Page 39 of Backslide
I try not to act impressed. Even though I kind of am. “I think I’ve heard of that.”
He glances up at me with a small smile, then goes back to work. “Nothing gets past you.”
Noah was never academically inclined. I was the studious one. In school, he got away with the bare minimum. But I guess in the intervening years he turned that around. Applied all that dedication to baseball to something else.
Whatever. He still sucks.
“So, what, you’re like… a chiropractor?” I ask.
At that, he stops and looks up at me, indignant. “You think I’m achiropractor?”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s a real job!”
“It’s a real job. It’s just not a real doctor.”
“Wow,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Someone’s a snob.”
Also, someone is defensive about their medical pedigree. Now I’ve got him where I want him:
“So, like, are you a physical therapist then?”
“No. I am not a physical therapist.”
“A veterinarian?”
“No. But in this moment, it feels like experience wrangling wild animals might be helpful—or at least sedating them.”
So funny.I smile sweetly through gritted teeth. “So, what then? You’re a personal trainer?”
He stops and looks up at me. “Do you actually think a personal trainer is a type of doctor?”
“No,” I say, adopting my most innocent expression. “But Damien said you work with sports teams. I know howflexibleyou are with the truth. So, I figured maybe you were using the word ‘doctor’ loosely.”
At this, he finally loses patience. “I’m a doctor. Anactualdoctor. Even if that’s hard for you to believe.” I’m getting under his skin, and I am loving it. Score one for Planet Nellie!
“Okay, got it,” I shrug. “So, like, an RN? I hear registered nurses can do almost everything a doctor can.”
“Nell!”
I am enjoying his indignation and the way my needling is making him flushed. But also, my injury is currently in his hands, so it occurs to me that maybe I want him less frustrated and more focused. Plus, something is gnawing at me about what he just said—how it would be hard for me to believe he made something of himself. And itoccurs to me that he mumbled something similar under his breath yesterday—about how I thought he was nothing.
I have believed a lot of things about Noah in my life, but that is definitely not one of them. On the contrary, for a long while, I thought he was everything.
Why would he think that?
“Okay,” I say. “I give. What kind of doctor are you really?”
“I’m an orthopedic surgeon,” he mutters.
Asurgeon? A motherfucking surgeon? For professional sports teams? That’s what he’s been doing all this time in La La Land, while I thought he was working a thankless office job in the big-box-store-filled suburbs of some cloudy city?
But I guess it makes sense. At least a little bit. Because while the Noah I knew was mostly beloved for his athleticism and charm, he was secretly a gifted artist, too. That was the part of him I liked best, a part reserved mostly for me.
Different small motor skills.
In fact, though I didn’t get this T-shirt on an outing with him and instead as part of a thank-you gift after I worked on an editorial spread about the artists of the Whitney Biennial, I could have. Because even as teenagers, we wandered museums and galleries together, sharing a love of aesthetics like so many 1950s milkshakes.
“How did that happen?” I finally blurt out with more force than I intend.
