Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Providence, Spring 1998

Raquel arrives at Professor Temple’s office. She is hung over but feels unintimidated by the professor’s stature within the art world. Raquel is a student at Brown, and she has just been awarded an important summer curatorial fellowship in the Contemporary Art Department at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Raquel loves art but wants to diversify the art world, and she recalls feeling that way even as an adolescent, when her mother worked at the Met’s cafeteria and she worked in its gift shop. Although she enjoys Professor Temple’s class, she finds its curriculum to be too focused on white artists. She tells Dr. Temple that she will be working with Belinda Kim in her fellowship. Dr. Temple frowns; unlike Dr. Kim, he does not think that an artist’s identity has a bearing on their art. He warns Raquel not to get too close to Dr. Kim. As the two part, she tells him that she plans to write her thesis on Jack Martin, and he smiles.

Claire, Margot, and Mavette are members of a clique that Raquel thinks of as the “Art History Girls.” They are highly privileged and are not her friends. They have parents who are heavily involved in the art world, and they feel more at home at Brown than Raquel does. Mavette, who is Lebanese by way of Paris, is “almost” friends with Raquel, mostly because the two girls are the only ones in their department who are not white. However, Mavette grew up abroad and has different ideas about race than Raquel does, and there is a noticeable distance between them. The Art History Girls will be spending the summer in Europe, having decided to devote their time to finding “eurotrash boyfriends.” The girls recently took a course on feminism and are rethinking their ideas about marriage and gender norms. Being single and having fun is their new goal. Raquel reasons that because their families are well-connected, they do not need the kind of summer internship that she hopes will allow her to forge connections in the art world.

On Sundays, Raquel provides programming for WBRU, Brown’s indie radio station, along with her friend and fellow Brown student Marcus, who is uninterested in the art world. They do share an interest in music, and he sometimes accompanies her to art events. She invites him to the show of Nick Fitsimmons, a senior whose work does not merit its popularity, in her opinion. There, they encounter the Art History Girls, who slyly tell Raquel that they think Marcus is a “hot, [B]lack” guy and ask her to hang out. Although she is unsure whether to enter their orbit, she agrees. She meets the artist, Nick, whose sister is a friend of hers, and is surprised by how unassuming he is. Despite her low opinion of his talent, she agrees to his invitation to go out for drinks.

Berkeley, Winter 1980

Anita tries to pinpoint the beginning and ending of her relationship with Jack. She finds it difficult to identify where their relationship began to end, in part the relationship’s inequality doomed it from the beginning. (She had always been forced to choose Jack over herself.) Now, she decides that perhaps his Berkeley show was where things truly began to unravel. By that time, Anita had already given up several important fellowships because Jack did not want her to leave New York, even though he knew how difficult she found it to create art in that space. At this party, as always, he takes the spotlight, and she is relegated to the sidelines. He tries to get her to regale everyone with a fabricated story about her parents having been jailed in Cuba for their support for Castro, but instead, she tells the truth. Her parents had been middle class, and although they were critics of Batista, her father was jailed in communist Cuba because of his Catholicism; he was not persecuted for having revolutionary beliefs.

New York City, Fall 1985

Jack and Anita have just returned from a party. Although the two have been at odds for years, their arguments have become increasingly angrier and more intense. Anita knows that Jack does not value her as an artist, and although he would love his low opinion to impact her self-image, she believes in her talent and understands her work. She resents Jack for trying to relegate her to the sidelines and for his many affairs. He has always been unhappy whenever Anita secures fellowships and residencies that take her away from New York, and although he has always cheated on her, his clandestine relationships have become more intense and frequent ever since she began to spend months away from him at a time. Hypocritically, Jack blames Anita for these affairs and maintains that she could just as easily work in New York. (This is not true; she struggles to access creativity there). He accuses her of driving him into the arms of other women with her travel and absences. He also finds her overbearing. Her personality is too loud, too vivacious, and he thinks that it might be time to end things.

