Momzillas by Jill Kargman Page A

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