“Wow,” she said finally. “These are quite the departure.”
Larry’s smile fell just the slightest bit. “I’ve evolved as an artist,” he told her. “I couldn’t do the same things over and over again. Picasso didn’t. Van Gogh didn’t.”
Oriana wanted to laugh at the idea of this man comparing himself to two of the greatest painters who’d ever lived. But she kept this same smile plastered to her face.
“They’re wonderful,” she said. “Truly. I think my buyers will love them.”
She told Larry to stand next to his brand-new paintings so that she could take a photograph of him. He stood proudly, his hands clasped at his waist. After that, she and Reese carefully wrapped up the paintings in linen sheets and put them in theback of her SUV. When they finished, Larry beckoned them back inside for grilled venison and cheese sandwiches. Realizing she was both starving and on the brink of freezing, Oriana sat down at the kitchen table and took a nourishing, cheesy bite. Reese looked tired but pleased and joined her.
“You know,” Larry said, sitting with them, his own sandwich untouched, “when that news story about my past came out, I just about panicked.”
Oriana set down her sandwich and blinked at him, waiting. She knew he meant the story about Henrietta’s disappearance.
“I don’t know who wants to drag my name through the mud,” Larry stated. “It could be anyone in Nederland or Boulder. Anyone can pick up a phone and tell a few lies, right? I mean, my fame puts a target on my back, don’t you think?”
Oriana hesitated. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She knew better than to anger one of her artists. “That can happen,” she offered finally.
“There’s so much they don’t know about my time with Henrietta,” Larry said darkly. “She was a cruel and manipulative person. You should have heard some of the things she said to me. She didn’t know how to make her husband happy.”
Oriana couldn’t keep herself from asking, “Is a woman’s only responsibility to keep her husband happy?”
Larry barked with laughter and looked at Reese to say, “She’s taking me the wrong way, isn’t she?”
“I think she’s trying to get a sense for what you mean,” Reese said. He sounded easy, confident. But he wasn’t going to take Larry’s side just because he was a husband and a man. He wasn’t going to cozy up to him just because he was Oriana’s client. His eyes flickered.
“It’s always the same with the younger generations,” Larry said. “You want to make us older people out to be mean and anti-feminist and whatnot. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Oriana asked, trying to sound sweet.
Larry put his large, wrinkled hands on the table. Oriana wondered whether his paintings were so different because his bones had changed. He wasn’t as dexterous as he’d been in the seventies. He didn’t have the same body, the same mind.
“Henrietta didn’t respect my art career,” Larry said. “I think that might be one of the reasons she left me, in fact. She thought making art was a waste of time.”
Oriana remembered what Isabella had said—that Larry supposedly wanted children terribly and had told everyone that Henrietta couldn’t get pregnant. She wondered if it was too dangerous to ask him about it now.
She plunged in anyway.
“Was there a reason you didn’t have children?” she asked.
Larry looked as though he’d lost his breath.
“I mean,” Oriana was quick to fix the mood, “most people had children back then. It wasn’t like it is now, with so many people being childfree on purpose.”
Larry cleared his throat. “Well, I wanted children. I wanted them terribly. I think Henrietta didn’t want children. That was another of our problems. Maybe she should have been born in a later generation. Maybe she should have been young now, when those kinds of childfree decisions were more common. As it was, she broke my heart. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten over it. But that’s all I can really say about Henrietta. Wherever she is, she’s a stranger. But wherever she is, I hope she’s seeing how famous I’ve gotten. I hope she’s feeling some regret right about now.” He took a long sip of water.
There was an air of finality to what he said, proof that he wasn’t going to continue any discussion about Henrietta. The fact that he’d brought up Henrietta himself didn’t matter.
A half-hour later, Oriana and Reese were driving back down the mountain. Oriana had to focus hard on her breathing to keepfrom shivering too hard. Reese had the heater on full blast, but it still didn’t feel warm enough.
“What do you think of his new paintings?” Reese asked finally, breaking the anxious silence between them.
“I think they’re fine?” Oriana struggled to make sense of them.
“Maybe he’s lost his edge over the years,” Reese said.
“Maybe,” she offered. “Maybe he’s out of practice?”
“Do you think they’ll still sell?” Reese asked.
