«Good evening. Welcome. I see you have my invitation in your hands. Decided to be brave, did you? Fine. Here we are Grab onto this.»
The tall, handsome stranger with the heavenly eyes and the impossibly blond hair handed me a wineglass.
«Clean your palate,» he said.
I took the glass and read the label on the bottle he held in his left hand. Bordeaux, it read. St. Emilion.
«Go on,» said my host. «It's not poison. May I sit? And might you drink?»
«I might,» I sipped, shut my eyes, and smiled. «You're a connoisseur. This is the best I've had in years. But why this wine and why the invitation? What am I doing here at Gray's Anatomy Bar and Grill?»
My host sat and filled his own glass. «I am doing a favor to myself. This is a great night, perhaps for both of us. Greater than Christmas or Halloween.» His lizard tongue darted into his wine to vanish back into his contentment. «We celebrate my being honored, at last becoming―»
He exhaled it all out:
«Becoming,» he said, «a friend to Dorian! Dorian's friend. Me!»
«Ah.» I laughed. «That explains the name of this place, then? Does Dorian own Gray's Anatomy?»
«More! Inspires and rules over it. And deservedly so.»
«You make it sound as if being a friend to Dorian is the most important thing in the world.»
«No! In life! In all of life.» He rocked back and forth, drunk not from the wine but from some inner joy. «Guess.»
«At what?»
«How old I am!»
«You look to be twenty-nine at the most.»
«Twenty-nine. What a lovely sound. Not thirty, forty, or fifty, but―»
I said, «I hope you're not going to ask what sign I was born under. I usually leave when people ask that. I was born on the cusp, August, 1920.» I pretended to half rise. He pressed a gentle hand to my lapel.
«No, no, dear boy-you don't understand. Look here. And here.» He touched under his eyes and then around his neck. «Look for wrinkles.»
«But you have none,» I said.
«How observant. None. And that is why I have become this very night a fresh, new, stunningly handsome friend to Dorian.»
«I still don't see the connection.»
«Look at the backs of my hands.» He showed his wrists. «No liver spots. I am not turning to rust. I repeat the question, how old am I?»
I swirled the wine in my glass and studied his reflection in the swirl.
«Sixty?» I guessed. «Seventy?»
«Good God!» He fell back in his chair, astonished. «How did you know?»
«Word association. You've been rattling on about Dorian. I know my Oscar Wilde, I know my Dorian Gray, which means you, sir, have a portrait of yourself stashed in an attic aging while you yourself, drinking old wine, stay young.»
«No, no.» The handsome stranger leaned forward. «Not stayed young. Became young. I was old, very old, and it took a year, but the clock went back and after a year of playing at it, I achieved what I set out for.»
«Twenty-nine was your target?»
«How clever you are!»
«And once you became twenty-nine you were fully elected as―»
«A Friend to Dorian! Bulls-eye! But there is no portrait, no attic, no staying young. It's becoming young again's the ticket.»
«I'm still puzzled!»
«Child of my heart, you might possibly be another Friend. Come along. Before the greatest revelation, let me show you the far end of the room and some doors.»
He seized my hand. «Bring your wine. You'll need it!» He hustled me along through the tables in a swiftly filling room of mostly middle-aged and some fairly young men, and a few smoke-exhaling ladies. I jogged along, staring back at the EXIT as if my future life were there.
Before us stood a golden door.
«And behind the door?» I asked.
«What always lies behind any golden door?» my host responded. «Touch.»
I reached out to print the door with my thumb.
«What do you feel?» my host inquired.
«Youngness, youth, beauty.» I touched again. «All the springtimes that ever were or ever will be.»
«Jeez, the man's a poet. Push.»
We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.
«Is this where Dorian is?»
«No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your eyes.»
I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid and more beautiful…
I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.
I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.
«Yes, aren't they,» he said.