It is the uncharacteristic silence of the room that wakes Bob suddenly. He misses the steady ticking of the antique clock which usually sits on the bedroom dresser. Then there is the darkness. Bob wonders what has happened to the night-light which usually shines from the hallway. A momentary light through the window from a passing car reveals the ceiling and walls of a unfamiliar space. He sits up on the strangely stiff mattress of the bed and searches for the pack of cigarettes and lighter which he remembers leaving on the night-stand. They are still there, but after lighting a cigarette and laying the pack and lighter back down, his hand comes across something else: a small empty plastic wrapper. It feels square-shaped in his hand, and he ponders what possible contents it might have once held.
After taking the first puff from the cigarette, he once more lays out before his mind the pieces to the puzzle. Puzzles are Bob's specialty. However, none of the pieces of this one are where he remembers leaving them, almost as though someone came in behind him and deliberately rearranged things. He tries sorting in reverse order, starting with the most recent. There was that cup of coffee from the previous evening. An oddly placed piece, considering that he routinely took his coffee early in the morning, before giving his wife Joan a kiss on the cheek and heading for work. Joan! Where did that piece go to? And why was her suitcase packed and sitting by the front door, when he came home that afternoon?
The next piece he finds lying in his hand: the empty square-shaped plastic wrapper which Joan found in his pants pocket; he remembers her handing it to him, when it once contained a condom and had the words "Just in case" written on its back in fluorescent pink. Janice! Bob drops the wrapper and probes the darkness. His hand lands on the slender and shapely form of the woman lying next to him. She moans in her sleep. A mysteriously substituted piece indeed, but one which only hours earlier was guiding Bob through places long hidden from the eyes of other men.
Bob takes another puff from the cigarette. It tastes different from his usual brand, stronger like a narcotic. Here is yet another bewildering substitution. Then there are all those lottery tickets. Where did they come from? Now the joining process would begin. First, he tries piecing the lottery tickets with Janice. The combination reveals a scene at a convenience store on the previous Monday. This unlikely scene had been set, when he neglected to follow normal procedure and fill the tank of his car on Sunday afternoon. So, anxiously finding it near empty as he drove to work, he pulled up to the first set of pumps in sight. After filling the tank and entering the store to pay, Bob finds a tall and slender young black woman wearing a gray sweat-suit standing behind the counter with her back toward him.
"Excuse me," Bob said. "How much do I owe you?"
A piece is turned and locked into place, as Bob remembers Janice's eyes first meeting his. The bright business-oriented grin which she normally offered her customers suddenly melted into a warm and softly glowing half-smile. Its flame lingered within the frame of her lips, even after her eyes shyly retreated and wondered aimlessly over the counter.
Bob remembers her face being light brown with tiny freckles dotting her cheeks. Her dark frizzy curls were kept restrained in a bun at the back of her head. What Bob did not know was that, for the first 24 years of her life, Janice had been cloistered in the house of her widowed church-frequenting mother. She had devoted herself to a life of repressed sexuality, ever since, as a teenager, she had caught her older brother Larry with his hand stuck deep into her best friend's shorts. Katy had been a white girl whom Janice had met on the school playground during childhood, but their friendship had ended that spring day when Janice had too quickly returned from one of her mother's prescribed errands. The anger she had felt had not been directed so much toward her brother, as toward Katy for liking too much what Larry had been doing to her.
After graduating college, Janice had started with the night shift at the convenience store, where during the slower hours she had curiously thumbed through several of the adult magazines kept behind the counter, particularly the ones with pictures of nude men. And then, there had been that black policeman who came by every couple of hours to check on her. He had been a dark-skinned and heavy-set man, and during every visit had made some attempt to persuade Janice to go out with him. Her adeptness at dodging his persistent prodding had given her confidence in her ability to control a situation. But then, there had been his partner, the trim and clean-shaven white policeman who had always stayed in the patrol car. His image had provided her with ample material for her mental exercises of naïve lust. It was not until she had moved to the day-shift and had gotten her own apartment, that there developed within her an urgent desire to actually draw a man into bed with her, in order to guide him in the proper way through the unexplored regions of her starving flesh.
"Um, let me check," Janice said to Bob, quickly adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses. "Pump number 2, right?"
"Uh, yeah," Bob said.
Janice's eyes kept darting between the cash register and Bob's face. Her shy manner was unlike that of any other black female Bob had ever met, and so he felt an instant attraction for her.
A high school math teacher in his 30's, Bob had been living the sedate and dependable suburban existence with Joan for close to five years. But his desires were kept directed toward the black girls in his classes, the ones who always seemed to respond so favorably to his kind attentions. He sat in his chair every evening, sipping from a glass of bourbon, and pondered the images of them hovered around him with their sensuous bodies and flirtatious manners, giggling with excitement to see the solution to a particularly difficult problem. It was during those evenings that the dry symbols of the equations in his mind would suddenly develop voluptuous breasts, curvaceous buttocks and thick luscious lips. Finally, after taking the sum of three particularly attractive girls, subtracting their tight-fitting and revealing clothing, then dividing himself by the remainder, the result would turned out to be a mathematical orgy of dark bold figures scrawled across the whiteness of his flesh.
But Janice appeared to him differently. The loose-fitting sweat-suit she wore did not accentuate the features of her body, and her reserved manner was in contrast with the usual boisterous nature that he found in other black females.
"Would you care to try some instant lotto tickets?" she asked sweetly, after handing him his change. "They're only a dollar each."
Bob normally did not gamble. It was not that he felt a lack of confidence in challenging the odds; after all, as a math teacher, he knew that he could have easily applied the laws of probability and won every time. Such problems which dealt only with uncertainties simply held no appeal for him. He preferred handling equations whose solutions were sure and absolute. However, with the sweet innocence of Janice's glances already changing the definition of "normal" for him, Bob's resistance to a simple game of chance seemed pointless. Janice showed him how to scratch the silvery coating to reveal the matching dollar amounts.
"Hey," she said with an unrestrained grin, "you won 6 dollars!"
"Well, what do you know," Bob said. "This must be my lucky day."
"Could be," said Janice, looking intently into his eyes. Then, it was Bob's turn to play shy. He remembered Joan, even though the solidity of their marriage was only framed by a set of precise daily rituals. The fact that she was there every morning with his cup of coffee gave a basic element to the framework, though not an essential one. Nevertheless, even this fact could easily be ignored without upsetting the order of things, or so he thought. Such an hypothesis needed to be tested.
The next morning found Bob's cup of coffee still sitting on the kitchen table untouched. He spoke a parting remark to Joan and was gone. Pieces to the puzzle had begun to be rearranged. After filling a plastic cup from the coffee machine at the back of the store, Bob went in search of Janice. There she was behind the counter, smiling as usual at his approach, supplying a new element of stability to his life. Having requested two more lottery tickets, he commenced to scratch away their silvery coatings, but only to uncover the first mismatched pieces to the puzzle.
"Aw!" Janice said, looking disappointingly at both tickets. "Maybe next time, huh?"
"Yeah," Bob said. "Guess I let that one slip by me. Well, can't win them all."
"But once is better than never," Janice said, smiling and staring into Bob's eyes more boldly than before.
