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The White Stag
     
     
     
     
    The invitation arrived on November 14, but I left it on my dresser for three weeks before I mustered the courage to open it.
     
    Senator Valor Balder and her family
    cordially invite you to celebrate
    Christmas and the Winter Solstice
    at the Balder Family Prairie House,
    Gainesville, Florida.
    8 p.m., Saturday, December 20, 2003
     
    The particulars of the invitation cascaded down the thick cardstock in bold, perfect brush strokes. I had never received an invitation to one of Valor’s parties; in fact, I had met her only half a dozen times over the past year, and always in passing. She had, on occasion, waltzed into the Prairie House during one of Jude’s weekend parties or had been introduced to me at a Democratic Party fund-raiser or one of Jude’s gallery openings, but there was something distant about her greetings when we met, and, despite the fact that Jude’s mother always seemed to remember my name, I always expected her to have forgotten it.
    I looked at the invitation for a long time. I considered throwing it away. I threw it on the floor, a dry run for actually discarding it, and wandered into the living room to watch TV. By the first commercial break, I had worried myself back into the bedroom and was once again holding the invitation between trembling fingers.
    Should I go back there? Or was the friendly but distant relationship I had established with Jude all I could handle?
    I called my best friend JoAnn; she was no help. She told me I was hopeless and to quit calling her about Jude. “Jude, Jude, Jude,” she had said finally. “Fuck Jude.” I winced; she’s a Jersey girl. When I started to respond, she said, “I am hanging up on you. Call me back when you grow a pair.” Then, in her singsong voice, “Love ya.” And she clicked off the phone.
    Ten seconds later, the phone rang.
    “Yeah?” I said.
    JoAnn started talking without a greeting or a breath. “And don’t even think of asking me to go with you now, because it’s too late, boy. I’ll be away that weekend.”
    Damn.
    I brought the invitation back into the living room and watched it sitting on the coffee table while an old rerun of Bewitched slipped past me.
    I picked up my phone, and then I put it back on the table.
    I hadn’t actually spoken to Jude in a couple of weeks, but we had traded periodic e-mails. Did I want to upset the balance?
    I sent Jude a text message: “ JOINT party? WHY?? ” He called me back immediately.
    “Dude, I told you it’s a joint party this year,” he said.
    “No, you didn’t.”
    “Yeah, I did. I’ve been talking about this for weeks.”
    “Yeah, but we haven’t actually talked in weeks, and you never said anything about this in your e-mails.”
    “Oh.” He paused. “Well, yeah, okay, my omission might be some kind of wishful thinking. I dunno,” he said. “But what’s done is done. It’s definitely a parade of compromises—at least for me, but I didn’t compromise on the guest list. She tried to cross you off the list, but I fought for ya, baby.”
    “That’s not funny.” I laughed.
    “No, she likes you, actually, she refers to you as ‘that young boy Joshua’, as in: ‘How is that young boy Joshua?’ or ‘Has that young boy Joshua found a boyfriend his own age yet?’ I guess she’s ultimately trying, in her none too subtle way, to point out that you’re too young for me, but I’ve told her you won’t let that become an issue. Really, she is just too relentless—”
    “Stop it! You’re kidding, right?”
    “No, you know how she is; the same thing that makes her a great senator makes her a ruthless conversationalist.”
    I laughed again. “I guess that’s true.”
    “Anyway, it’ll be local party bigwigs, campaign donors, old Gainesville, some sports people from the university, and a handful of crazy bohemian artists—”
    “You’re kidding,” I said, interrupting him. “Did you ever consider that those are two worlds that maybe