Loving Time

thirty-one

Mike Sanchez and April Woo were due at work at four P.M. on Saturday. At exactly nine A.M. Mike took a calculated risk. He pulled his red Camaro into an empty spot in front of the neat brick house in Astoria where April lived with her parents. The house had green fiberglass awnings in the shape of fans over each window. April had once told him the awnings made every raindrop sound like thunder.

“What are they good for?” he’d asked.

“For show.”

She told him the decoration had been installed by the previous owners and the Woos had decided not to waste the cost of the improvement by removing it, even though they themselves did not like them. Mike had pondered their reasoning for a long time. He was beginning to understand how he might solve his problem.

His problem was the porcupine living inside him in the soft, vulnerable parts of his body. The porcupine was April Woo. He wasn’t exactly sure how she had moved from the outside of him to the inside of him. But there she was. When he wasn’t with her, he thought about her. When he was with her, he couldn’t stop looking at her. Sometimes he wanted to touch her so badly that holding back felt like too much steam in a turned-off radiator. This was one of the many kinds of Chinese torture.

April had told him in old China the death sentence was never only death. Sometimes the guilty party was pulled apart by four horses, then hacked into pieces, the cut-off head paraded around on a stick. Sometimes the condemned man was skinned alive. And people thought the violence in New York was bad. Mike had no doubt April was capable of a similar lack of forgiveness if he dared to touch her where she didn’t want to be touched. Which was everywhere.

Sometimes his desire for her took his breath away. It occurred to him that she was rendering him brain-dead and helpless by extracting his oxygen from the air. He’d had many women in his thirty-four years. Not one of them, not even the girl he’d married, had ever taken his breath away. Well, certainly not on a regular basis with no physical contact. And now he was too preoccupied with April to get relief from other women. He was concerned that her scorn was powerful enough to cause his dick to wither away and die. He worked out a lot, smelled other women’s perfume and their sweat, and was not interested. He figured this was the way homos felt about women and worried that April was making him gay.

From Mike’s point of view, wanting April Woo was stupid, wasteful, irritating, and dangerous. Dangerous because whenever he let her know, she raised the spines on her back and tore at his gut. But he was beginning to see a way out. April was a person of quality, of character. To get her he was going to have to get the approval of her mother, her father, and quite possibly her entire community. When he got that, he’d have her.

He got out of the car and stretched. Busy by the front door was a thin man of indeterminate age with his very little hair cut so short his head looked like an unadorned skull. The man wore a white shirt much too large for him and black trousers, black Chinese canvas shoes—the newest version with rubber soles. At the moment he was carefully trimming a dense, prickly bush with shiny dark green leaves and red berries on it, attaching the shoots to a trellis that curved up and over the front door, and peering at his work through black frames with thick lenses. There was a similar untamed bush on the other side he hadn’t gotten to yet. It would be a while before the two bushes met above the door.

Mike guessed the man was April’s father, Ja Fo Woo, making his own improvements to the house. The trellis had not been there the last time Mike had seen the house. Neither had the tiny apricot poodle sitting at attention at the top of the three steps that led to the front door, watching the thin man’s every move.

For a few seconds, Mike, too, watched the man’s every move. The man continued snipping and tying, but the dog jumped up and began barking excitedly. The sudden racket of yips and yaps brought two faces to the windows. Upstairs, between a parting of white curtains, April’s face appeared. At precisely the same position in the window below it, her mother’s head came into view.

The man spoke in Chinese to the dog, but he didn’t turn his head as Mike advanced up the path toward the house. This ignoring of him forced Mike to speak first.

“Morning, sir,” he said. “I’m Mike Sanchez.”

“Know who you are.” Now the man turned his head to look at him. On display between big teeth was suspended a slender gold toothpick. “Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.” Mike was wearing cowboy boots and the leather jacket that made him look like a drug dealer. He’d combed his hair four or five times, trimmed his mustache, splashed his body with cologne, and gargled with Scope. “Very nice to meet you,” he offered.

Woo’s father shifted the toothpick to one side of his mouth and elaborately sniffed at Mike’s collection of strong odors. He himself smelled of shirt starch, garlic, and cigarettes. “Not here, went out.”

“Ahh … April?”

No, she hadn’t. She was in the house, now on the first floor conversing with her mother in Chinese, probably caught on the way out. It sounded as if the two women were in something of a dispute. In fact, if Mike had to interpret their noises, he’d have to conclude they were screaming at each other.

The dog became more excited, jumped up on him. Mike leaned over to pet it. “Hi, guy, uh, girl.”

