Wounded

It is 2006, November. I'm in our apartment's bathroom, washing my hands, when my cell phone rings. I quickly dry my hands and retrieve the phone from my pocket.

"Are you home?" my wife asks, clearly agitated.

"Y-yeah," I stammer, realizing instantly why she's calling. There can be only one reason why she's so upset.

"Wait there!" she shouts before hanging up.

I am undecided which action to take, to leave home immediately or to stay and state my case. My wife is not a rational woman, not a person known for thoughtfully weighing matters before making conclusions. I know this, but still I stay. To leave would be an admission of guilt.

She is home within a minute, and the look of rage in her eyes terrifies me. I stand at the entryway shaking. I know that this is the end, and I am doomed. Thank God my daughter is at a neighbor's.

"Who is Jiwon?" she screams, thrusting a record of my cell phone text messages so close to my face that I can't see anything but blurred ink.

"A friend of mine," I say plainly, but my look of guilt cannot be more clear, I know.

"A friend?" she screams. "A man or a woman?"

There is no escape. I know my wife is aware that, in this case, the sexually ambiguous given name of Jiwon is a woman's, that she has in fact called this Jiwon to confirm her suspicion, but illogically, stupidly, I tell her she's wrong, that Jiwon is a man. And that's when she wails and rakes my face with both of her hands.

There is an explanation, of course, but now is not the time to backtrack. And my wife is not someone easily appeased with the excuse I have to give, anyway. It is true: for three weeks I have been exchanging text messages with a woman named Jiwon, a woman who, under different circumstances, I would consider falling in love with.

Tufts of hair are pulled from my scalp, and I am in another state of reality. I am hovering above this abject domestic scene, wide eyed and incredulous, watching curiously. But in a flash I'm back, and Jesus does that fucking hurt! For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so says the man, but right now all I can do is stand like an idiot scarecrow as I'm assaulted; and this, oddly, feels like the right thing to do. If I am to fight back, it will be at a later date, I tell myself.

I am concerned, however, about a tutoring lesson I've scheduled and which begins in fifteen minutes. If I leave now, I just might make it on time, and this seems like the perfect excuse to vacate myself from such an ugly tableau of a marriage on the brink of ruin. So, while my wife screams and pulls at my shirt collar, without a word I slap her arm away and push past the open door and downstairs into the cold autumn night.

I am two blocks away before I discover that blood is streaming from my cheeks. Clearly, I am in no shape to tutor anyone. Not looking like this. As I stop, contemplating turning back, I also notice that I am standing in socked feet. I want nothing more than to go someplace other than back home, but where? I have no one to go to, nowhere else to return to but our apartment, where I am sure I might not live long should I do so.

Regardless, I am drawn back.

And as I approach I hear a clamor of destruction. My stomach sinks further than it ever has, because I know, without a doubt, that my wife is wreaking havoc upon my DVD collection. Do I deserve such punishment? No. A million times, no. I have upwards of three hundred DVDs, each of them cherished, and right now they are being hurled about our apartment by a hurricane of a woman.

I reenter to find discs scattered everywhere, the cases that once held them shattered all over, in every room. This is how a man is broken, I think. I don't have much, but that collection was something I was proud of, something I loved as much as a person can love inanimate objects, and now it's furnishing our apartment's floor as a testament to material revenge. This has happened to me before, by my brother Julian when I was younger, dumber. When I was thirteen he ripped my paperback copy of The Stand in half after a petty argument, and after my first year abroad he sold off the most valuable of my comic books for beer money.

This is irreparable.