the intimate practices of lousy lovers

The soap-opera scenario, he figures, is his just desserts, his unspicy serving because even if a short, balding Jewish man can defy the stereotypes enough to get women, he can't bend the rules far enough to have what Foreman got in a sexy, willing-and-able affair partner.

Not that Rachel wasn't plenty of all of that when they were doing it on Foreman's couch. Which was so, so long ago...

Everyone's a shell of themselves, anymore. Chase is jaded and leaning in to the hopeless sexual reputation House wants to pathologize him into having. Foreman's as hopped-up on power as he ever might have been said to be, even still with nowhere else to go. Thirteen's gone, like gone gone, and not to jail this time - because who can believe jail? House can, apparently, enough to hire out of it. Adams is so...nothing. Park is so...everything else.

Kutner's gone. Amber's gone. Cameron's gone.

And Taub is still just standing here, short-coated, holding the idiot ball of unidentified origin. Which is fine. Obviously.

It doesn't have to be exciting. It just has to mean something.

Is what he would say if he were still doing plastic surgery, which he knows - contrary to popular belief - sure as anything means a great deal to those who elect it. Yeah, sure, triple bypasses and partial hysterectomies are life-changing in ways that those who've never been threatened with either could hardly imagine, but nobody goes through life dreaming about stuff like that.

(Rachel had dreamed of a hysterectomy. Chris had never known.)

And those people...they mean something, right? Inherently? Intrinsically?

It's hard to tell, when life isn't threatened. It's hard to flip-flop the patient against the power of the problem. And that's a strange sort of stance to have to take.

Neurotic as he is, Taub is disquieted to meet people who wouldn't care about a stray-shapen mole on their exposed flank. So, even though the happiness itself isn't vapid, the existence of a consciousness that doesn't writhe around with the ethics of uninformed consent, et cetera, poses like the unfunhouse mirror to the subjects of a caricature artist.

"So...you're a fellow?"

Park peers at him through the incurious eyes of a not-question question. It's not that interesting. He's not that interesting.

His job, under House, is to be the one who's not that interesting. Who's really not that glamorous or all that strange. Who stays, year after year.

"You think I'm too old. Well, just to get ahead of the rumors you'll be hearing, I seem to subscribe to the philosophy that age is just a number."

Park blinks. "Do you?"

Of course not. It's life experience that matters...or doesn't. It's alignment of values that makes or breaks a relationship.

It's being better than the sum of twenty-two years together. It's finding a way to exist, through it all, as the product of your circumstances and more.

"We're like TV doctors," says Taub, his smile far too flickering and self-conscious for the current pair dynamic posed artlessly by the person across from him.

He'll become disabused of that notion...someday. Someday when his daughters are just as bored with him as he is with them, when his boss stops acting like a walking one-liner, when he feels himself start to matter about as much to the plot of his own life as the department of oncology does to the department of diagnostics.

Orthogonal. Once-removed. Oddity in bemusement. Someday, shunted to a secondary screen.

Once upon a time, he was chafing at the seams to butt heads with Henry Dobson, the fake doctor, because of how much fun the preposterous fraudster was getting to have with it - and without an ounce of guilt! Once upon a time, he'd moralized on the very basis of that competition, wrestled with it, grit his teeth on its off-by-one edges.

Taub wouldn't think that Dobson should be guilty, now. He'd like to be having such a one-in-a-million opportunity, now. He'd like to be wanting it that much.

He'd love to be wanting any woman, or man, or otherwise, that much. Rachel was so easy to want. Rachel was such comfortable, well-written daytime television.

Medspa narratives used to feel less canned than his life right now. He used to be excited for the day's script to fall out of a blue folder and into his active, animated hands.

The show will go on, or it won't, and he'll still be here. A supporting character. An unsuppurating credit. A stitch without a scar.

In general, a hospital. The trustworthy caretaking face. The twice-over single father. The standard, sturdy clipboard with nothing in its chart.