Momzillas

by Jill Kargman

  “Hi, sweetie, sorry to stalk, I just—”

  “Honey, I’m really busy here, I just found out I have to present tomorrow and I have a few more hours.”

  “A few more hours?” I was bummed beyond words.

  “Sorry, sweetie, I can’t help it. This is for us.”

  “I know, I know.”

  He told me he loved me, which warmed me up, but as I replaced the phone on the wall, I felt the now-familiar chill of loneliness.

  After I tucked Violet into bed with Goodnight Moon, which I knew by heart, with her spotting the little mouse on each page, I sang her to sleep with “Tender Shepherd” then snuck out. Naturally, seven seconds post-tiptoe in the hall, there were wails.

  “Mommieeeeee!”

  I went back in, lay down on the floor next to her crib, and sang some more. As I’d quiet down and begin to slowly get up again, I’d see her sit up suddenly, her small face looking through the slats of her white crib, desperate. She’d see I was still there and lay back down. Back in California Josh had always been the bedtime expert, lulling her with his gentle voice that was at once calming but also strong, making Violet—and me—feel utterly safe. He was a master tucker-inner, exiting our daughter’s room each night and leaving in his wake Violet’s gentle breaths of deep and blissful slumber.

  I, on the other hand, had a one-hour process—she even struggled so hard against my putting her in the crib that her little foot kicked me and her toenail was so sharp that she suddenly morphed from cherubic little nugget to Vlad the Impaler. I was so wiped out, she usually commanded me to lie beside her on the floor, which I would do and pass out myself, finally wakened from my dozing by Violet’s heavier breathing, those little invisible zzzz’s coming from her tiny lungs.

  When I got in bed after giving Leigh the Tate Hayes rundown, the clock read eleven thirty. I tried to stay up to see Josh, but as my eyes closed, I couldn’t help but think of my chance meeting with Professor Hayes. It excited me, and I still felt the buzz. While I would never ever cheat on Josh, or even look at anyone for that matter, this teacher, this sage—no, guru—was so frozen in pedestal-mode from college, Leigh and I declared him an NGO—Never Get Over. But maybe Leigh was right—now we were both married with kids, so it was safe and relaxed. He seemed so happy and friendly, maybe it would be a nice intellectually stimulating afternoon, without having to see a “disturbing” film or forcing myself to put down Vogue in order to read articles in the Wall Street Journal that made me want to sleep, just because I was trying hard to know everything that was going on in the world like Bee’s friends. Maybe seeing him and harking back to my more badass self would take me out of my obsessing about my fish-out-of-water status as a New York mom. Maybe etchings at the Morgan would be just what the doctor ordered.

  Eleven

  Professor Tate Hayes was the kind of man who made all the female students swoon, Indiana Jones–style, with bashful downward glances on their way out of class. He was tall with light brown curls, little gold glasses, and a Jermyn Street dapper edge that was especially hot because the tweedy and academic front had hints of a fire coursing below the striped-oxford-shirt and bespoke-tailored surface. To say that he was shrined by my friends was an understatement—Leigh and I obsessed about him, and I literally almost stalked him freshman year when I saw him at a Nob Hill art opening where he was holding the hand of a young sculptress. But it wasn’t his green eyes and calm swagger that made us wring out our panties post-class, it was the way he spoke. There was simply no one in the galaxy like him.

  He taught my first-year art survey with Bianca Pratt, a sexy professor we knew he’d had an affair with. Rumor had it they had this over-the-top fiery tempestuous relationship that ended with her throwing an alabaster bust out the window at him, which shattered on Fillmore Street.

  I knew he’d divorced his grad-school love years before and she was now remarried, living in London. He was not your average playboy, because nary a lax-stick-toting buff dude could boast a PhD from Yale and a three-book deal. From my first class with him, I knew I would major in art history. So many classes at Berkeley were big lectures taught by cranky, bitter TA grad students, and any individual voices were squashed and buried. In the art history department there were twenty-eight majors in my class. It was so small and intimate, under the watchful eye of legendary professors. But none was like Professor Hayes. At thirty-four he had been the youngest full professor in the department, and his cult status made him a mini celeb on campus, at least among the girls.

