Momzillas by Jill Kargman Page B

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.
    â€œNext 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œNext 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