Matt had repeatedly expressed his dismay that the financial sector was gobbling up some of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians and that rather than using their gifts to tackle the world’s thorniest numerical dilemmas or improve the human condition, these geniuses were now engaged in the zero-sum game that was making bets on the stock market.
“Beyond that,” Matt continued, “I don’t even know if he really understands what he’s getting into. I mean, yeah, I think I’m close to a breakthrough. But I’ve been thinking that for a while now, haven’t I? And until I actually bring it home, I’m just another struggling scientist going around dishing out pithy aphorisms about how many airplanes the Wright brothers crashed. What if a year from now Plottner gets bored or impatient and decides he’s wasting his money? Dartmouth isn’t going to take me back. And these kind of positions . . .”
He didn’t need to complete the thought. A tenured Ivy League professorship was the most sought-after prize in American academia, not to mention the most recession-proof job of all time.
“Well, you know enough people,” I said. “You’d land on your feet somewhere.”
“Yeah, but where? Say I hang on for a year or two with Plottner before he pulls the plug. It will have been that much longer since I published anything. I’d be lucky to get an interview with Southern North Dakota College for the Directionally Challenged.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It’s more than that, though,” Matt said. “If I work for Plottner Investments, I am no longer part of the community of scholars, creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge, freely sharing my ideas. He would own whatever I did. I wouldn’t get to publish a paper unless he okayed it. Let’s say I do finally have a breakthrough and he makes me sit on it?”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he wants to patent it and sell it to the highest bidder,” Matt said. “He’s an investor. He’s not offering a million dollars a year—plus benefits, plus lab setup costs, plus whatever—simply because he wants to see Plottner Investments get a one-line mention in Physical Review Letters. My work would remain under lock and key until he said it wasn’t.
“And then there’s my health.”
I felt a small catch in my breathing. The great unspoken was being spoken.
“What about it?”
“Dr. Reiner said I need less stress. Not more. What if taking this job makes it come back? Moving to New York is stressful. Starting a new job is stressful. Working for a guy like Plottner is stressful.”
“Okay. You’re right. Turn it down.”
“I know. But a million dollars a year?”
“Money isn’t everything,” I said.
“But it’s to do something I love.”
“That’s true.”
“And no more grant proposals.”
“That too.”
“And . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just feel like it would be . . . selfish of me not to take this,” he said. “There’s Morgan’s college to think about. And I could retire my parents.”
Matt’s parents still spent seventy hours a week at the diner. Matt worried they were working themselves into the grave. They had been trying to sell the business for a few years but hadn’t been able to find a buyer.
We stopped and stared at each other. I looked into those puppy dog eyes of his and tried to divine what was really happening deep inside.
What I saw was a man legitimately torn.
A million dollars was a lot of money for anyone, but especially for a kid who grew up in a diner in Clinton, North Carolina.
“When does Plottner need an answer?” I asked.
“He didn’t say. We left it that I’d talk to you, and then we’d talk again soon.”
“Which way are you leaning?”
“The risk-averse part of me leans toward no,” he said. “But then, as soon as I try to live that decision, I feel crazier than a bag of monkeys. Who turns down a million-dollar-a-year job?”
“Right,” I said.
“Let’s sleep on it and see how we feel in the morning,” he suggested.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll sleep on it.”
We slept.
Or, in my case, pretended to sleep until sometime well after midnight.
Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, I never would have described my family as rich. But we had always been comfortable. I had the privilege of never worrying about where my next meal came from, of being able to plan for the future while taking the present more or less for granted.
Ditto with my adult life. Even when Matt was a broke grad student and I was riding the reference desk in West Windsor, the second-most junior librarian in the system and paid accordingly, we had everything we truly needed. I could sing for free. And ramen noodles weren’t so bad.
These days, we weren’t just comfortable. We were very comfortable. Truly, working for Dartmouth College was the quintessential golden handcuffs.
Still, we had our worries. Hanover real estate wasn’t cheap, and our mortgage payment gobbled up a big chunk of our paychecks. We probably weren’t saving enough for Morgan’s college, the cost of which only grew more astronomical with each passing year. And retirement? Don’t even start.
All those qualms would be eliminated if Matt was making a million dollars a year.
A lot of things got easier with a salary like that.
Plus, there was always hopeful talk about the cutting-edge treatments for hearing loss that might soon be coming and could significantly improve my condition.
They were all expensive. And none were covered by insurance.
What would it be like to hear again? To sing again?
To not have to wonder if I’d be able to know what my sweet boy’s voice sounded like when he became a man?
I immediately chastised myself for even thinking about that. Matt had enough pressure on his research already. There is this incredible urgency that physicists feel as they age. Albert Einstein was twenty-six when he had his annus mirabilis, his miracle year. Werner Heisenberg was twenty-five when he published his uncertainty principle. Niels Bohr wrote his famous trilogy of papers when he was twenty-eight. Erwin Schrödinger was considered an old man when he was doing his best work at thirty-nine.
There were far fewer examples of people whose best work came in their forties and beyond, the wall Matt was now staring at. It had long been my role in his life to remind him there was more to life than winning the Nobel Prize. He often thanked me for bringing balance to his worldview and “saving” him from the unhappy life of a narrow-minded, workaholic physicist. Is that what I should do again here?
At least now, at Dartmouth, he still had his teaching, which he enjoyed. Did we really want to put him in a place where his research would be everything?
At some point, I finally drifted off. Matt made his usual five o’clock exit. Or at least I assumed he did: when the bed started buzzing at six thirty, his side was already empty.
I got Morgan off to school, then groggily made my way to Baker Library.
Around ten, my phone started flashing.
It was the Dartmouth College Department of Physics and Astronomy.