Work Text:
1.
“Does anyone have any questions for Mr. Xavier or Mr. McCoy?” the blonde in the white suit asked, her lipsticked mouth brushing the microphone, which shrieked deafeningly in protest.
Charles rubbed his earlobe, glancing across the stage at Hank, who met his eye and smiled. We make a good pair, Hank and I, Charles thought. It wasn’t the first time he had counted himself lucky that, after drifting apart at St. Edmund’s, the two had run into each other again at Oxford, and after a night swigging cider and discussing literary theories until the sky paled, their friendship had reannealed more strongly than ever.
Compared to other author readings, this afternoon’s event was robustly attended, white-haired academics filling out the middle rows of the auditorium while sweaty undergraduates fidgeted in the back. I must write a nice thank-you letter to the League, Charles thought, twisting his first and second toes together inside his right shoe so that he would remember, and then instantly forgot.
The cause of his abrupt memory loss was a strikingly featured youth sitting in the front row. This boy could not be more than twenty, and yet he met Charles’s gaze with a jarring audacity, breaking into a grin that displayed far more little teeth than any civilized grin ought to. His legs were very long, his pants were impertinently tight across his thighs, and a small notepad lay across his lap, dark with copious notes he had been jotting down while Charles had been reading aloud from Journey to a War.
Though it was common for undergrads to take notes at his readings, Charles inexplicably felt as if he had been caught wrongfooted. In spite of himself, he leaned forward to try to decipher the boy’s black ink jottings, irrationally alarmed that they might somehow contain something incriminating, might somehow probe beyond Charles’s bland 32-year-old facade to the perspiring adolescent who secretly still lived inside Charles’s skull, wearing a cascading wig of yellow curls and stammering through the role of Katherina in his senior school’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. He immediately sat bolt upright again when he realized he had been unconsciously thrusting his face in the general direction of the grinning boy’s crotch.
Ears ringing now, Charles only vaguely registered that the blonde in the white suit had asked him a question and was waiting for an answer. Seeing no reply was forthcoming, Hank nimbly leapt in to answer on Charles’s behalf, “I read history, but was sent down before I could receive a degree. Charles had a scholarship in biology, but changed to English in his second year.”
The toothy boy winked up at Charles.
2.
“For the last time, Charles, give me your list. I’m about to run out for groceries,” Hank yelled from the hall, oversized galoshes making muffled thumping noises on the carpet.
“What? Why? It’s my turn this week, isn’t it?” Charles said, eyes running over the opening sentences of the essay he had been drafting for the twentieth time. Should he switch the first two clauses around again, or….
Hank’s face reappeared in the doorway of his study. “You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been saying, have you? You need to stay in, because that kid’ll be dropping by at 2.”
“Kid? What kid?”
“The Brooklyn College undergraduate who’s supposed to be interviewing you for his college paper, remember? The Observer or something.”
Come to think of it, Charles did recall Hank telling him something about a Brooklyn College undergraduate the other night. “Oh, all right. I don’t actually need much, just more oatmeal and, um, milk and, um, that nice oolong tea if they have it.”
Some indefinable amount of time later, Charles’s attention was hauled away from his essay yet again, this time by the noise of a bell ringing. He growled inarticulately. “Just let me drown, goddamn it,” he said nonsensically, before wrenching himself to his feet and going to answer the door.
Good God, it was him again. The toothy grinner. “Erik Lehnsherr,” the boy introduced himself. “Thanks again for agreeing to talk with me, Mr. Xavier.”
“Yes, yes, come in,” Charles gestured muzzily at the much-divoted couch (he and Hank had rented the apartment fully furnished), then dropped into the faded armchair opposite. “Ask me anything, please — anything at all.”
Erik paused dramatically, giving this generous offer all the serious consideration it deserved. “You’re married, aren’t you, Mr. Xavier?”
“Please call me Charles. And how do you know that I’m married? Very few people know that.”
Erik bared his teeth, but said nothing. Unable to bear the silence any longer, Charles found himself admitting, “Yes, I’m married. Gabrielle Haller, you know, is my wife’s name. But we don’t live together. It was a question of citizenship, you see. Gabrielle needed, rather urgently, to become a British subject — couldn’t stay in Germany a moment longer — and, well, I’m a British citizen, as it happens. So it all worked out quite nicely.”
“So you were her saviour.”
“Pardon?”
“Saviour. It rhymes with Xavier,” Erik bared his teeth again.
Really, this was too much. Charles covered his cheeks with his hands, trying to leach the heat out of them. “Anyone would have done the same, wouldn’t you say? Hank surely would have — Gabrielle actually asked him first — but he had a crisis of his own that he was working through at the time, and, well…“
“You’re very modest, Charles.”
“Hardly. My Oxford friends would say I’m something of a tyrant.”
“A tyrant?”
“I’m very fond of having my own way.”
“Ah.”
“Are you thirsty, Erik? May I offer you something to drink? We’re actually out of the good tea, but well, the second best tea has its charms, too…”
“Far be it from me to neglect what is charming,” Erik grinned, and Charles hurriedly excused himself to go regather his composure in the kitchen. Where had Hank stowed the damn darjeeling again? As Charles lifted himself up on tiptoe to rifle through the cabinets, a shadow fell over him. Erik had joined him in the kitchen, then. Charles desperately tried not to show his discomfiture. “Tell me about yourself, Erik,” he heard himself saying.
“Well, I’m a great fan of your books, Charles Xavier.”
“Have you read my books? Really? Most of the people who come to my readings actually haven’t read a single one. They only come because they’ve heard that I’m the latest hot item — I mean, that my books are hot; not me personally, haha — and so they show up to try to suss out what the fuss is all about. I don’t begrudge anybody that, of course. God knows I don’t have time to read more than a fraction of the books I’d like to read, either.”
“I’ve read every one of your books. At first, The Orators was my favorite, but then Look, Stranger! supplanted it in my heart, and then, well,...”
“God, why can’t I stop blushing,” Charles gritted out. “I should be too old for this by now. But you flatter me too much, Erik. When I asked you to tell me about yourself, I really didn’t mean for you to talk to me about me; I meant for you to talk to me about you.”
“Me? What’s there to say about me? I’m just a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” The faux modesty was so obviously artificial that the air fairly crackled with it.
“Well, what does your father do?”
“Dentist.”
“And you? What — what do you do for fun?” Heavens, had the top three buttons of Erik’s shirt always been unbuttoned like that? But then, Charles’s question answered itself, for he saw Erik’s hands moving in slow motion, reaching up to unbutton another button of his shirt, and then another, and then another. And then, all at once, Erik was standing very close to him, and when Erik spoke again, his words were whispered directly into Charles’s ear, hot and breathy:
“Well, Charles, I’m terribly fond of the opera.”