She told all of this to Darnel at The Mask Market the next afternoon, sitting on a stool behind the cash register. He stood across from her, the glass display case between them. His hair was slicked back; he had a few days of stubble on his cheeks and chin. The store carried tribal art and textiles, specializing in Indonesian masks. Joyce had been working there for five months. She was only two weeks into the job when Darnel started taking her to lunch and grazing her back or waist when he slipped by to reach the register or lift a mask off the wall. At first, they just locked the shop door and went into the back and lay down amongst the wood figures and uneven towers of cardboard boxes. Then they began sneaking off to her apartment, which Joyce liked best — the feeling of having someone in her bed, walking naked through her kitchen and pouring a glass of water, as though he might have lived there. He would tell her about Bali, where he went twice a year for merchandise. He had even talked about bringing her along on his next buying trip, about watching late night topeng dances and snorkeling and swimming naked in the sea.
“That doesn’t really qualify as a mugging,” Darnel said after Joyce finished her story.
“All right.” She shifted on the stool, crossing and uncrossing her skinny legs. “What would you call it?”
“A purse snatching.” He looked at her and shrugged. “A mugging involves a weapon of some sort. A knife or a gun.”
“I had to cancel my credit card and order a replacement,” she said. “And he gave me a hard push before he started running.” That wasn’t true, but sometimes she couldn’t resist a chance to make Darnel feel guilty.
“You’re lucky.” He walked around the display case and put his arm over her shoulder. “Lucky you weren’t shot or beaten or worse.”
“I guess,” she said, even though she didn’t feel lucky at all. She had wanted to call Darnel the moment she got home and ask him to come over, but knew it was far too late to phone without arousing his wife’s suspicion. Instead she turned her noise machine to Evening Monsoon and slept with the lights on and got up in the middle of the night to make sure the door was locked.
“I wish I’d been there, Joyce.” He gave her a squeeze. “I really do.”
“Will you come by before closing?”
“How about later tonight? I’ll call your apartment.” He tapped the large face of his wristwatch. “Andrea has a Lamaze class at three.”
Darnel’s wife was six months pregnant. She had come by the shop last month, saying she’d been in the neighborhood and wanted to check on the merchandise. It was the first time Joyce had seen her. She had a round face and squinty eyes, her stomach protruding underneath a pink cotton blouse. After she walked through the store and spent a minute rustling around in the back, Joyce noticed how unbalanced she looked, on the brink of toppling over, and offered her the stool to sit on, but she only shook her head, said the masks were dirty, and then left. That same afternoon, Joyce sat on a box of ceramic bowls in the back and wrote Darnel a letter, telling him they couldn’t possibly continue under these circumstances. What am I doing here? she wrote. I can’t understand what I’m doing with my life. She even sealed and stamped the letter, but was never able to drop it into the mailbox. It was still in her apartment, in the top drawer of her dresser, underneath a pile of winter socks.
“I won’t be too late,” he said, releasing her shoulders. “Maybe we could even get dinner.”
Joyce slumped on the stool. The shop smelled of incense and mothballs. Last night, after the culprit was out of sight, she’d leaned against the store window, the glass cool against her face, and felt the glare of the masks. When Joyce began working at the shop, the masks had terrified her, all those bulging wooden eyes and flung open mouths, the painted faces that, during the evening shifts, radiated an eerie light. Most were shaded red, green, blue, and gold, the eyes silver or black, some decorated with feathers or tufts of human hair, the most expensive ones studded with semiprecious stones: lapis, charoite, gaspeite, jasper. The death masks resembled human faces, the eyes and lips exaggerated into menacing caricatures, while the others were designed to look like animals, painted whiskers and long white tusks. After the mugging, Joyce focused on one mask in particular: the death mask that hung right above the register. It was the largest piece in the shop, painted acid greens and blues, with huge red eyes and white teeth. She’d stared at the mask through the window for a long time, as though it could offer her some kind of rescue.
“Can we go to the café down the street?” Joyce asked.
Darnel kissed the top of her head. “Whatever you like.”
She walked him outside and watched him move down the sidewalk, his lumbering steps. It was spring. The trees were tipped with green and white. The brick façade of the building across the street was covered in blue and gray graffiti and the colors looked almost cheerful in the sunlight. Every so often, someone would get stuck behind Darnel’s broad frame and lurch left and right, looking for a way to pass. It had always seemed strange to her, the way people hurried even when they had no particular destination in mind.
Joyce went back inside and dusted the masks, standing on the stool to reach the ones that hung closer to the ceiling, as she did every afternoon, despite what Darnel’s wife had said. During the rest of her shift, she only had three customers. First, an older woman wearing a caftan and white braces on her wrists. She didn’t say anything to Joyce when she came into the store, just stood in the center of the room for a little while and gazed at the walls of masks, her mouth tight with confusion, as though this wasn’t where she had meant to end up. An hour later, a couple lingered in front of a death mask that cost several hundred dollars. They both wore shorts and sandals and carried mesh tote bags. The spoke in a foreign language; the man kept touching the space between the woman’s shoulders. Joyce watched them from behind the register. They were young, early twenties, and looked happy. She both envied and pitied them.
The woman pointed at the display case, which held a selection of semiprecious stones. Garnet, red jasper, moonstone, tourmaline. She asked Joyce which types were supposed to bring luck in love. Joyce opened the case and took out an opal. The stone was shaped like a small egg. In the woman’s slender hands, it gleamed blue.
“This one is good for love,” Joyce said. “But I have something even better.” She handed the woman a piece of unakite. It was a rough stone, speckled with green and pink. Unakite, she told the woman, was supposed to help with finding direction. If you ground the stone and then looked into the powder, you would know what you needed to do. Joyce had considered grinding the stone for herself; once, after finding a mortar and pestle in the back, she placed some unakite in the bowl, but she couldn’t bring herself to crush it, afraid it would reveal she’d taken too many wrong turns to get back on track, or, worse, that it wouldn’t tell her anything at all. She hoped this woman would be braver.
“Here,” she said, returning the opal to the case and closing the woman’s hand around the other stone. “This is the one you really want.”
After Joyce’s shift, she took the subway to The Fish Emporium on 8th Street. Earlier in the day, she had used the store computer to look up photos of fish found in Bali — angelfishes and clownfishes and blacktip groupers — and decided it was time she got herself a pet. Bali. Whenever she walked down the street or hung onto the handles that dangled from the tops of subway cars, she repeated the word to herself like a song. Bali, Bali, Bali. The first time Darnel mentioned going to Bali, the idea hooked itself into her immediately. She bought a map, which she sometimes unrolled on her bed, so she could study the shape of the island; if work was slow, she used the computer to find pictures of Bali, mist-covered mountain ranges and azure waters and temples with roofs shaped like giant jenga puzzles. When she saw something about Bali, an ad for a resort or a travel article, she tore out the pages. She had never traveled outside the United States, not even on her honeymoon with her ex-husband (they had gone to a bed-and-breakfast in Maine). She thought this was symptomatic of something, though she wasn’t sure what.