Page 107 of Bare
The flat received them, dark, familiar, the studio smell, which had become, over eight months, what Neil associated with arrival. In from the cold. The specific sensation of a body that had been performing all day and could now stop.
He took off his jacket. His shoes. Socks on the hallway carpet. The routine that had started as courtesy and become ritual; the shedding of layers at the door, the transition from public to here.
Today he'd stood in front of the painting, in the evening, in front of strangers, holding Rory's hand, and stayed.
Rory opened wine. Poured two glasses, as always. He'd known they'd come back here.
'Come,' Rory said.
The studio door opened. The concentrated chemical smell of a room where oil paint had been mixed and scraped and layered and scraped again for three months.
The studio was different. Emptied. Most of the canvases were at the gallery, the walls bare, the stacking spaces vacant. Theworktable was clean, scraped down for once. Brushes washed and standing in clean jars.
Only the easel remained. And on it, a canvas Neil hadn't seen.
Smaller, two feet by three. The palette luminous, brighter than anything in the show. Golds and ambers and the deep, living umber that Rory had been reaching for since the autumn. No dark blues. No bruised blacks. The underpainting was white, not dark, the gold tones built on light rather than scraped through darkness.
Two figures, close together, a margin of air between them, the live space of bodies that knew each other but hadn't yet made contact. On the left, a figure turning towards the right. The other already facing forward. A meeting of two movements, one completing, one waiting.
It was them. Obviously. The features matched. But the postures were legible. The man who'd been turning for twelve canvases had arrived, and the man who'd been waiting was there to receive him.
'When did you paint this?' Neil asked. His voice sounded strange in the empty studio. Thinner.
'After the opening. After...' He didn't finish. After Friday. After the car. After the night spent on opposite sides of the city with the same painting between them. 'I needed something for afterwards. Something that wasn't for anyone else.'
'It's not in the show.'
'It's not for the show. It's for us.'
A painting made in the days between the fracture and the repair, when Rory hadn't known if Sunday would happen and painted it anyway because painting was what his body did when his mouth couldn't.
'Where will you hang it?'
'Wherever we end up.' He said it simply. The togetherness already decided, only the geography remaining.
Neil looked at the painting. At the margin of air between the two figures.
The turning. The waiting. The meeting.
He put his thumb on the paint ridge of the right-hand figure, his own jaw, Rory's half-centimetre decision, and looked up.
'Is this appropriate, Cavanaugh?'
The word was a joke. The first time the word had been a joke in his mouth.
'No,' he said. 'Never was, Mr Ashworth.'
'I love you,' Neil said. 'We should find our own place. And hang it there.'
Unplanned. The mouth saying what it meant because his body was tired of carrying things unsaid.
Rory stilled. Wine glass frozen. His eyes on Neil.
'You're sure?'
'I keep being sure. I keep finding new things to be sure about.'
'That's how it works.'