  But it wasn’t his academic and analytical strength that made me weak, it was that he himself was an artist. He painted, but in words. In each class he dipped the soft-bristled, pinpoint brush of his musical, lilting voice into the deep spectral palette of colors, his unique lexicon of patented Hayesisms.

  For a rowdy genre painting filled with rabble-rousing bar people, he pointed out the “legless cripples cavorting on crutches” and the “bestial peasant besotted with alcohol groping in a carnavalesque Falstaffian pursuit of earthly pleasure.” A study of a bird depicted from three different angles was “uncompromisingly precise, with a neutral gaze charged with life in every feathered fiber; the heart is thumping beneath the blue breast, as if the painting screams Believe me.”

  That night, as I waited for Josh to come home from work, my bed became a Michael J. Fox–driven time machine because my normally restless solo self was cinematically transported back through a decade to freshman year. I wandered through all my courses with Hayes, and all our moments together, getting to know him as I worked on my thesis. Seeing him was like taking a balmy walk through my past—I drifted back to my college days, a safe place to nestle into, a soft hazy realm of fleecy nostalgia.

  “Next slide, please,” Hayes said to the projectionist that first year, and when the slide switched, a radiant Ruisdael landscape appeared before our eyes. Each time he saw a new slide, it was as if he were a man drunk on love at the first sight of the girl who would be in his bed only hours later. He inhaled, drinking in the breadth of colors, the warmth of the exhaling weeping willows, the depth of the rolling heathered hills, and sighed, quasi-aroused.

  “This airy, wet landscape has this sweeping, transcendental, vibrant green,” he said, almost air-caressing the color with his pointer on the screen. “The swirling motions meld description and invention, as Ruisdael turns up the volume on nature’s whispers and we luxuriate in the glistening glow of a million sun-kissed leaves.”

  His recipe of words had baked me to a crisp toast, burnt to the core with utter love and over-the-moon devotion. To me, he was perfect.

  The next slides and their verbally painted descriptions trickled over the stones of my mind like a violent, passionate cataract, completely awakening me to a whole new exhilarated side of myself, the sucker for beauty and the art of his teaching.

  “Next slide,” he said, delicately moving a piece of hair from his eye. Another landscape, “a sturdy monolithic cliff and tempestuous sea.” The next slide was a woodcut, infused by the “rude, coarse, dynamic vigor of an artist charged with a forceful eye and vengeful burin.”

  In later years, we studied court portraits: Anthony Van Dyck’s Charles the First had a “cavalier king’s swagger; his insouciant, careless, flamboyant pose is dressed in glowing translucent hues, fabrics fashioned from sensuous slashes of color.”

  Hieronymus Bosch’s insane Garden of Earthly Delights was filled with “the entropy of uglified self-delusional merrymakers, a monstrous, muscular mountain, a freak gallery of menageries, heraldic gryphon devouring the sinners all in a Dionysian release of ecstasy.”

  But of course, it was really the flesh that got him going. If a painting can speak a thousand words, Hayes had two thousand to describe it. And on one chilly November afternoon during my sophomore year, a Peter Paul Rubens illuminated the classroom screen. And that was the moment I knew, as Leigh and I joked, that I would never get over him.

  When the slide came up, he gasp-moaned as if he
had just begun making love. His voice soothingly floated over the “intimate tones of warm gold and sun-dappled browns” in the background, then zoomed in to focus on the skin. “Rubens doesn’t offer an account of flesh, but the flesh itself,” he said, and I’m not kidding, he was almost panting. “This flesh, almost a cream-cheesy richness, a beckoning softness incarnate.” Most guys whack it to Playboy and Penthouse, but I swear this dude fully spanked to Venus and Adonis, and would choose the Met over Times Square’s PeepLand in a New York nano.

  We spent time together chatting in hallways or in the occasional office-hours-posed question about paper topics, and his comments through the years threw Duraflame logs on my fire for him. On my paper about the latent eroticism of musical instruments in Dutch painting, “Music be the Food of Love,” he wrote, “Hannah, splendid as usual,” which of course made me kill myself with every paper to impress him and be even more splendid for him. The ultimate obsession artifact, though, was on my wall to this very day, and was by far my prized possession.

