Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee

couldn’t speak to my wife that way if she wanted to keep living in our house. The woman bit her lip; she bent her head and bowed severely before me in a way that perhaps no one could anymore and then trundled out of the room between us. I suddenly felt as if I’d committed a great wrong.
    Lelia shouted, “What did she say? What did you say? What the hell just happened?”
    But I didn’t answer her immediately and she cursed “Goddamnit!” under her breath and ran out the back door toward the apartment. I went after her but she wouldn’t slow down. When I reached the side stairs to the apartment I heard the door slam hard above. I climbed the stairs and opened the door and saw she wasn’t there. Then I realized that she’d already slipped into the secret room behind the closet.
    She was sitting at my old child’s desk below the face-shaped window, her head down in her folded arms. When I touched her shoulder she began shuddering, sobbing deeply into the bend of her elbow, and when I tried to coax her out she shook me off and dug in deeper. So I embraced her huddled figure, and she let me do that, and after a while she turned out of herself and began crying into my belly, where I felt the wetness blotting the front of my shirt.
    â€œCome on,” I said softly, stroking her hair. “Try to take it easy. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say about her. She’s always been a mystery to me.”
    She soon calmed down and stopped crying. Lelia cried easily, but back then in our early days I didn’t know and each time she wept I feared the worst, that it meant something catastrophic was happening between us, an irreversible damage. What I should have feared was the damage unseen, what she wouldn’t end up crying over or even speaking about in our last good year.
    â€œShe’s not a mystery to me, Henry,” she now answered, her whole face looking as though it had been stung. With her eyes swollen like that and her high cheekbones, she looked almost Asian, like a certain kind of Russian. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She looked out the little window.
    â€œI know who she is.”
    â€œWho?” I said, wanting to know.
    â€œShe’s an abandoned girl. But all grown up.”
    * * *
    During high school I used to wander out to the garage from the house to read or just get away after one of the countless arguments I had with my father. Our talk back then was in fact one long and grave contention, an incessant quarrel, though to hear it now would be to recognize the usual forms of homely rancor and still homelier devotion, involving all the dire subjects of adolescence—my imperfect studies, my unworthy friends, the driving of his car, smoking and drinking, the whatever and whatever. One of our worst nights of talk was after he suggested that the girl I was taking to the eighth-grade Spring Dance didn’t—or couldn’t—find me attractive.
    â€œWhat you think she like?” he asked, or more accurately said, shaking his head to tell me I was a fool. We had been watching the late news in his study.
    â€œShe likes
me
,” I told him defiantly. “Why is that so hard for you to take?”
    He laughed at me. “You think she like your funny face? Funny eyes? You think she dream you at night?”
    â€œI really don’t know, Dad,” I answered. “She’s not even my girlfriend or anything. I don’t know why you bother so much.”
    â€œBother?” he said. “
Bother?
”
    â€œNothing, Dad, nothing.”
    â€œYour mother say exact same,” he decreed.
    â€œJust forget it.”
    â€œNo, no,
you
forget it,” he shot back, his voice rising. “You don’t know nothing! This American girl, she nobody for you. She don’t know nothing about you. You Korean man. So so different. Also, she know we live in expensive area.”
    â€œSo what!” I gasped.
    â€œYou