Joyce had moved to Manhattan from upstate New York after her marriage broke up six months ago. She was married for five years. When she first met her husband, he was living with another woman. She was almost a decade older than Joyce, a retired ballerina who taught dance at a private girls’ school. Her husband had lived with the ballerina for eight years, longer than Joyce and he ended up being married, and after they had divorced, Joyce realized she’d never gotten over the feeling that their marriage had been poisoned by the betrayal on which their life together was founded.
She had been surprised by how easy it was to leave. She told him the morning after they got into an argument over a movie they’d seen. At the end of the movie, the heroine walked into the sea and drowned herself in order to escape her monotonous life in a Norwegian fishing village. Joyce found her choice noble, while her husband thought it absurd, and, over dinner at the same Italian restaurant they always frequented, they argued their cases bitterly, skimming the edges of bigger, knottier issues that they could not articulate or even really understand. They went to bed angry and, in the middle of the night, Joyce woke with an ache in her chest and wandered into the guest room to sleep. When she went downstairs the next morning, her husband was sitting at the kitchen table with his bran flakes and newspaper, slurping the milk like he always did. She sat down and told him that she no longer wanted to fall asleep and wake with his body next to hers. He looked at her, his face expressionless except for his eyes — his pupils, she could have sworn, widened like spilled ink. Then he flipped to the sports section and went back to eating his bran flakes. And that was that.
During the divorce, when her friends and family asked what had happened, Joyce said the marriage had simply run its course, as if losing a husband were no less complicated than quitting a tedious job. But in truth, the separation, the sudden rush of solitude, had left her feeling like she’d misplaced some part of herself in a foreign land. It wasn’t that she missed her husband, but that the divorce hadn’t brought the relief, the clarity, she desired. The one thing she did know is that she was glad to get out of upstate New York. She’d always disliked her job in real estate — she never got the hang of sales pitches and was usually only allowed to show rentals — and the stillness of the suburbs, the quiet routines of her neighbors, people waiting for their lives to get better or worse or end. She signed a lease for the first apartment she saw, a one bedroom in Alphabet City, and found her job in the classified section of the New York Sun. Her friends were horrified to discover that Joyce, a licensed real estate agent, was working in a tribal art store for an hourly wage, but Joyce felt she no longer belonged in the world of 401Ks and home ownership. She just needed to duck underneath the surface long enough to figure a few things out.
The inside of The Fish Emporium was cool and dark. The walls were lined with tanks that glowed a phosphorescent blue. At first, Joyce thought the store was empty. The doors chimed when she entered, but it took several minutes for a young woman, with cropped blonde hair and stacks of silver rings on her fingers, to appear.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “Business has been slow ever since New York Times Magazine ran an article that called fish passé pets for city kids.”
“I don’t think fish are passé,” Joyce said.
“Me either,” the woman said. “In fact, I love them.”
She took Joyce by the elbow and showed her the selections of butterflyfish and algae eaters and Japanese fighting fish, beautiful, velvety-scaled creatures that had to be kept in individual tanks.
“If you get two of these and put their fishbowls side by side, they’ll spend all day staring at each other,” the woman said. When they passed a tank of goldfish, Joyce was reminded of the orange anthias that swam in Bali’s reefs. She peered into the tank and watched the fat orange fish dart through the water.
“I’ll take one of those,” she said.
When the woman plunged the little green net into the water, all the fish darted away. After a few swings, she scooped up a fish with a white spot on its side and dumped into a plastic bag filled with water. Before Joyce left, she picked out a top-of-the-line brand of pellets, a glass fishbowl, and a little plastic castle to go inside.
In her apartment, Joyce placed the glass bowl in the bedroom windowsill and emptied the plastic bag into it. She watched the fish bob around in the water and circle the pink castle. She set the noise machine on her bedside table to Midnight Mist, then kneeled on the floor and stared at the fish’s black eyes and orange scales, its tail in the shape of wings. For a moment, she wished she could call her husband into the room to watch the tiny air bubbles rise from the fish’s mouth to the top of the bowl like miniature balloons. But she knew, if he were here, that he wouldn’t sit on the floor and watch the fish with her. He would think it was a silly and pointless way to pass time, and that was why she had left.
Later that evening, it started to rain. Joyce showered and changed into a sleeveless silk dress with yellow flowers printed on the front. She cleaned her apartment and set the noise machine to Rainforest Chatter. By eight o’clock, the goldfish had figured out how to swim through the circular hole in the center of the castle and Joyce had given up on Darnel coming in time for dinner. She ate leftover takeout, sitting on the bed and looking into the fishbowl. She was looking forward to showing him the goldfish and telling him she’d picked this one because it reminded her of the anthias that lived in the waters of Bali, which, if they ever went snorkeling like he said they would, they’d see huge schools of near the reefs.
At ten, Joyce was about to exchange her dress for running shorts and a T-shirt when Darnel called and said he would be there soon.
“It’s late,” Joyce said when he finally arrived, his hair damp from the rain. “What did you tell your wife?”
“That there was a problem at the shop.” Darnel smiled and pinched her wrist. “Which isn’t a total lie.”
“Ha,” Joyce said. “Ha, ha, ha.”
He wasted no time unzipping her dress. He stroked her back, pressing her body into his. His hands were wide and hot and she felt consumed by them. She kissed him, leaning against a wall. He unzipped his pants and lifted the hem of her dress.
When it was over, they lay on her bed for a while. The sound of dripping water came from the noise machine. She turned away from Darnel, but could still feel the warm, damp line of his body against her. Would she want to fall asleep and wake with him every day and night? She was considering this question when Darnel noticed the goldfish.
“What’s its name?” he asked.
“Bali.” She hoped he’d say something about an upcoming trip, but he only sighed and told her that he wouldn’t be able to stay much longer.