  My senior year, we had grown closer and had even hung out off campus, going to museum openings and various lectures. Once we walked all the way across town in a drizzly mist. He laughed at my weirdness and quirks, and I often thought he considered me a total freak, my worship washing across my whole face like a red Rothko. But we never spoke of personal lives and talked mostly art stuff. Together, we came up with the outline for my sixty-page senior thesis, and he mentored me through every scary step. When I handed it in, I submitted the three required copies to the department office (I’d be graded by a panel—horrifying) and left one on his desk with a note that read:

  Dearest Proffy Hayes,

  Here it is. The big shebang, my life, my baby: the almighty Senior Thesis. It’s a chunk whittled out of my soul all for you—I cannot thank you enough for all your sage guidance and tireless help.

  xoHannah

  I handed it in and felt a pang of regret that maybe my dumb note was too gushy. I wanted to say so much more. Something along the lines of I fucking love you and think of you when I have sex with my boyfriend, who at the time was Clay Fisher, a jockish guy who played football and was gorgissimo but frankly not the sharpest tool in the shed. I had come off a loooong dry spell sans ween and was psyched to just have someone; I’d been so lonely in the library jamming 24/7 on my thesis—watching disheveled couples emerge from the stacks where some girls opened books less often than their legs. I was thirsting for some affection and I knew I’d never get it from the object of my ridick lust, so I settled for what was available. Leigh once scolded me for my ill-fated, hopeless crushes, saying, “Hannah, like the guys that like you.” Well, Clay liked me. He was semi-cocky, but sweet, unpretentious, and, hey, easy on the eyes.

  I was walking hand in hand with him on our way to a party a month before graduation when we walked by Professor Hayes on Shattuck Avenue.

  “Hannah—I just came from your mailbox, I left your thesis—”

  Heart attack.

  “Oh my God—no way! I thought we weren’t getting them back ’til next week.”

  “Well, yours is back from the group. I think you’ll be quite pleased.” He smiled at me but then looked at Clay and nodded to him, looked back at me, and walked away.

  I felt so torn in that moment, between the ecstatic glee that I’d obviously done well, and the despair magnet that was pulling me to watch him walk away into a café and out of my life. I’d heard he was moving to New York to teach at Columbia when the dopes in power at Berkeley didn’t give him a raise. Would I ever see him again? I never got to tell him he changed my life and I worshipped him! I told Clay I wanted to run back and get the paper from my mailbox.

  “Hannah, you are such a dork. Who cares at this point? You already know you’re summa cum laude.”

  “I’ll meet you at the party. I have to run back.”

  He seemed annoyed but I turned and bolted back to my mailbox. I walked past the heaving, breeze-blown trees, past the stoners, past the hippie stores, onto the campus I loved, and beelined for my box. There, with my A-awarded paper, was my prized possession. And because of what I found, I didn’t give a shit about the panel’s unanimous A.

  Affixed with an almost vintagey paper clip was my original note:

  Dearest Proffy Hayes,

  Here it is. The big shebang, my life, my baby: the almighty Senior Thesis. It’s a chunk whittled out of my soul all for you—I cannot thank you enough for all your sage guidance and tireless help.

  xoHannah

  But the word whittled was circled with the familiar cobalt ink of his fountain pen. The circle was attached to an arrow that led me down the right margin to the bottom of the page, where he had written:

  Dearest Hannah,

  Your word choice, “whittled,” suggests your sparkled soul is made of wood. In some ways, this is true; you are strong, clearly grained, and filled with life in so many golden layers.

  In other ways, though, it is an inappropriate metaphor.

  Your soul, sweet girl, is anything but wooden. Unless it is the honeyed wood of a lacquered violin, resonant and singing.

  T.H.

