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A Novel
by Xochitl Gonzalez
Book Reviewed by:
NEW YORK CITY • FALL 1985
If it weren't for what happened later, everyone would have forgotten that night entirely. It wasn't like the '70s, you know? Nights when you never knew what could happen; what to expect. No, by 1985, the parties in New York were all the same. One night, one party, bleeding into the next. Nothing specific or momentous enough to press itself into your memory. The guests, the conversations, the taste of the fucking wine on your lips, all more or less the same. Especially Tilly's parties. Formulaic; interchangeable. Some felt that's what made them work, but for me? It depressed me—that impossible distinction of the passage of time.
The drinks were always set in her claustrophobic galley kitchen. To force intimacy. The food—what little there was—WASPs hate feeding people—set atop the piano in the center of her massive loft. The poor young artists hovering while it lasted. The music just loud enough to soften silences, but too muted to inspire true revelry. Over the years, Philip Glass was replaced with Sun Ra. The "hot new" artists aging into establishment figures or disappearing altogether; replaced by other, younger faces. All the big museum people were always invited, naturally. Tilly enjoyed the thirst shared between those two groups in particular: the haves dangling their opportunities tantalizingly before the have-nots. It created a great "friction in the room," she'd remarked once. After years where I was the only brown speck in attendance, lately there'd been a noted effort to populate the guest list with more "Third World Artists." This sudden concern for diversity coinciding with the Met hiring their first Black senior curator. I'm not being cynical, just honest; it would be embarrassing to invite Rory to a party and have her see only white people there. But, outside of that, in all the years of these fetes, very little had changed.
Except, I suppose, for me.
If you were in New York and in the art world, you did not refuse an invitation from Tilly Barber. And, for whatever reason, that night was particularly crowded. Bodies and conversation packed close enough to create a hum. I remember feeling a restless excitement when I arrived. The kind you feel when you're giddy from holding a secret; one with wings that flap furiously against your palms. Knowing that, any moment now, it could fly up! Out into the world. Its motion changing fortunes and futures, oceans or even lifetimes away. And I, the only one containing it. Such a power! Giancarlo, raconteur that he was, was telling me a story. I was listening, but not. He always came back from Rome with the longest stories. I was distracted; knowing that at any moment, he'd arrive! Jack Martin. My husband.
And then, as if I willed it by simply glaring at the doorway, he did.
Jack likes to enter rooms slowly. To stand and hover before he makes his way, glacially, into a space. Some people think this is because of his size; he's become quite mammoth these last years. His physical form expanded, I think, intentionally to match his scale of import in the world of art. The more generous attributed Jack's heavy footedness to the rumored injuries sustained from years of lifting rods of iron and setting down plates of steel. "Each and every piece of art that's ever bore my name," he will tell you within breaths of meeting him, "was installed by me and me alone." That explanation is, for me, the most ripe—picked with callus-free hands from the vine of Jack's decades-old propaganda tree about working-class roots. But here is the truth, the kind of truth only a wife can really know: Jack enters the room slowly so that people will notice him. Plants himself like a lightning rod, drawing the kinetic energy of everything and everybody his way. Still and quiet so that, for a moment at least, the attention of the revelers is pulled from whatever conversation they were having or joint they were smoking or person they were trying to fuck and drawn instead toward him. The party, if not the world, spinning around Jack Martin.
Excerpted from Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. Copyright © 2024 by Xochitl Gonzalez. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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