DISCOVERY
Two weeks later,on a Friday in mid-November, they didn't have sex at all.
Neil hadn't planned it. Neither had Rory.
When Neil arrived at eight, the front door was on the latch. He let himself in. Rory was in the studio, working on a canvas, not the Neil canvas but a commission piece, and said ‘Give me fifteen minutes’ over his shoulder. Neil said ‘Fine’ and poured himself wine and sat on the small sofa Rory had recently put in his studio and picked up a book from the nearest tower.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Penguin edition, cracked spine. He opened it at random and started reading.
Fifteen minutes became forty. Rory worked in the studio, the scrape of the palette knife reaching through, the occasional tap of a brush dropped into a jar. Neil read. The flat was warm. Rain steady on the windows. No drama. Just days of it.
And this silence was different. Easier than the corridor kind. Just quiet. Two people in the same space, doing different things, who didn't need to fill the gap between them with speech or touch.
Neil read about Vincent's money. Letters to Theo that were half art theory and half begging. The desperation didn't diminish the work. It was the soil.
He thought about Rory at twenty-two. Batch-cooking bolognese, painting on whatever he could find because canvases cost money and stretchers cost more. The early work on the website, rough, struggling figures pressed into whatever surface was available. A man making art from nothing because making art was what his hands did when everything else was falling apart.
At nine, Rory emerged. Late. Cadmium orange on his jaw and a streak of prussian blue across his forehead where he'd pushed his hair back. He dropped onto the other end of the sofa, picked up the wine, drank directly from the bottle.
‘What're you reading?’
‘Van Gogh's letters. To Theo.’
‘Any good?’
‘Desperate. But brilliant. He writes about colour like it's a physical force.’
‘It is a physical force.’ Rory pulled one leg up, arm along the sofa back. ‘Light hits a surface, the surface reflects wavelengths, the wavelengths enter your eye, your brain translates them into experience. Colour is the world touching your nervous system.’
‘You sound like a physics teacher.’
‘I sound like a painter who paid attention in one lecture.’ He took another sip from the bottle. ‘Which letters? The Arles ones?’
‘Earlier. Nuenen. He's still learning. Still failing.’
‘The potato paintings.’
‘The potato paintings are remarkable.’
‘The potato paintings are ugly. Deliberately, brilliantly ugly. He was painting darkness because darkness was what he knew. The light came later. When he went south and the sun hit him and he couldn't mix yellows fast enough.’ Rory's head tilted. A strand of hair had escaped the tie and lay against his cheek, dark against the smear on his cheekbone. ‘I was the same. My early stuff is all bruise. Blues and blacks. I didn't have warm colours until...’ He stopped.
‘Until?’
‘Until recently.’
A beat. Rain on the windows. The flat close around them.
Neil held his wine and didn't look away. The not-looking-away was new.
They talked for two more hours, sharing the wine bottle.
‘Go on then. Your lot. Keats. Byron. The big romantics. Did suffering make them better?’
‘Keats had tuberculosis. He wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ while coughing blood into a handkerchief. So you could argue the proximity to death sharpened his attention.’
‘Or you could argue that the man was brilliant and the tuberculosis was irrelevant and he’d have written something extraordinary regardless.’
‘You could. But you’d be wrong.’
