Idle Musings of a Woman at Eighty
by
Minisinoo


Notes: I wouldn't mind having the wisdom of sixty, the libido of thirty, the body of twenty, and the gall of eighty. This is my drool-over-Logan piece. And how would it feel to watch him stay the same age?

---

Sweat beads on slick skin and then slides together, running in rivulets down his back and out from beneath his arms. I watch it. I want to lick it off, lick him clean like a Popsickle. I wonder what his skin tastes like? Salt and cigars and that indefinable man musk.

He's not beautiful. Not in the usual magazine-sculpted ideal of chiseled and starved perfection. I slept with chiseled perfection for forty-two years. After a while, it loses its appeal. Contempt of the familiar, I suppose. This face is handsome, but the skin is less taut and faint lines bracket the mouth, crease the forehead. It's a face that is aging, but not old, a face in the flower of manhood. All the smoothness of youth has been sanded off by years and experience, and the eyes -- all-color-hazel and none -- are deep with the weight of things seen. He knows the underside of life, and its brilliance, too, the whole kaleidoscope-complexity of being human. It's drawn his mouth gentle and curved with irony.

No, he's not a beautiful man. But he is a handsome one, and interesting -- which is more important. It's not the animal magnetism that attracted me then, nor attracts me now. He has that, but so do a lot of men. What always interested me about him was that, when I talked to him, he listened. And I often thought that if he'd made love to me, he wouldn't have rushed. Patience is a virtue of age.

So I watch him a moment more from the shadow of the gym door. He's too involved in his lesson with the kids to have smelled me yet.

But I can't stay hidden forever, indeterminate in the doorway, so I enter the room with measured steps, feel it as they all register my presence.

The Grand Dame of Westchester.

They look at me with awe, I feel it beating against the glass lantern of my mind like the fluttering wings of moths. I must be so careful with them or I would burn them up. I am Phoenix. Yet I am also simply me. Plain Jean. I don't feel so special on the inside of my skin, and I wonder, idly, if this is how Charles felt when we idolized him, so many years ago. Inscrutable, omniscient Professor X. Now I am the inscrutable, omniscient one. Senator Jean Grey. How funny. I wonder if these children know how I snore like a chain saw, or that I put ketchup on my cottage cheese. Scott always thought that was nuts -- both the ketchup and the eating of cottage cheese, in the first place. "Live dangerously Jean," he used to say, "try some salsa." And I'd laugh and poke him in the belly. The belly got wider as he got older. But then, so did mine. He never did lose his hair, at least.

Now, I make my way across the floor. 'Majestically,' I've heard it called. In truth, I just can't walk fast any more. Only one pair of eyes doesn't watch me with awe. There's a glint in them. Come to keep tabs on me, Old Woman?, he asks in my mind, where the students can't hear.

No. Just came to watch you sweat, Old Man.

Care to lick it off later?

And Jesus, just which of us is the telepath here? I meet his eyes and shake my head faintly. Aloud, we speak of other things, such as the importance of physical exercise for mental agility. It's true enough. But Lord, it sounds so . . . potted. Like a two-bit column in a health magazine. At least Logan no longer must teach them how to keep themselves alive. Prejudice isn't dead, but it's gone to hide in the dark under the porch. Xavier didn't live to see that, but Scott did. He was among the chief architects of that tolerance. I was another. We two built a palace together on Charles' foundation, and God, I loved that man. Scott, not Charles.

I miss you, Slim. It's the whispered litany of eight years, no less poignant for the passage of time but less sharp at the edges. I think of Scott softly now. We grew old together. I watched his body change. I watched his hair turn gray and his muscles go lax. And I watched him become the moral leader that Charles had seen inside when he'd put him in charge of the X-Men. Scott never held public office (that was me), but he did become a bit of a legend.

Yet heroes are hard to live with at home, no matter how much you love them. He was only ever half here. Too many people needed a piece of Scott and he had a bad habit of bringing them to bed with us at night. Sometimes I found myself talking to the wall of his ear. He lived with a mobile phone and his HP notebook just as much as he lived with his glasses.

But Logan listened to me, and still does. Sometimes, I need to be a woman. Not a doctor. Not a researcher. Not a senator. Not an X-Man. And dammit, not a political activist's long-suffering wife.

Or widow.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the Grand Dame here for me, or as Mrs. Scott Summers, even though I never took his name. That was the funniest thing of all. We just didn't quite get around to a wedding, woke up one morning and realized we'd been sleeping in the same bed for seven years and that was Common Law. So we registered it and went on with the important things in life. My sister asked me once if I didn't resent him for not marrying me formally. God knows, I resented him for a lot of things, but never that.

Smiling at the thought, I wait for Logan to dismiss his class. Today, I feel a need to speak to someone who doesn't idolize me, or hate me, or want something from me. He walks me back towards my office -- the old corner office that once was Charles' and then was Scott's and now is mine -- and gallantly offers me his arm on the stairs, makes a flourish of it for humor to conceal the fact that without the arm, my bad knee would probably go out and send me crashing ignominiously to the bottom. Most of the time these days, I use the elevator.

