After the war, he was courted by several prestigious universities offering handsomely-paying teaching positions. He eventually settled on a prominent technical school in Southern California, where, as he put it, he could do "all science, all the time." However, it was there that he discovered his true calling: he was an artist.
After a fire drill in the building hosting the physics department canceled one of his lectures, he decided to take a stroll over to the anemic liberal arts building, where budding the budding Einsteins took all their pass/fail courses.
This place is always begging for mischief, he thought. So far, his greatest hits included sitting in on a discussion of Robert Frost poems, where he made a persuasive argument that "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" was about bestiality. Another time, at a packed seminar, he asked the dean of the philosophy department to explain the eternal dilemma of "hustle vs. bustle." This time, he decided to drop in and see what he could do for Drawing I.
Miss Barone, the art teacher, was beside herself when she saw Ben standing in the doorway of her classroom.
"Does Professor Symon really wish to grace us with his presence?!" she gasped.
"It is, and I do," he replied with a wink.
"Joy of joys!" she cried, handing him a charcoal and paper.
"Forget it," he rejoined, "the only thing I ever get is physics." But he couldn't resist the pleas of the students, many of whom, he knew, had idolized him since the day they got their first chemistry set.
It was the beginning of multiple failures in a variety of mediums before he eventually created his oil on canvas masterpiece: "Madame Curie discovers radium." It was modeled partly on an ancient photograph of Ms. Curie and partly on Playboy's Miss August 1955. He made sure to use the most striking white-yellow he could find on the gamma rays he created shooting out of Madame Curie's crotch. To balance this harsh embellishment he added another; he festooned her generous mound of pubic hair with several pink roses, endowing her with that earth-mother look that he felt had been missing from the real-life M. Curie.
He was forced to part with his life's work after his second wife vindictively donated it to an auction during their divorce proceedings. He was able to track down the buyer, a wealthy, elderly British matron living in Bel Air, but she refused to sell it back to him.
He tried to convince her that she'd been robbed: "How could you have paid $10,000 for such a piece of trash?" he cried, gesticulating wildly at the garden of fireworks around M. Curie's nether regions.
"I'm sorry," she replied, "but I can never resist a lovely bit of foliage."
