After receiving the Nobel Prize, he decided to go to Japan. For years he had beaten back the army and their waves of requests for commission work. Now it would be near impossible to keep them away. It was time to take a much-needed vacation.
He felt relaxed in the presence of the hostess. She spoke excellent English and possessed an unassuming beauty. Her body was so small and slender. Unlike, he thought, the big, loud American women who had increasingly begun to enroll in his lectures. He appreciated the servile manner with which she presented his meal. He even liked her name--it reminded him of an ice cream flavor he had tried once.
"Tell me, dear, what is the name of this dish, again?"
He was sitting on the floor of his hotel room, thoroughly enjoying the exotic dinner she had brought him.
She murmured something sweetly in Japanese.
"Mmmm...right. I think I might have had that before. Never this good, though."
He saw her smile as she fluffed his pillow. Satisfied with this reaction, he busied himself with wolfing down his delicious dinner.
It was odd how at ease she felt with this man. It were as though she were meeting a long-lost relative for the first time. His rambling, long-winded propensity for storytelling reminded her of her father.
As she knelt down next to him, Ben was struck by the fact that she might not be as young as he had at first supposed. Her sharp black eyes were embedded in the folds of lightly lined skin and her long dark hair appeared coarse and brittle up close. There was a disconcerting pink blotch that bordered her hairline like a melted crown. But, rather than take away from her beauty, these flaws seemed to add a special quality.
He noted her long, regal neck and the delicate hands she held clasped politely in her lap.
"Darling, I'm about to ask you a very strange question."
She did not flinch at this intimacy.
"I doubt you could ask me something stranger than I've already heard."
"I'm hoping you'll let me draw you."
"Why, Mr. Symon," she gasped. She fluttered her eyelashes cartoonishly. "I thought you were a scientist."
"I'm an artist, too. And you're the perfect model for my new painting: Madame Curie Discovers Radium, part 2: The East."
She gathered his dishes.
"I don't see how I could refuse."