Providence, Spring 1998

Raquel is going through the Art History Girls’ medicine cabinet. She is curious about their toiletries, having been introduced to the kind of soaps, lotions, and makeup that “rich girls” use when she started attending Brown. After perusing for a while, she returns to the small gathering that Claire, Mavette, and Margot have invited her to. The topic of conversation is Raquel, or rather her budding relationship with Nick Fitzsimmons, a name known to everyone on campus. Raquel does not want to admit how quickly she has fallen for Nick, and she tries to play it cool. The conversation takes a sudden turn when Margot accuses Raquel of being a racist; before Nick, no one can remember Raquel having a white friend or partner. Raquel tries to explain that this is not the case, but the girls begin to complain about “minorities” who play “victim,” and Raquel tears up. They accuse her of dating Nick for his family’s influence, as they are wealthy art patrons. They also accuse her of sleeping with her advisor, Dr. Temple.

Raquel leaves the dinner for another date with Nick. She tells him about how horrible the girls were, and he explains that he has spent his entire life around girls like that, and that they were always “the worst.” She talks about the difficulty of being a student of color at Brown and tells him about her friend Denise, who was accepted into Notre Dame but had chosen to go to one of the New York state schools where she was surrounded by other people of color and was happy. Nick, not realizing his gaffe until he speaks, tells Raquel that “self-improvement” is probably better than going to a state school. Although she is offended, the comment does not cause a conflict, and the two proceed together to a party at neighboring RISD. There, Raquel runs into her friend Julian. While the two are talking, Nick’s sister Astrid nearly overdoses on Ketamine, and the host asks Nick to remove her from the party. Annoyed that Raquel was talking to someone else when he was looking for her, Nick snaps at her. The two have sex later that night. It is Raquel’s first sexual encounter, and she does not enjoy it.

New York City, Fall 1978

Anita recalls the beginning of her relationship with Jack. At the time, her friend Leslie, a white woman who ran the Venus Collective and was a champion of artists of color, had invited him to speak about feminist art at an event for Anita in Iowa. Jack’s presence provided major publicity, and although the event was packed, the attendees were mostly there to see Jack. Anita, whose art is deeply personal and is rooted in her sense of Cuban identity, felt that she was lost in the shuffle of so many self-important men. Jack is famous for eschewing identity politics in relation to art, and she knows that he does not understand her work. Anita remembers growing angry at the fact that her art was being ignored by white men talking about feminism. She also remembers that at the end of the show, her pieces spontaneously fell from their hooks, the glass shattering. She reasoned that her art didn’t like being ignored any more than she did. After the event, she and Jack had talked and eventually began dating.

Providence, Spring 1998

Marcus and Raquel are at the radio station. Marcus is doing his show, the 360- Degree Black Experience. Marcus dedicates a song to Nick on Raquel’s behalf, and she is angry, but both agree that Nick probably isn’t listening to their show. Marcus gives Raquel a hard time about her “white boy” and also comments on how skinny she has become. Although she is reluctant to admit it, Raquel has lost weight. She knows that she is succumbing to “first world” beauty standards, but resembling the slender-bodied white girls on campus has made things easier for her. Her weight loss was particularly pronounced and noticeable in her first year. Although she told her mother that she was eating better, the truth is that being with Nick has only exacerbated her disordered eating. However, she believes that she is happy with him; he leaves sweet messages on her machine, and the two spend a great deal of time together. Still, she cannot help but notice that she is more relaxed in her dorm room than in Nick’s spacious quarters.

After seeing Marcus and spending days with Nick, Raquel is happy to be back home in her room. She listens to her messages. Her mother and Nick have called, and she even receives a message from Mavette, who called to apologize for not standing up for her on the night that the Art History Girls called her a racist. Professor Temple also called to offer her a collection of materials related to Jack Martin for her thesis project. She listens to all the messages and then settles down to study.

New York City, Fall 1985

Anita recounts the day that she died. At that time, she and Jack were still unhappy. They had never truly been a good couple, and she speculates that she returned to him over and over mostly out of loneliness. On the morning that she died, she had planned to leave Jack for good. She and a friend had gathered evidence of his infidelities, and she had consulted a divorce lawyer. Knowing that Jack loved nothing more than money, she planned to take half of everything that he had and move on. She was tired of his affairs, his constant disrespect, his belittling, and his dismissal. He had even accused her of stealing his artistic ideas. Their entire relationship had been built around Jack and his needs, and Anita was done. She put on a thong, pretended to seduce him, and then showed him the file of evidence that she had prepared for the attorney. Jack flew into a fit of rage and began beating her. As she tried to escape his grasp, he threw her from the apartment window. As she fell, Anita recalled falling into the deep, cool blue of the ocean. She came to on Varadero Beach, back home in her beloved Cuba.