Radiant Realm

 Before I dove into my first teaching position at university in an East Coast city filled with universities, I rented the attic space of a magnificent victorian house near campus. It was a grand affair with tall ceilings and sweeping staircases of carved balusters and impressive newel posts all in their original unpainted polished state. My ‘room’ was tucked under a mansard roof and hardly felt like an attic with tall windows on three sides and a private bathroom that faced the back of the house. All the porcelain fixtures were original including the extra large clawfoot tub. If I held my body just so, I floated in that tub –  well, I am only five foot tall.  I was reunited with my oak pedestal table that had been in storage while I was studying abroad. It was big enough to serve as my desk and still have room for morning coffee and light meals I prepared on a hot plate. A new double futon thrown down on an oversized well-worn Chinese rug that had been gifted to me and the room was perfect. I loved the house and my quarters and they loved me back.

The house was owned by a librarian at the University of Pennsylvainia. She had a son called Dante. Dante took piano lessons from a friend of hers called Marlow. Marlow was an old elegant gentleman, a beautiful black man with graceful hands and a slow measured voice that tended toward molasses. His music filled the house on Saturday mornings. Marlow was also a painter. His quiet but powerful portrait of my landlady-librarian hung near the piano in a drawing room. I asked Marlow if he would consider taking me on as a piano student. I had a good ear and maybe some talent I might have inherited from my grandmother.

When we sat down for our first lesson I could feel Marlow’s gaze, not on my hands but my face. It wasn’t uncomfortable but it was persistent in subsequent lessons. Then he asked if he could paint my portrait. I was flattered, of course, and curious. Why me? He confessed he had a strong feeling of knowing my face. I reminded him of someone but he couldn’t say who that someone was.

Then he told me how my skin would best be painted with a color known as rose madder. He went on to say that rose madder was a rare pigment coveted by painters of the Renaissance. Did he say Renaissance painters? I could hear the fortuneteller whispering in my ear, “You were a popular model during the Renaissance… you’ve always had the same eyes.” The hairs at the back of my neck quivered.

“Rose Madder”, he said, “was not ground from minerals as most pigments were, but instead extracted from the root of the rubia tinctorum plant, and because of its organic origin its warm toned tint was fugitive.”

Fugitive pigment – it sounded like the title of a poem. He had my attention.

“The extract is suspended in oil and after it’s applied to the canvas in layers the organic colorant possesses the ability to shift color. The color comes and goes, lightens and darkens. Fugitive, and highly translucent. What better way to describe exactly the beauty and blush of a particular woman’s cheek… soft rose, pink-y peach, no, crimson, wine, ember-orange, deep magenta. It eludes description.”

As Marlow attempted to describe the indescribable, his voice, his words  were present  but I could see the thoughts behind his eyes occupied another plane. He was staring at me and searching for I don’t know what, but searching. And then as if the spell was broken he looked away and was quiet. Then he stammered through the following words, “ Well, you’re going to think… you’re going to think I’m kinda crazy, but, what the hell, here goes… I’ve always had a sense, that is, I believe,” and then he visibly gathered himself and sat up straighter and said with gentle conviction, “ I believe I was a painter in another life and, well, I’m pretty sure, in that other life, I painted you. It’s your tawny cheek, but really it’s your eyes.”

Now I’m not making this up. I’m not drifting into fiction here, not here.  Marlow had delivered to me, without being provoked, confirmation that I had lived another life as a model during the Renaissance. We knew each other almost five-hundred years ago.

I thanked Marlow for revealing what seemed to be difficult for him to bring forward into this moment. And then I divulged the details of what the fortuneteller had told me ten years earlier. I ended by saying that given the many opportunities of being in museums and studying art as an art historian, I was still waiting for that circumstance when I would come face to face with myself.

A week later there was a murder on the sidewalk very near the house. There were witnesses. Two young men shot a woman because she wouldn’t give them her purse. This scared the hell out of me and I moved to another house in another part of the city. I never saw Marlow again.