Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu Page A

they keep asking about you.”
    “That’s swinging. You’re talking about us becoming swingers.”
    “Ew. Gross. No. It was not that at all.”
    “Then what kind of party was it?”
    “People know us. They like us. Not ‘us’ exactly, it’s hard to explain. You just have to come see for yourself.”

    It was us, but we were performing.
    I could feel myself not quite being myself, but a little better, wittier, like I was doing everything for the benefit of someone else.
    When I would talk to Samantha, it was like we were speaking lines. As if someone were watching, and we were trying to give off an impression. And the impression we were giving off was that we were happy, and in love, and that we flirted with each other and made each other laugh all the time.
    At one point during the party, I put my hand on the small of Samantha’s back, and whispered in her ear, “I love you,” and it felt so natural that I felt like I really did, and it didn’t matter that I never did things like that back on the other side of the door.
    But it wasn’t us. I had never put my hand on the small of her back. I didn’t even like that phrase, “small of her back,” and even as I was doing it, I felt more like I was “putting my hand on the small of her back” than actually doing it. It was a gesture more than an action, and I was not actually doing it because I wanted to touch Samantha. I was doing it just so that I could feel myself doing it, so other people could see that we were the kind of couple that showed each other affection in this way.

    “I like it there,” I said.
    “We should go back tomorrow,” Samantha said, and the way she said it, I knew she’d have gone back with or without me.
    It was five a.m. We were in bed, lying on top of the covers, wide awake, our heads buzzing with the clinking of flatware and the hum of conversation.
    We went back the next night, and the next. We were practicing something that we had no name for. Neither of us wanted to talk about what the “door” was. Neither of us wanted to take a chance that we might ruin a good thing. Every night, we would get home from work, get dressed without talking, and go through the “door.” Whoever would get home first would call the other one to confirm that the “door” was still there.
    We got good at whatever it was we were doing. We learned how to arrive at the party, and how to leave it. We learned to stay until just the right moment, the point in time during a party when you know you should make your exit, find the “door.” If we stayed too long, there would come a point when the party had peaked, and everyone knew it, and yet there was nothing to be done. Being at a party at that point made everyone still there feel lonely, and trapped, and a little bit desperate. On the other hand, if we left too early, we would get home and feel like we’d left part of ourselves somewhere else, as if our centers ofgravity had been displaced, moved somewhere in between Here and There, and we were no longer where we were. We were nowhere.

    I started to realize that I was more there than here. It was the same for Samantha.
    When we had first started going through the “door,” we lived our lives here, and went to the other side to be other people. But we were becoming those people, even though those people were us, and now, on this side, we were increasingly finding ourselves unsure of what to do, how to act or treat each other when there was no one to see how we “acted” or “treated each other.” I would try to touch Samantha’s cheek and she would move away. When she was getting dressed for work, I would try my old move, circle my arm around her waist, but she would turn around and give me a look, as in, what-do-you-think-you-are-doing. And even though I didn’t show it, I felt the same way. It felt counterfeit, somehow, to be good to each other when it was just the two of us. It was as if. As if we were actors in a play with no audience,