“Okay — you can check now,” I called out to my wife after I thought the steps had had enough time to dry. I’d looked at all three of the un-wiped-down steps carefully, feeling to make sure there was no dampness, looking at it from this angle and that, trying to make sure it wasn’t obvious.

Part One of the dirty stairs wager is here.

Up the stairs she marched. Straight to the first step. “She’s a cleaning hound,” I thought. “I haven’t got a chance.”

“This one,” she proclaimed, and marched on.

My sporting-chance had now turned into insurance. “She can’t possibly find all three.”

She didn’t — she only found the one, which was in the most brightly lit portion of the staircase. My ego therefore took a beating, but it could have been worse — I was saved by poor lighting, I suppose.

Stunned, I sat wondering what had gone wrong. Now, I’m not a slob. When I lived alone, I didn’t have the cleanest apartment in the world, but it was regularly given a good shakedown. Still, I don’t like to carry things to extremes, and wiping down the staircase after vacuuming seemed like just that.

I was sure that she would not detect a single step.

I went back and looked again. There was no difference in the carpets. At the scene of the crime, there was nothing obviously out of place. It would be easy to chalk this up to gender differences, to come up with a carefully worded generalization that didn’t make all straight men seem like slobs and yet didn’t insult homosexual men, who are stereotypically cleaner than straight men but not always, hence the adverb “stereotypically,” that at the same time acknowledged the high slob-factor of some women without selling the occasional male clean-freak short, that tip-toed the touchy area of gender/orientation distinctions with a nod to a possible cultural influence without seeming overly PC…

All I ended up with was a run-on sentence and the affirmation that I am, despite all my protests, a lazy slob.