The Art of Being Lewis by Daniel Goodwin

Author:Daniel Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc.
Published: 2019-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

14

THE MORTON CLAN is enjoying that transitional time after supper and before bed when the day is slowly unwinding. Judah is working on his homework at the dining room table. He doesn’t look stressed or hurried. He has a book open on the table and is completing some English homework on his laptop. At least Lewis assumes it is English because from the kitchen where he is loading the dishwasher he can make out several distinct para-graphs. It looks suspiciously like a well-thought-out essay. Lewis can’t see the title of Judah’s book from where he’s standing, but he is secretly pleased that his son still reads old-fashioned print books and that his public school still assigns old-fashioned essays.

Lewis is secretly pleased with many things about Judah, as he is with all his children. Lewis watches as his first-born son types away. Judah stops occasionally to think — which is good, in Lewis’s eyes — but when he is in the midst of typing, his strokes are regular and deliberate. He knows what he wants to say. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t search for words or phrases. This is the way Judah approaches all his subjects, and he excels at every single one, whether English, math, or gym. No right brain, left brain confusion going on in Judah’s well-screwed-on twelve-year-old head.

He has also done well in art when it has been offered in school, but so far Judah has shown no unnatural interest in the discipline or in anything remotely approaching architecture, which also secretly pleases Lewis. As Lewis loads the last of the dishes, places the environmentally friendly dish detergent tab in its small compartment, and shuts the dishwasher door, which starts the expensive German machine humming, Lewis finds himself silently hoping. Hoping that Judah will be one of those sons who, without managing to think too much about it, perhaps without even being conscious of his thought processes, chooses to study a discipline that has nothing to do with his father’s profession. He hopes Judah’s decision about his career will come easy to him.

LEWIS HAD NO idea what he wanted to study in CEGEP, the two-year college intermezzo between a truncated high school and an abbreviated university in unique Quebec where students were able to choose their own courses and set their own schedules, and where teachers and students spent a typically uninspiring fifteen hours a week together in the classroom. During his first year at Dawson College, Lewis took a bit of everything, but especially art, because he was good at it and because with Miranda as his mother he never assumed he would study anything else.

The man who taught “Introduction to Painting” at Dawson College was a little over five and a half feet tall, a perfectly bilingual and bicultural Toulouse-Lautrec who was famous in the incestuous Montreal art world for the tonality and psychological power of his abstracted and distracted nudes and for the profanity of his temper tantrums, which he visited liberally on his friends, lovers of alternating genders, art dealers, critics, and patrons.

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