Living with Snakes

The Other Two

The Other Two ran into Peter Watts at the gym today. I had just stepped from the bath looking like a god—I know very A^ell how I look. Enough women have told me. Enough homosexuals have made their passes. When I have a beard I look like George V or Nicholas, czar of all the Russias, and that's godlike enough for any man. I was on my way to my locker when I saw him. He was slumped on the bench, gray and old. He was so out of it that it seemed safe to stop and look at him. Peter Watts lives with .my ex-wife, so naturally I was curious . I was so curious, in fact, that finally I spoke to him, asked him if he was all right. Of course he was all right. Everybody slumps in front of his locker sometimes and listens to his heart and wonders if this is it at last or if health and eternal youth are worth such agony. Then quiet sets in, a drowsy blank that would be worth even greater pain. He looked at me and knew me. I wasn't sure he would. It's been a long time, although we were familiar enough once. My ex-wife—Indiana her name is. I'm getting tired of the effort required to say ex-wife, so I'll call her Indiana. At one time I paid a therapist enough to teach me to sayexwife : You have no wife, he said patiently until I lost patience and learned. Indiana was Peter Watts's student once, when she first came to the university. That was before we were married— i The Other Two 27 childhood sweethearts and all that sort of thing. He hated me but never knew why. He was unhappily married himself . Of course, if he had really known about me and Indiana he wouldn't have been sojealous. I made her life miserable . I was a real son of a bitch. She always worked and saw me through half the curricula in the university while I tried to find myself, as they say. I tried English. I even had a course with him because Indiana thought he was so great. He was OK. I was OK, too. He gave me an A. He had to. I saw to that. He hated it but I left him no choice. I also tried pottery before I finally fell among the computers where I discovered my true genius. In all modesty I can say that I am so good that I can work when I want and where I want for as long as I want, which is never very long. But there is always plenty of money. And plenty of women, of course. But there were always plenty of women. Not very surprising for a man who looks like a czar or a king-emperor—without my beard, the young Edward, Prince of Wales, is more my line. I would have said I bear Indiana no ill will. She rather disgusts me, but that's quite another matter. If anything, she was always too good. Once in the middle of our marriage I even moved a woman into the house and sent Indiana off to sleep in some corner upstairs with the kid—John, that is. It's only natural, I suppose, that a woman named Indiana would name her kidJohn. I demanded breakfast in bed for me and the woman—I've forgotten her name—and Indiana brought it. Oh, I was a bastard. Indiana thought she was moving with the times. She thought that was the way people lived now. She wasjust a country girl, of course. What did she know? Indiana, indeed. Sometimes I wanted to kick her the way you want to kick a dog that doesn't have any self-respect. But ill will? No, never a trace of it. I can imagine her saying now from the sublime height of her therapy that this is all guilt on my part. Guilt that I 28 Living with Snakes treated her like a dog. Guilt that I abandoned her. Guilt above all, compounding itself, because I want to see her really punished for some unnameable crime against me. I can't imagine what the crime is. Nor do I bear Peter Watts any ill will. To be sure, he once refused...