Oriana didn’t have time to listen to this. “Why did you steal your wife’s paintings and call them your own?”
Shocked, Larry was quiet for too long before blaring, “I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“You do,” Oriana said.
“I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with my wife and what happened to her,” Larry shot back. “I’ve told you again and again, my wife was a monster. I was married to her fifty years ago. Fifty! The way she treated me has always haunted me. It was so traumatic that I never bothered to get married again. I never bothered to fall in love.”
“Just tell the world what happened to her,” Oriana said. Rage toward Reese’s diagnosis made her sharp-tongued, and she rather liked it.
“I’m a lonely old man,” Larry said. “The only thing I have is my art career. The only thing I have is painting. I understand that you want to ruin me. But understand this in return: everything that brings press to my name helps me to sell more and more paintings. When people thought I was a murderer, they bought more of my paintings. If you besmirch my name even more, I imagine that will make the value of my paintings go up tenfold.”
“You’re a fraud, Larry,” Oriana shot back. “Everyone is going to know.”
“And you’re a sniveling lunatic,” Larry said.
Oriana wanted to laugh at that. It sounded so ridiculous, so outlandish, especially from an eighty-year-old man. A part of her ached to tell Larry that his wife had been pregnant in the summer of 1975, that whatever had happened to her had happened during her pregnancy. But it felt like a bridge too far, even for her and her rage.
“My assistant will be in contact with the next steps,” she said. “We will terminate the contract.”
“I’ll find a better art dealer than you,” Larry said. “I’ll find someone who recognizes how insane you are for giving me up.”
“I imagine you will,” Oriana said. “Goodbye, Larry.” She hung up and blocked his number, grateful that she wouldn’t have to deal with him a moment more.
Before she went downstairs, Oriana again considered what her daughter had said about a private investigator looking into Henrietta Johannes's whereabouts. But what if Henrietta didn’t want to be discovered? What if her whereabouts were a secret precisely because that was how she’d built up her life? Oriana put her phone in her desk drawer and went downstairs to eat cookies with her sister and her husband. She felt chocolate melt into a long ooze on her tongue and laughed at every single one of Reese and Meghan’s jokes. She felt the tethers to her old, ritzy, artistic life fading as she gave in to this one of coziness and humor and joy.
Thank goodness, she thought as Larry’s voice receded from her memory.
All she had left to do was the press conference. After that, it was full speed ahead on Reese’s treatment and rebuilding his health. She had to believe it was possible.
A few days later, Oriana packed a single suitcase of clothes, kissed Reese goodbye, and left her husband in the care of their daughter. On the ferry to the mainland, she tightened her hands into fists and told herself not to cry. She was going to be in Manhattan one night and one night only: long enough for the press conference, a few drinks with old friends, and a sleep. By tomorrow at eight in the morning, she’d be back on the road, headed for Martha’s Vineyard.
Reese would hardly remember she was gone.
Oriana played her favorite pump-up tunes from Billy Joel, Alanis Morissette, and R.E.M. on the drive into the city. She sang loudly, knowing she probably looked ridiculous to cars passing her by but decided not to care in the slightest. When she reached the hotel, she handed her keys to the valet and wheeled her suitcase into the lobby, her heart pounding. She felt ready.
The press conference was to be held at four thirty that afternoon. Forty-five minutes beforehand, Oriana met Kendra at the community center, where Kendra had gathered prominent members of the art-dealing and art-buying world, as well as a film crew. Oriana’s hands were slippery with sweat, but she kept her smile alive and open. She said hello to as many old friends and old rivals as she could, all of whom were “tremendously curious” about why Oriana had gathered them together today. Oriana promised they wouldn’t be disappointed.
“You’ve done incredible work as of late,” her dear friend Conrad Murray said to her a few minutes before she took the stage. “You’ve always had an eagle eye, my dear, but your discovery of Larry Calvin Johannes ups your standings in my book. What an incredible find.”
Oriana winced. “Discovering those paintings certainly changed my career,” she admitted. How she wished she could prop up Henrietta’s career instead of Larry’s.
When the time came, Oriana sat at a long, wooden table and looked directly at the camera and a slew of journalists who’d come to hear her talk. She was accustomed to situations like this, being who she was in the art world. As she opened her mouth to speak, she realized that this would be the final time she ever orchestrated something like this. It would be the final time people looked at her as though she were really important.
“Thank you for joining me this afternoon,” Oriana said, smiling in a way that washed away her original fears. Cameras flashed across her cheeks. “As you all know, I recently entered into a contract with the now famous painter Larry Calvin Johannes. When I discovered what I assumed were his paintings, I went to Colorado to meet him in a little log cabin, deep in the Rocky Mountains. He’d been there for decades, living out his life alone. He had more than twenty paintings locked away. It felt as though he’d been waiting for me, for people to finally notice him, for fame. But recently, it has come to my attention that Larry Calvin Johannes was not the painter of these works.”
A hushed whisper swept across the crowd. Oriana’s heart pumped.
“I had the paintings analyzed by an art expert whom I’ve worked with for many years,” she said. “She assessed both Johannes’s newer works and his older works and has declared that they were not completed by the same hand. Incidentally, Larry Johannes’s wife, Henrietta Johannes, disappeared the same summer that he displayed many of these same paintings in a small art exhibition in Boulder, Colorado. The year was 1975. I’m not here today to say that Henrietta Johannes was the definite painter of these works. But I am here to say that itfeels entirely too coincidental that she was never seen again—and Larry was unable to recreate masterworks by himself when asked.
“If Larry did what he did—steal his wife’s paintings and make them out as his own—he would not be the first husband in history to take his wife’s brilliance. But I cannot stand for it in my own career, certainly not after all my years of championing women artists. Certainly not after all the years I’ve fought for my own standing as a female art dealer in a male-driven art world.
“More than that,” Oriana said, tears filling her eyes as she prepared to announce her retirement, “encountering Larry Johannes’s work has demanded more of me than I bargained for. For this reason and many other personal ones, I am announcing my retirement from the world of art. My contract with Larry is finished. I implore any other art dealers—including my dearest friends and dearest rivals—to think twice about uniting with Larry and his paintings. It is up to us to ensure that the right and most talented artists are talked about in the history books. Larry is not one of them. It’s probable his wife is or was, but we may never know for sure.”
At that, Oriana thanked the crowd, got up, and hurried to the bathroom, where she washed her face and told her reflection to calm down. She didn’t want to answer any questions. She didn’t want her career to last a moment more.
When she left the bathroom and returned to the conference hall, she found only a few of her art-dealer friends remained, waiting to take her out for goodbye drinks. She hugged them and thanked them for staying.
“Conrad couldn’t stay,” a friend, Tanya, explained as they put on their coats and prepared to call a cab to take them to their favorite bar ten blocks away.
