Excerpt from Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Well, cheers! Quite the lucky day for our shooting star," Jack said, saccharine dripping from his voice.

Human will is a particularly powerful magic. Alchemy happens when a person truly decides something; when a mind is changed. We'd shared exchanges like this hundreds of times before, my husband and I. Tiny acts of violence enacted with words. Exchanges that had cut and left me bleeding, with my best stuff—confidence, clarity—pooling down, away from me, onto the floor. But not that night. No. Because that day I had decided to reclaim my might; to cease to be shrunk. And in my decision, I'd grown a new version of myself. My new skin thick like coconut shells, impervious to his attempts to crack my joy. My triumph at my accomplishments, my exultation with my own art, euphoria at this new power I'd discovered in simply deciding to change my mind. All of it now in safekeeping, deep inside my new self. I pulled from his embrace and turned to him, with a smile so genuine on my face, and I said:

"Jack, the night is still young."

And it was.

Later, when I saw him across the room, practically entangled con esa cabrona gigante—Inga or Ingrid or whatever her name was—it wasn't that I didn't feel rage. No, it was that in my decision to strip him of his power, I was able to transmute that anger into joy. The specific type of joy one can only feel by really fucking with someone's head. Poking at exactly the right tender spots. The spots only a lover, and surely a wife, can really find. So, yes, I saw them—her, with her long blond hair hanging down like a sheet, leaning against the glass window; him, with his arms braced on either side of her, their faces practically touching—and my first feeling was anger. Resentment. Not just that we were in a room where everyone knew us—because I am someone too!—but because she wasn't even a good artist! She made derivative, exhausted, color-field shit that he would have pissed all over had it been done by someone with a cock. Instead, he bought three of them and hung them in his fucking living room. At least if he was going to carry on this way, he could do it with someone with real fucking talent! But, of course, talent scared Jack.

Then, like finding a five-dollar bill in an old coat pocket, I remembered my thick, coconut-shell skin and that I had changed my mind.

"Quimbara" trumpeted from the stereo, and I turned to my friend Jomar and suggested, loudly, that it seemed like a great time to dance.

"Someone turn the music up," I commanded. The boy Giancarlo was trying to seduce eagerly obliged.

Tilly's parties were not dancing affairs. They were more gatherings than celebrations. Openings without the art. While I knew this was not something she'd like, it was something she'd tolerate. Americans love to see Latins dance. Dance, fuck, fight. Anything, really, that's meant to be done with passion. And besides, the guests who remained by this point were the most drunk, the most high, the most bored. Thirsty for entertainment. Jomar was an amazing dancer, the kind who knows how to make his partner look better than she is. As we moved, I could feel the attention of the room now pull toward me. Not as a lightning rod, but as a wind, a wave. Something in perpetual motion that touched everyone gathered. Around me, I could feel their thoughts and assessments and presumptions. Anita de Monte, art star on the rise. Anita de Monte, winner of the Rome Prize, winner of the Guggenheim. Anita de Monte, a once-in-a-generation artistic voice. Anita de Monte, a one-trick pony. Anita de Monte, immigrant opportunist. Anita de Monte, wife of the legendary Jack Martin. Anita de Monte, lucky bitch. Anita de Monte, the most miserable bitch alive. No one realizing that I was all these things at once and more.

I remembered my task at hand.

"It's just that I miss dancing," I said to Jomar, with my best stage whisper. "My husband doesn't dance, you see. Not a salsa, not a waltz. He won't even do the twist."

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.