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to sudden, inexplicable crying jags.
    Now her temper was short.
    “Tell me what you see?” Alice said. She demanded he get up from his desk and follow her. She led him to the living room and pointed to a candlestick in a holder. In the evenings, Alice liked to light candles in the apartment.
    “I see a candle,” David said. Seized by sympathy for his wife, he’d gone out and bought her new spiral beeswax candles. Vowing not to mention this gift but wanting to wait for her to notice, he went home, fitted them neatly into their holders and, when it turned dark, lit them all.
    “I see a
crooked
candle,” Alice said. “I see wax all over my table.”
    David looked. Wax spread like a smooth scab over the cherrywood.
    “Did it even
occur
to you,” she said, “that at this sharp an angle the candle might drip?”
    It had, but for some reason he’d ignored it. “I’ll clean it up,” David said.
    “I don’t want you to clean it up. I want you to tell me why you left it crooked.”
    “I wasn’t thinking.”
    “Then I want to know why you didn’t think.”
    Her eyes flashed, her stomach rumbled as audibly as distant thunder. It occurred to David to count Mississippis. Was the storm coming or going? “It was careless,” he conceded, then went for a razor blade to scrape up the mess.
    “You bet it was careless,” she said.
    She followed him, railing. And while walking to the front hall closet, where he kept his tools, David wondered what the neighbors must think of their marriage, though he knew that all of Alice’s yelling was really about food; and when all he could find in his tool box was a box cutter, he went to the bathroom for his straight razor; and when he closed the medicine cabinet to see her face right there, wild-eyed, he pushed her out into the halluntil there was space between them, then swung both his arms like an umpire calling a runner
safe
.
    “I wish you’d stay fat!” he shouted.
    Alice froze.
    “Did you hear me?”
    He took a step toward her, and she took a step back and then stopped, petrified.
    “Every few months we go through this,” David said. “Every time with the diet. It takes over
everything
. You call me at work, it’s all you talk about at home. It takes over your moods, it kills our sex. Every time I get a
minute
to myself, every time I get some momentum going, like
clockwork
you start up with it again.” He waved a finger in her face. “Do you have any idea what I could have accomplished by now?
Do
you? So I wish you’d just stay fat.”
    Alice stood there, feeling for the wall. Only then did David realize he was holding the straight razor in his other hand.
    He left the apartment and walked downtown without a clue as to where he’d end up. It was snowing heavily, cars whispering along, hissing into a quieter distance, disappearing in a blaze of floating brake lights behind curtains of snow. Here, outside, David could no longer hold his anger together; it dispersed, flying off into the night toward the hidden towers above. He stuffed the straight razor in his pocket and scolded himself for his lack of fierceness. Perhaps he should rekindle his anger indoors. He passed a pub lit by Christmas lights, the bar crowded; but he knew that to sit and drink in a strange place among strange people would make him self-conscious, would only send him home faster. He turned up the collar of his coat. Flakes of snow landed softly on his neck and melted on his black hair. He turned west now on 57th Street and caught sight of his reflection in a black storefront; he could stand to lose weight himself. He stopped at Tiffany’s, his breath fogging the small display window, the whole building seemingly built to encase these few visible jewels. Then he turned up Fifth Avenue and looked over at the gold and emerald Plaza, refurbished and gleaming, Sherman and winged victory demanding he halt. He stood before the Pulitzer fountain, mesmerized by it, the pool ruffling, illuminated from