Affairs of the heart

When he rang her door bell she opened the door and ushered him inside. He was astounded at the way she looked as he never, in all those eight years, saw her so sexy and desirable. She was wearing a white halter top dress. The revealing plunge neckline exposed a lot, leaving little to his imagination. Her straight back was bare excepting for the sash tie at the neck. She was barefoot and her toe nails were painted bright red. Her hair was freshly shampooed and still a little wet, her luscious lips were pink and her beautiful face had very little make up. Petra asked him “Do you like my dress, my darling, I got it from Ukraine when I went there last Christmas.” “You look gorgeous, Petra. I never saw you wearing such a nice dress before.” “My dear Anant, I wear this only for you, If I wear it outside all the men will go crazy.” “You may be right, Petra. Thanks for giving me this opportunity to enjoy your pulchritude.” “You use very big words, darling, whatever they mean, I hope it is a compliment.” “Petra, it means that I have the honor and privilege to admire your dazzling beauty.” “You are such a flatterer, are you always like this with all the women?” “I rarely get the opportunity to be with such a special woman like yourself, my dear.” The living room was cozy, with a smoldering fire place and the drapes drawn to keep out the draft. Petra sat on Anant’s lap and kissed him seductively and said “You are a real gentleman, all evening you didn’t even try to touch me. Most men in my country are not this patient. If there was a Russian man in your place he would have made love to me first and then ate his dinner. I love you because you are so decent and considerate. So far in my life no man has ever offered to help me in the kitchen. When I was in Ukraine, my mother, me and my sister would work hard and get the food ready. My father and my two brothers would come in, eat and leave. Sometimes when my father was in a good mood he would compliment my mother on the tasty food, but none of them offered to help in washing dishes or cleaning the kitchen. When I came to this country, Paul was the first man that I dated. He was a very lazy man and never got up from his chair even to get a cup of coffee. I had to wait on him all the time.” “Petra, thank you for the compliment. As soon as I saw you I wanted to make love to you but I figured I could wait until after dinner. I enjoyed watching you in your new dress and I liked the way you moved around the house in this outfit. Also I thought we must do justice to the food you prepared. There is a saying that the way to man’s heart is through his stomach. I found that the way to a woman’s heart is to first eat whatever she cooks, compliment her on the excellent food and then slowly take her into the bedroom.” “How many times did your recipe work?” He never forgave his father for throwing him into the cesspool of the scientific world. A world where you had to genuflect constantly to the top scientists in the field; a world where you were as good as your last paper; a world where you published or perished, and sometimes published and perished because no granting agency gave you money for your hare-brained ideas; a world where the research money was controlled by the old boys’ network, and even God couldn’t save you if you didn’t belong to this mafia, no matter how good you were or how bright your ideas may be; a world where, in the name of peer review, the anonymous and malicious reviewers hid behind the compliant editors and blocked the manuscripts of their less powerful rivals; a world where even if your publications were proven to be based on fabricated or wrong data, you could talk your way out of trouble if you were powerful enough; a world where the “visible scientists” hogged all the limelight, gave meaningless keynote addresses at international conferences, and pontificated to their less fortunate brethren; a world where the graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, the unsung and unheard heroes of science, slogged day and night to churn out data that enabled the “visible scientists” to gallivant around the globe at the tax payers’ expense.