Martin felt it was incredible that the situation had come to exist at all.
And once begun, had grown to such monstrous proportions.
The pair of white cotton shorts ruled his life.

Lying awake at night, he could see them, laid out on the floor of his mind.
When he rose in the morning, the image was still there.

He had always been a messy and negligent man.
In his bachelor days, his bedroom had been strewn with clothes which his mother, or later the hotel maid, generally saw fit to put in order.
No doubt Dolores resented following in their footsteps.

But it was fun those first days, kidding about the trail of garments he left littered across the rug.
There was an assertive maleness in his grinning refusal to pick them up.
Half slyly he enjoyed seeing her stoop to lift the things.

He remembered the first time he saw her, standing across the room at a party.
The smooth curve of her neck, very white against hair which curled against it like petals.
Her hair was the color of those blooms which in seed catalogues are referred to as "black", but since no flower is actually without color contain always a hint of grape or purple or blue -- he wanted to draw the broad patina of hair through his fingers, searching it slowly for a trace of veining which might reveal its true shade beneath the darkness.

So he sought her out, and spoke to her, and thought of his hand in her hair.
Or against her back, pressed on the column of vertebrae, which held her so magnificently straight and unyielding, until the segments of bone made tiny sharp cracking noises, like the snapped stem of a tulip.

But, to put it bluntly, nothing snapped.
Yet that had not seriously troubled him, not then.
They married.
More he could take at leisure.
All Martin thought he needed was time: to what better use could time be put?

He saw later that they had made their marriage too quickly.
There was too little occasion beforehand for resistance, the brave strong delights of emotional clash and meeting.
They had left themselves too much to discover.

But, at the start, his new life felt invigorating.
Good.

It was on the tenth day after the wedding (how could it have been so soon?
) that he dropped the shorts on the floor.

"Now, I'm not going to pick up those shorts"!

Martin gave her a teasing pat.
"I think you'll get tired of them there".

In the morning the shorts were where he had left them.
He smiled to himself, and decided not to mention them till Dolores did.
It was almost too easy.
For he had just remembered: tonight they were having their first guests.
The shorts would not be on the floor when he came home that evening.

He was wrong.
The rest of the bedroom had been groomed to a superhuman neatness, but in the middle of the carpet lay the disheveled shorts.
They gave the room a strange note of incongruity, like a mole on a beautiful face.

He saw that Dolores intended to wait until the last minute, thinking he would get nervous.
Quietly he determined to foil her.
I can be as stubborn as she can, he thought;
my nerves are as strong.
She'll rush to the bedroom when the doorbell rings.

It rang.
Ten minutes early.

Martin was standing a few feet from the front door.
He swung around, eyes toward the bedroom, some fifteen feet away.
Dolores stood motionless in the doorway.

He could not cross the living room, brush past her, and bend down to retrieve the shorts.

Martin turned his back.
He strode to answer the bell.

Bill's hat was deposited in the hall closet.
With the most casual and relaxed manner in the world, Dolores led Anthea to the bedroom.
Martin strained his ears.

At first he could not be sure.
Then he caught just enough to know that the shorts were still there.
A glissade of giggles slid over their voices.

All evening Anthea favored him with odd, coy looks.
Clearly she had been instructed "not to say a word".
For some reason, this ellipsis in the conversation spread until it swallowed up every other topic.
At last there was a void no one could fill.
The Brainards went home early.

Martin realized, later on, that he should have "had it out" with Dolores that night.
As violently as possible.
But he was so taken aback, he could not believe any rage of his would make her give in.
On the contrary, it would only weaken his position if he fumed, while she stayed calm and adamant.
And if he surrendered after raving at her.
He shivered.

Suppose he ran up the white flag altogether?
At once.
He considered the sober possibility.

In his head was the echo of those titters with Anthea.

There was something about private feminine whisperings which always made him feel scabrous and unclean.
He remembered his mother gossiping with her neighborhood women friends, lowering her voice to a penetrating hoarseness which might be trusted to carry to the head of the stairs, where he crouched listening.
He could even recall the last time he sat there.
She was talking about him that time, because he had done some bad thing, something she disliked, but "Afterwards Martin said he was sorry.
He apologized so sweetly, I couldn't keep being annoyed with him".
It wasn't even true that he'd said he was sorry that time;
he had in fact said simply that he wished the thing hadn't happened, which was as honest as he could put it.
But his mother told the story over and over, till her "Martin said he was sorry" was as much a part of her as the shape of her thin, pallid ears.

The battle had to be fought.
Let the best sex win.

