Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital – Princeton, NJ – March 1996
An overwhelming sense of déjà vu hits you the moment he walks into your office.
You've forgotten how tall he is, how slender yet athletic. You've forgotten about his peculiar strut, and the way it exudes a lethal mix of arrogance and reticence. You remember the eyes, though. How could anyone forget those eyes? He's wearing khaki pants, brown sports coat, and a blue dress shirt. No tie. His brown hair is mussed and you think it's a bit thinner than it was the last time you saw him. More than a decade will do that, you suppose.
You greet him not by first name, but by his title: Doctor House. That's why he's standing in your office, after all. He is a doctor looking to be hired. You are a doctor looking to hire. That is all. You try to convince yourself that's all, at least.
It's a hard balance to strike, you soon realize, between the personal relationship you once shared and the professional one you're looking to begin. You haven't forgotten about Michigan, and you haven't forgotten about him. How could you, really? Your friendship was short-lived, and your sexual relationship even shorter-lived, but that doesn't minimize their lasting affects. The warmth that floods your cheeks every time his name pops up on the medical community's grapevine reminds you of this.
You know he remembers, too. That's why he called your office last week, hoping to fill a vacancy in nephrology. He was kind enough over the phone, but spoke to you as one would speak to a friend-of-a-friend, a distant acquaintance. He didn't mention Michigan once. It was better that way, you told yourself once you hung up the phone.
You know he's a risk. He has a reputation. He was expelled from Hopkins during his final year of medical school. He has been fired five times in the four years since he finished his infectious disease fellowship. He tells you during the interview that very few of his professional references will have positive things to say about anything besides his diagnostic abilities. He's a liability and you both know it. But you also know about his reputation as a medical genius and world-class diagnostician, that his IQ is in the 99th percentile and that he scored a perfect 45 on his MCATs, that he's a graduate of the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University and that he's trained under the best physicians at the country's best teaching hospitals. And you know those things and the attention they can bring to your hospital outweigh all else.
You wait until you're about to leave for the day before calling. A woman answers the phone and, even though you're not surprised, you feel your chest constrict. You ask for Doctor House and offer him the best deal you've been able to come up with: you'll give him the attending spot in nephrology but you won't pay him what he's worth. You can't take the risk you're taking without a few caveats. You also know that he'd be committing professional suicide if he turned your offer down: no one else will hire him. He knows this, too, and he accepts your offer readily.
You tell him to be in your office at 8 o'clock Monday morning. You then say goodnight to Doctor House.