You're old, Jean Grey.

My back aches when I unbend from sitting, and I have arthritis in my hands and knees and feet -- too many years of standing for hours in ridiculous heels. Now, I wear flats, but still look most men in the eye despite the shrinking of bones and a touch of osteoporosis. I should have drank more milk when I was nursing and taken my calcium like a good little doctor girl.

"Is Nate arriving in time for the party?"

"His plane gets in at four. Chris is going to pick his dad up. And shhh. They think it's a secret."

He laughs. They should know they can't keep secrets from a telepath.

Nate is a telepath, Logan.

Then he really should know better.

That makes me smile. He's Scott's son. He's predisposed to selective blindness.

And grand gestures.

That, too.

We've reached my office door and he opens it for me, ushers me in. I expect him to leave then; Logan has become marginally respectable in his old age and oversees the mansion for me. I don't trust anyone else to do it, even Emma. She manages the school, and that's enough. But this place still exists on two levels, and Logan manages the Underground. They used to tell me that I was the heart of the X-Men and Scott was the soul. I'm not sure what Logan is, but we couldn't exist without him, even when it's no longer necessary to save -- or fight -- the world. Maybe Logan has been the soul all along, and Scott was the mind. That makes more sense to me.

Now, he shuts the office door and follows me towards my desk, stops me before I can get behind it, great mahogany thing that it is. My shield, my mask, my dignity. His hand comes down on my shriveled shoulder and I can smell him strong, all salt and musk and health. So unlike Scott in his last years with his persistent yeasty cough from the walking-pneumonia that was killing him, or the slightly sour old-man smell, like dirty socks in a hamper or day-old washcloths. It's a smell you become used to. As he was used to mine. The medicine astringent of Ben-Gay under expensive perfume, or too much stale coffee on my breath.

But now, Logan stands close behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him through the Egyptian linen on my back. He says nothing for a moment, just drags his thumb gentle over the bared, wizened skin of my neck, as if I were still the same woman he first met, a woman of thirty-three, ripe and rich and conflicted. I'd desired him then. I'd dreamed of fucking him hard against a wall. But I'd loved Scott with everything in me, adored my beautiful, brilliant boy. And I chose. I never faltered, never cheated. And I never regretted my choice except in those halfway seconds between sleep and waking, or when Logan passed too close and I smelled that salt and musk and scent of wind. Like now. Bending, he kisses my cheek and I feel the scratch of his beard on my tissue-paper skin. It sends shudders through me, and my dry, old passage goes moist. There's still heat there. There's still life there, rising like my namesake the phoenix, though the womb has been dead for almost twenty-five years.

Silly old grandmother.

"Happy birthday, Jeannie," his whispers.

I turn slightly, a shift of weight to move my shoulder out from under his hand. My chin goes up. This silly old grandmother still has some pride. I don't want his pity. I look him in the eyes and mean to say so, but it never gets out.

I see my reflection there: mostly white hair with vestiges of auburn, a face ravaged by gravity, a sagging chin. The skin around my lips is stitched by a drawstring of lines and my eyebrows no longer arch like the wings of butterflies. But the eyes themselves belong to Phoenix. They're as black as coal. And seeing my eyes in his eyes, I see what he sees beyond the face. There is a girl inside eighty. And there is a boy, still, inside the unknown years of his own life. Bending, he kisses that girl as his hand runs up my side to cup the breast of a woman. He rubs a thumb over my nipple, which can still remember how to get hard. Desire spikes out through my chest and belly. I'm old, not dead. Then he steps back, lips quirking up in that self-deprecating smile. "I've waited a long time to do that, Red. But I'd better get down to the dining hall. There's a surprise party to prepare for, and punch to spike."

"What?" I ask him, lifting an eyebrow. "You think you need to get me drunk to pass second base?"

"Nah. But if I didn't spike the punch, Nate would think I'd gone soft in my old age."

"And we couldn't have that, could we?"

Winking, he ducks out the door, leaves me to myself. Maybe I should feel ashamed for what just transpired, but it seems senseless. Perversity is in the eye of the beholder. I spent most of my life in the bed of a man almost nine years my junior, and have still outlived him by nearly a decade. So what if I kiss a man who is, I'm quite certain, at least twice nine years my senior? The fact that he has the body of a thirty-five year old is irrelevant. They say age is in the mind. My mind is ageless. It's my body that has forgotten.

I pick up a picture from my desk. Scott, teaching Nathan to walk. Scott stands behind with Nate's little fists gripping his father's fingers as he toddles. In the background, almost out of the picture, Logan sits on a step and watches. Not with envy. I think it's with pride. Logan had loved Nate, too -- the slightly gruff old uncle. And he'd respected Scott. Human emotions are never shoe-box simplistic, tagged and stored and consistent.

The three men in my life. Eight years ago next week, I buried one of them after watching him survive on willpower alone for five years. Another is flying in today to see his mother turn eighty. And tonight, I believe I shall sleep with the third.



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