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.
"It seems like once is all it takes to get hooked," he said, staring back without once thinking of Joan.
Another drag from the cigarette, and a new piece falls into place.
Bob vividly remembers Wednesday evening, sitting in his chair, gulping down glass after glass of bourbon, and working out probability equations. But the widening of the odds kept defeating him. Also, matters were not helped by the fact that his usual brand of cigarettes had been out of stock that morning, and he had resorted to smoking an unfamiliar brand; or by the fact that six out of six lottery tickets had failed that day to produce the necessary matching numbers.
Now, staring into the darkness of the strange room, he takes a few more puffs and flips one of the pieces over, trying to make it fit. Joan had become used to the weekly scheduling of their lovemaking, just as she had become used to the normally quick foreplay, followed by the even quicker intercourse. The routine was for Bob to roll over and fall asleep, while Joan slipped into the bathroom to finish herself off. However, that Wednesday night, with thoughts of Janice still swirling in his brain, Bob's usual soft kisses to Joan's lips were replaced by his tongue lashing the insides of her mouth. She felt like she was about to suffocate, then Bob moved down to her neck. She heard him mumbling her name into her ear, but the tone was somehow different, more like "Jan." Frustrated with the buttons of her night shirt, Bob ripped it open and attacked her breasts, treating them like a hungry man who rabidly laps up the last morsels from his plate. Joan's eyes grew wide and her heart pounded fiercely, as Bob clawed at her panties, jerking them from her hips and legs and tossing them across the room. Now, he was doing the strangest thing ever: he was sucking the lips of her vagina, something Joan had never experienced before from Bob or any other man. Not really knowing what he was doing himself, Bob instinctively inserted his tongue as far as he could manage and lashed away at her insides.
When he found a small protrusion at the top of her vagina, stiff and pointed, Bob's tongue lashed at it too, followed by his trying to suck as much of it into his mouth as possible. He felt Joan's fingernails digging into his scalp, as her hips bucked his face. Sounds emanated from her mouth like none Bob had ever heard before. Bob's penis was so hard and sensitive now, that he knew of no other way to relieve its pressure than to plant it as deep as he could into Joan's hot and moist vagina. The usual thrill that Joan had felt from their concluding intercourse would often remind her of teenage midnight skinny dipping parties in a friend's pool. But on this occasion, Bob's aggressive thrusts into her took Joan over the waterfall and into the drink. Later, as Bob lay exhausted on the bed, she stumbled to the bathroom and let the warm water of the shower rush over every burst nerve-ending of her body.
The next morning, sitting alone at the kitchen table with a small glass of bourbon in her hand and staring over at the untouched coffee, Joan pondered Bob's newly acquired skills from the previous night. She picked up the small hard plastic case which came with the test kit and, taking another sip of bourbon, glared into its blue-streaked well. Out of over 200 tries in 5 years, Bob had finally gotten a hit.
"The lucky devil," she mumbled to herself, then swallowed the last ounce of bourbon.
Having overslept that morning, Bob had to raced to the school. His daily stop by the convenience store would have to wait until the afternoon. He concluded his calculations later in the day and determined that two tickets out of four should yield the winning result he needed. But after frantically scratching the fronts of every ticket Janice had handed him, he found that all that the spent 10 dollar bill had return for him was 2 dollars. His hands shook, as he accepted the two bills from Janice. She was not smiling now, but wondering what kind of wild thing she had lured with her well-placed trail of crumbs. When she informed him that his usual brand of cigarettes were still not in stock, Bob reluctantly settled for the same unfamiliar brand that Janice had recommended the previous day. She hoped that, with the bait firmly in place, she would soon be able to snare the beast now raging in Bob's eyes.
After getting into his car, Bob from the bag the pack of cigarettes, but then also pulled from it a small square-shaped plastic package. Janice had made sure that enough of Bob's protective fabric had already been unraveled, before she dared to let her true intentions be known.
Friday morning, Bob decided to avoid temptation and pass up his usual visit to the convenience store. It was while doing the laundry though, that Joan discovered the condom, confronting him with it later that evening. He remembered her saying something strange about not wanting a two-timing philanderer helping her raise her child. His excuses of innocence and ignorance were not enough to assuage her, so she announced her plans of staying with her mother for the weekend, and that his supper was on the stove. Then she picked up an already packed suitcase and stormed out the front door.
Seeing more pieces slipping from his mind's grasp, Bob takes a long draw on the half-spent cigarette and recounts what is left of the puzzle. He remembers racing back to the store in hopes of persuading Janice that her advances were misplaced, and that he was a happily married man living a normal life. Of course, it did not matter to him that he had scratched so much of the silvery coating from the face of normalcy, that the figures underneath no longer added up.
Upon entering the crowded store, he found another black woman in Janice's place behind the counter. She was dark-skinned, heavy-set and wearing a tight top through which her nipples were conspicuous.
