (04/23/98) The little browser that could By Paul Bissex Move over, Microsoft and Netscape -- Opera is coming to town (04/23/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

A WRITER'S ENGAGEMENT UNRAVELS -- THANKS TO A TELLTALE E-MAIL MESSAGE. BY EVAN MARX | Until a few months ago, I planned to get married this summer. I felt excited about the upcoming wedding, and I was convinced that Amy and I would be together for life. Then an e-mail message ruined everything. My discoveries began one evening in early January. I was checking my e-mail at home while Amy was out doing aerobics at the Y. As my Eudora software downloaded a large batch of e-mail, a message header from "mitch-r" flashed in the dialog box. The message's subject was "Re[3]: Being alone." Amy and I kept different e-mail boxes, and Eudora filtered Mitch's message to her personal box. I hardly knew Mitch. We had him over for dinner a few months before and I saw him occasionally at parties. Why, I wondered, was Mitch writing to my fiancée about being alone? In the year and a half that I've known Amy, I've never once doubted her. Sometimes she'd go out with friends past 1 in the morning, but the thought that she might cheat never crossed my mind. As I considered the possibility of infidelity, I pictured the Amy I always envision. In my mind she'll always wear that adorable pale blue dress we bought together while visiting her parents in Canada. Now, doubting Amy and wondering whether I should investigate, I remembered sweet young Faith in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Did I dare doubt my love? Would my checking bring about a reality I couldn't handle? I knew that reading Mitch's e-mail would be like Goodman Brown's decision to venture into the forest to test Faith. Cold sweat dripped down from my armpits and my heart squeezed. I clicked open Mitch's message. In a casual tone, Mitch wrote that he couldn't meet her at the Y but would be at the Golden Lotus restaurant later if she wanted to drop by. I was suspicious -- doubly so because of the message's subject: "Re[3]: Being alone." In Eudora, if you reply to a message called "Being alone," your response would have the subject "Re: Being alone." If your correspondent answered that e-mail, the response would come back "Re[2]: Being alone." And so on. So this e-mail was Mitch's response to a series of three "Being alone" e-mails. Yet when I checked Amy's in-box and the out-box, there were no earlier "Being alone" messages. Amy practically never deletes messages; she doesn't even delete spam. Yet she had intentionally erased at least three messages involving Mitch. Still, Mitch's message was hardly a smoking gun. I had to know what was going on. I used Norton Utilities to explore my hard drive. I tried the basic un-erase, but nothing relevant came up. So I set Norton Utilities to scan the entire hard drive for deleted files that contained the text string "Mitch-r." Norton churned my hard drive for about a minute, and the deleted files obligingly popped up, one by one. Eight of them. All with personal subjects like, "despairing," "talking" and, of course, the three earlier "Being alone" messages. Perhaps I violated Amy by reading these messages. But I violated myself, too. As the passion between Mitch and Amy deepened with each e-mail, I felt too shocked and betrayed to weep. Details from the e-mails nauseated me. In one, Amy wrote, "My darling, I hope the soreness in your trapezius is diminishing. Today I consulted a massage book for some tips on working on that part of your body." Among other things, one penalty for my losing faith became reading my betrothed's offer to massage Mitch's trapezius. N E X T_P A G E .|. Amy was sending him long passages by Simone de Beauvoir about orgasms