“About the job.”

“It’s still available, if you want to know.”

“I don’t know if I conveyed that I am very interested.”

“You did not seem completely interested, to my eyes.  I assumed, young man, that Scripps or Woods Hole was your destination.  However, President Thornton shall know your personal leanings.”  He made it sound as if David liked to screw cats. 

“Wherever I can get the most money for ship time, especially if I don’t have to teach, that’s where I’m going.”  His putative boss promised to have a decision in two days.

David sipped his Scotch and drew little equal signs with his finger on the windowpane.  Incredibly, he appeared to be on the cusp of getting exactly what he wanted, a job with no exposure to undergraduates at all – it was pitiful when a physicist tried to tell eighteen-year-olds how a ball rolls off a table – and he could feel his heart racing.  No more grant proposals; he could pry all the money he wanted out of the Institute, and that meant underwater physics that could lead to fundamental breakthroughs, and that meant – maybe someday – the N word, as in Nobel.  More importantly, he could leave Pasadena, California and his postdoc at Caltech without seeming to break up with anyone.  This new job as Senior Research Fellow would impress his women, and it needed to – all three of them smart, demanding, and ambitious for him as well as for themselves.