But his resolution hardly seemed to help.
If the situation had been bad, it now got worse.
About this time people began "dropping in", considering that the newly married had been left alone long enough.
Angrily Martin wished they had delayed the wedding and gone on a trip -- preferably one that lasted months -- instead of deciding not to postpone the date until he could get away.
Here they were at the mercy of anyone who chose to come by.
These stray people nearly always insisted on Dolores showing them around the apartment.
Of course, the tours of inspection included the ever-present shorts.

It was curious how the different visitors took this.
Some tried to ignore the blot on the bedroom's countenance.
Others asked.
Quite a few laughed.
To them all Dolores told a lighthearted and witty tale.

"It's a little contest Martin and I have", she would begin gaily, carrying the anecdote through a frothy and deceptive course.
While he waited in the living room.

Once Martin went along.
They entered the bedroom, and Dolores said nothing.
Then one of the guests showed his merriment.
"You were in a hurry, weren't you"?
Martin would have liked to break the man's neck.
Dolores smiled;
she let the interpretation stand.
Now Martin heard himself give a snort of mock good nature.
With her eyes Dolores dared him for the truth, ready to begin: It's a little contest --

Never again did he enter into the ritual of showing the apartment.

They kept up a rigid pretense of speaking relations.
But Martin seldom felt the impulse to talk about anything.
What to talk about?

Dolores kept picking up any of his clothes (except the fatal shorts) which he left about, but he had been robbed of pleasure in scattering his possessions.
He fell into the habit of putting his clothes in drawers and closets, so his life might impinge as little as possible on hers.
The shorts alone remained.

In his moments of worst agony, Martin imagined what his friends were saying.
The sound of their amazement.
Bizarre: He could hear the word.
The most bizarre situation.
We were up to visit them and

He had thought her exactly what he wanted.
Six weeks of marriage and I'm using the past tense, he told himself furiously.
Pursuing his idea, he saw that it would be impossible to leave her now.
Everyone would know why;
he would cut a supremely ridiculous figure.

He was trapped.

Day and night Martin could not drag his mind from the dilemma he had made for himself.
His mind scurried frantically, seeking an exit.
Alternately he had periods of hostile defeatism in which he determined sullenly, morosely, to live out his life in this fashion.
Nothing would change, nothing would ever change.

When the solution finally came to him, one night while he was in bed, he was so shaken by its simplicity that he could only wonder why it had not occurred to him before.

In a frenzy of excitement, he considered his plan.

Beside his shorts, he would place something of hers.

Instantaneously he would have won an immeasurable moral victory, for if she picked up, say, a pair of her panties, she might just as well lift his shorts lying alongside -- the expenditure of energy was almost the same.
He felt that it would be a particular humiliation to Dolores to pick up her own underwear which he had laid on the floor.
Furthermore, he could go on repeating the maneuver endlessly: every time he went in the bedroom, he could drop a slip or a brassiere, or maybe a girdle, next to his shorts.
Sooner or later, Dolores would crack.
On the other hand, if she didn't remove her own things, it would be difficult to explain to the parade of guests which traversed the apartment.

Martin guessed that Dolores would not be so eager to tell the next installment of her story.
The tale, he thought, would become less gay.
She had used his rumpled shorts as the very image of his childishness, his lack of control, his general male looseness, while she remained cool, airy, and untouched, the charming teacher who disciplined an unruly body.
To have her underclothes linked with his on the floor would draw her visibly into a struggle both bitter and absurd.

Something in the back of his mind was aware that the magnificence of the plan lay in his faith, that the idea would work because he believed in it, since his courage and virility were involved, because it was truly his.
The knowledge kept him from analyzing his scheme to death, and took him through the last hours of that night in a peace of exalted fanaticism.

The next morning, while Dolores was out of the room, he went to her bureau drawer, took out a pair of nylon lace pants, and tenderly dropped them next to his shorts.
He sat down on the bed.

In a surprisingly short time, Dolores appeared.
To his delight, her eyes focused at once upon the two garments.
Slowly and deliberately she reached down and touched the lace with her fingers, then hesitated for about a second.
Ah, he thought, she's going through the chain of reasoning which says she might really just as well pick up my shorts too.
He saw that in a moment she had grasped all the implications of a plot which had been weeks in occurring to him.
Extending her fingers another inch, she caught up the shorts, and swiftly left the room.
She did not look at him, but he noticed that her face was flushed and her eyes unsteady.

They breakfasted together, but Martin did not refer to his triumph, and Dolores found a great deal to do in the kitchen, bobbing up and down from the table so that talk was impossible.
Well, Martin thought, That'll save.
He left for work in high spirits.

As he relaxed that day, Martin realized how tense he had been these past weeks.
He found that he no longer hated Dolores (he knew how much he had hated her), and he was surprised at a resurgence of an affectionate feeling.