Chemical Reactions

Part 3

Later that day, you finally made your way home which, to you, did not feel much like home at all. You had a room with beautiful views, overlooking the park across from central station. It was magnificent and, yet, you felt somewhat out of place inside this rather large property.

Since commencing your studies at Berkley, you were staying with family friends who, just like your mother and father, entertained strong communist believes.

The Chevaliers were well known party members and, whilst you never joined the party yourself, you retained your associations for the sake of mutual benefit.

Haakon Chevalier was an English professor at Berkley and it was through him that you have heard about the scholarship in the physics department at the university which, in the end, he aided you to obtain.

You thus owed him a great deal and, even though you were at odds with communism yourself, you did not mind presenting yourself at the events him and his wife invited you to.

With your father in charge of the party branch in the south and running for Senate, having you there meant a great deal to them and you were certain that, with the right amount of alcohol, you could get through the night effortless. But, apparently not tonight.

Tonight, was going to be different and, just as you got yourself ready for the event which was hosted by a friend of Haakon, you thought about it again. You thought about how your professor's fingertips felt on you, raising goosebumps on your bare skin.

It was a feeling quite unfamiliar to you and you thought that, if he would have known that you had never been touched by a man before, he would have apologised to you for this somewhat inappropriate gesture.

An apology though was not what you were after. To the contrary. You wanted something completely different to this man taking pity on you. You wanted him to desire you for who you were, which was something that, to most men was off-putting.

Your mother always called you condescending. According to her, you were too fixated on the sciences and not interested enough in what mattered the most. To her, you were wasting your youth on problems that could not and should not be solved by human kind and this, itself, was a frustrating revelation to you.

Did you miss out on being loved where everyone else around you was focused on exactly that? Romantic relations, marriage and children?

You quickly realised that none of this interested you and not once, in your twenty-two years on this planet, have you felt intellectually challenged by a man. Not until now at least, which is when you met J Robert Oppenheimer who, out of all people on this earth, had to be your professor.

With him in mind, you looked at yourself in the mirror and reached up and clapped your hand over the place he touched, fizzling out the tingling that was beginning to rise there again by just thinking of him.

"Don't be ridiculous" you then said to your image in the mirror, trying to snap out of your thoughts. Not only was he your superior, but he was also a married man who had a child and was at least fifteen years older than you.

It was pointless, so to speak and you really had to focus on your studies rather than on your professor.

***

Eventually, the evening came around and you caught a ride with Haakon and his wife Barbara to a property nearby. The drive was no more than twenty minutes and, when you arrived in front of the largest mansion you had ever seen, you could not help but laugh.

"Now that is the definition of communism" you said sarcastically, seeing the irony in the fact that communism was all about equality and, yet, whomever lived here probably had enough money to end poverty all together.