  My entire body grew heated and I felt the rush through my middle of a beggar who had happened upon a treasure chest of ingots. The paper shook in my hand and I read it again and again until I thought I’d faint. I had also never been more turned on. I wanted to find him and rape him. I couldn’t bear to fold it, so I grabbed some crappy local arts magazine and slid it in, carrying it with me as if it were an original Declaration of Independence. The whole night at a birthday dinner at a Mexican joint, while everyone pounded tequila shots, I soberly felt the leather of my handbag between my ankles and thought of the gem inside it.

  The next afternoon, I went to the department and nervously knocked on Hayes’s door. I opened it slightly and he gestured for me to come in, while he wrapped up a call. I took a seat in his worn cognac leather chair and studied the books on the shelves behind him, including Simon Schama’s works and ordered spines of October, the contemporary art criticism journal. “Very good then,” he said, smiling and rolling his eyes at me, like the person on the other end of his phone line was a really Chatty Cathy. I could even hear the nasal tones of her squawk through the receiver, like Charlie Brown’s teacher. At last he hung up. And looked at me. We said nothing.

  Finally, I spoke.

  “Your note…made…my life. I don’t know what to say.”

  “I meant it. And I told you you’d get an A. The grade could not have been more well deserved.”

  “Thanks, well, thanks to you. I was so nervous. I didn’t even care what they thought, really. What you thought was all that mattered. I didn’t want you to think I was an idiot.”

  “Hannah,” he said rising and walking to get his blazer, which was hanging on the door next to me, “how could I ever think that?”

  I stood up also because I thought he was trying to leave, and I shrugged bashfully. My heart started to beat harder. This was the closest I had ever been to him—a few feet away. I looked at him and knew I’d fucked up when I looked not at his face but through the lenses of his little gold specs, past the glass into his green eyes. I wish I had his unique vocabulary to describe the green of his eyes, but I don’t. Okay, I can try: the radiant, chlorophyllic green of an Albrecht Altdorfer oak. That doesn’t even come close.

  But in his irises, I lost track of time—about three seconds—and before I knew it, he was looking into mine. We paused, looking at each other, and it took a thousand mental stallions to hold me back from him. But then, he moved a hair closer, leaning in to me and I felt the space between us penetrated by his fevered step.

  In a cloudy sweep more violently passionate than an epic war tableaux, he put his hand on the back of my neck, moved closer, and kissed me. I threw my arms around him with the vigor of a woodcutter, and he kissed me almost to tears. After about a minute of the most hell-bent, out-of-control make-out I had ever had the blessed rapture of experi
encing, we pulled apart and we looked into each other’s eyes. His were the same, but mine…uh-oh. Mine were stinging with the joyful, shocked dew of bliss. It was then that he snapped out of our late-afternoon moment. My coy spell had been suddenly broken by the mood-arresting wand of my obvious emotion.

  “My God, I am so sorry,” he said, flustered, rubbing his forehead.

  “No, don’t be, I—”

  “This is very bad. You are my student. This is…”

  “It was me, too,” I stammered. “I mean, it’s fine.”

  “No, it’s really not,” he said, straightening his jacket by a swift brush of the lapels.

  “But—” I tried with futile effort to get him back into our heavenly zone.

  “It’s unethical and wrong. Plus, aren’t you seeing someone? That man I’ve seen you with?”

  “Clay is—”

  “Clay, right. He gratifies the eyes, that’s for sure, but he seems thin nourishment for your mind.”

  Whoa. Was he, like, jealous of Clay? My wide-receiver McBoyfriend of five weeks?

  “Listen, I have been…” I trailed, humiliated and childish. I gulped before completing my sentence: “…mad for you for so long.”

  “I’m flattered. I can’t deny there has been a connection, but that has to be all. I’m sorry.”

  He picked up his briefcase, looked at me once more, and walked out.

  I never saw him again.

  Until he spied me with Violet that day, when we saw each other among the still lifes. Perched in a sea of oiled flowers, the fiery hues seemed more charged in his wake.

  Twelve

  The next morning Josh woke me up with a kiss and apologized for coming home at two A.M. His work was killing him, but at least the guys were great (he’d loathed his assholic, alky, unsmart boss in California) and hopefully he’d be able to make our dinner with Leigh on time. He was all dressed to go in his suit, but came under the comforter with me and we had an eggroll moment, which made me feel cozy and toasty.