“Dmsm!” Woo’s father barked.

“Ah, excuse me?”

“Dog name Dmsm.”

“Yes, April told me that. She’s very cute. The dog, that is.” Mike patted the dog, then straightened up as the front door swung open.

April came out in jeans and a sweatshirt. She didn’t look happy to see him.

He gave her a big smile. “April, you came back.”

She clashed eyes with her father. Ja Fo Woo coughed and spit into a patch of lilies. After a brief, awkward silence, April mumbled, “This is my father … Sergeant Sanchez.” End of introduction.

“We’ve already met,” Mike replied.

Two seconds later, April’s mother appeared at the door. Sai Woo wore a brown Chinese dress and a blue padded jacket. Her hair was black as shoe polish, tightly curled all over her head. Her body was as thin as the toothpick still on steady exhibit in her husband’s mouth.

She glanced at April and snapped out something in Chinese.

“And this is my mother,” April said dutifully. “Sergeant Sanchez.”

Sai Woo looked him over, frowned a little at the leather jacket. “Why Sergeant? Why not Captain?” she demanded. She, too, sniffed the air around him, trying to get the hang of it.

“Mom!” April protested.

“You not pass test?” Sai demanded.

Mike scuffed a boot on the sidewalk sheepishly, like a kid confronted by an important teacher who was hoping to stick him with a D. “Ahh, I didn’t take the test,” he admitted.

“Mebbe next time take test. Betta for you.”

“Maybe I will. Thank you for thinking of it,” Mike muttered.

“Think of everything.”

“Good. That’s good.” He nodded at how good thinking was.

“Well, thanks for dropping by.” April jerked her head at Mike and headed down the walk toward his car.

“Where go?”

“Just over there to the car, Mom. Mike has to go.”

“Dmsm!” Sai said sharply.

“What?”

Sai pointed at the dog.

“Oh, and this is Dim Sum,” April said, enunciating carefully. “Remember Dim Sum, Mike?”

“Yes, I do. She seems very happy here.” He was breathing a little easier now that his rank in the Department was no longer an issue, patted the dog that jumped up on his leg again.

“Velly rucky dog.” Sai made a strange noise. Instantly the little dog let go of Mike’s leg and sat, cocking its head to one side for praise.

“Wow, it sat. I’m impressed. Good girl, Dim Sum.”

“Say good-bye, Mike.”

Figuring he’d accomplished his goal, Mike took a few seconds to say his good-byes and admire the tiny yard.

“They talked to me,” he said triumphantly when he joined her. “I was kind of worried, but it went great. What do you think?”

“Well, they may have talked to you,” April conceded. “But don’t get any ideas that they like you. They don’t like you. What’s up?”

“They have someone better in mind? Huh?”

“What’s up, Mike?” April tapped her foot irritably, one eye on her parents, both dead silent by the front door, watching them.

Mike waved at them. “Next time they’ll ask me in.”

“Trust me, they will never ask you in.”

“What makes you so sure, querida?”

“You smell too sweet for a man.”

He stared at them, smiling affably. They did not smile back. “That’s pretty bigoted.”

“Well, they have their own ideas about things. What are you doing here anyway?”

He shrugged and turned to her. She sounded annoyed but was leaning against his car with a smile that lit up her face and cut right through him.

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by and—” He shrugged. “You know, meet the family.”

“Well, you met the family. Happy now?”

He nodded. “Now maybe you’d like to come with me to check out this place I’m supposed to look at.”

The smile vanished. “Oh, come on, Mike. I can’t go looking at apartments with you.” April shook her head. “I already told you. You know I can’t do that.”

“It’s a house.”

“Oh, yeah? Aren’t you in the wrong borough?”

“It’s nice in Queens. I like it here. Come on, get in. It’ll only take a few minutes.” He opened the passenger door for her. “I need some expert advice. Come on, you know I’d do the same for you.”

April glanced at her parents, then down at her jeans and sneakers. It was about 9:20. They didn’t have to be at work until four. Mike smiled and tried to keep his mustache from quivering.

“Damn you,” she muttered. Then, after a second, she screamed something out in Chinese, shattering his eardrums.

“What did you say?” He banged the side of his head to stop the ringing.

“I told them there’s been a triple homicide and I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Good thinking, querida. But a triple homicide will take a lot more time to clean up than an hour.”

“True. I better get my bag.” April ran up the walk and into the house. The dog and her mother followed her, slamming the door. Two minutes later April was back with red lipstick on her lips and the handbag slung over her shoulder. By then her father had resumed his pruning.