Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

Author:Xochitl Gonzalez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Jack

NEW YORK CITY • FALL 1985

Oh, Tilly. Always right. The moment Jack arrived at the service it was obvious that it was a terrible fucking idea, but he’d never even entertained not going. What, he thought, could make a man look more guilty than missing his own wife’s memorial? And he was not guilty, he explained, again and again. And she was, he felt the need to remind everyone, his wife. Not his girlfriend. Not his lover. His fucking wife. No one deserved, he felt, to be there more. If she was going to be remembered, he would not allow himself to be erased from her life. In another time, she would have been known as Mrs. Jack Martin. And of course, he was not so backward as to want that kind of thing, but why agree to something as conventional as marriage if you didn’t somewhat believe in those roles? So yes, she was Anita de Monte— now a martyr for the feminist cause. (Because the feminists . . . ugh, the feminists were very angry. And they did not believe that Jack was innocent. No, they did not.) But she was also the wife of Jack Martin, and that should not be forgotten.

For this reason, he had, wrongly, assumed that the place would be equally full of his friends and champions: the famous artists and gallerists and curators and dealers and collectors that he and Anita had had countless dinners with over the years. That they would come to comfort him—the grieving widower. That they would come to show that they believed him. That they knew that she had simply gone out the window. He could never possibly push her. They would come to show they did not care about the scratches on his face that the New York Post reported. They did not care that the Daily News said he called Tilly a full hour before he called the police. They believed him when he said he truly did not know what happened: he blacked out from the trauma of it all. He assumed the place would be full of people who saw him as he clearly was: a man mourning his wife who died suddenly in a terrible accident.

Tilly tried to tell him that these friends would never show up here, that it wasn’t personal. Did not mean that they weren’t on his side. Just that no one in their right mind would go out of their way to attach themselves to such a spectacle. This was not his memorial for Anita, Tilly tried to explain. This was a publicity circus organized by feminist zealots trying to turn an accident into a political crime. An exploitation of one couple’s personal tragedy populated by the tuft-hunters on the periphery of the art world that Anita associated with. Jockeying for relevance by association. His presence, Tilly had forewarned, would only make for a third ring. And still. Still he was shocked that Tilly wouldn’t go. (“I refuse to be a lion tamer,” she had snapped.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.