The History of Love (14 page)

Isaac Moritz, acclaimed author of six novels including The Remedy, which won the National Book Award, died Tuesday night. The cause of death was Hodgkin’s disease. He was 60.

Mr. Moritz’s novels are defined by their humor and compassion, and the hope they search for amid despair. From the first, he had his ardent supporters. These included Philip Roth, one of the judges for the National Book Award in 1972, awarded to Mr. Moritz for his first novel. “At the center of The Remedy is a live human heart, fierce and imploring,” Roth said in a press release announcing the prize. Another of Mr. Moritz’s fans, Leon Wieseltier, speaking on the telephone this morning from the offices of the New Republic in Washington, D.C., called Mr. Moritz “one of the most important and undervalued writers of the late twentieth century. To call him a Jewish writer,” he added, “or, worse, an experimental writer, is to miss entirely the point of his humanity, which resisted all categorization.”

Mr. Moritz was born in 1940 in Brooklyn to immigrant parents. A quiet and serious child, he filled notebooks with detailed descriptions of scenes from his own life. One of these—an entry about watching a dog being beaten by a gang of children, written at the age of twelve—later inspired the most famous scene in The Remedy, when the protagonist, Jacob, leaves the apartment of a woman to whom he has just made love for the first time, and, standing in the shadows of a street lamp in the freezing cold, watches a dog being brutally kicked to death by two men. At that moment, overcome with the tender brutality of physical existence—with “the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts”—Jacob launches into a lament, a single, ecstatic paragraph, unbroken over five pages, that Time magazine called one of the most “incandescent, haunting passages” in contemporary literature.

Aside from winning him an avalanche of praise and the National Book Award, The Remedy also made Mr. Moritz a household name. In its first year of publication it sold 200,000 copies, and was a New York Times bestseller.

His sophomore attempt was awaited with eager anticipation, but when Glass Houses, a book of stories, was finally published five years later it was met with mixed reviews. While some critics saw it as a boldly innovative departure, others, such as Morton Levy, who wrote a scathing attack in Commentary, called the collection a failure. “Mr. Moritz,” wrote Levy, “whose debut novel was emboldened by his eschatological speculations, has here shifted his focus to pure scatology.” Written in a fragmented and at times surreal style, the stories in Glass Houses range in subject from angels to garbage collectors.

Reinventing his voice yet again, Mr. Moritz’s third book, Sing, was written in a stripped-down language described in the New York Times as “taut as a drum.” Though in his more recent two novels he continued to search for new means of expressing them, Mr. Moritz’s themes were consistent. At the root of his art was a passionate humanism and an unflinching exploration of man’s relationship with his God.

Mr. Moritz is survived by his brother, Bernard Moritz.

I sat in a daze. I thought of my son’s five-year-old face. Also the time I watched him tie his shoe from across the street. Finally a Starbucks employee with a ring in his eyebrow came up to me.
We’re closing
, he said.
I looked around. It was true. Everyone was gone. A girl with painted nails was dragging a broom across the floor. I got up. Or I tried to get up but my legs buckled under me. The Starbucks employee looked at me as if I were a cockroach in the brownie mix. The paper cup I held was crushed to a damp pulp in my palm. I handed it to him and started to make my way across the floor. Then I remembered the newspaper. The employee had already thrown it into the trash bin he was rolling across the floor. I fished it out, smeared as it was with uneaten Danish, while he looked on. Because I am not a beggar, I handed him the tickets for Dudu Fisher.

I don’t know how I got home. Bruno must have heard me unlock the door, because a minute later he came downstairs and knocked. I didn’t answer. I was sitting in the dark in the chair by the window. He kept knocking. Finally I heard him go back upstairs. An hour or more passed and then I heard him on the stairs again. He slid a piece of paper under the door. It said: LIFE IS BUTIFUL
.
I pushed it back out. He pushed it back in. I pushed it out, he pushed it in. Out, in, out, in. I stared at it. LIFE IS BUTIFUL
.
I thought, Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is the word for life. I heard Bruno breathing on the other side of the door. I found a pencil. I scrawled: AND A JOKE FOREVER
.
I pushed it back under the door. A pause while he read it. Then, satisfied, he made his way up the stairs.

It’s possible I cried. What’s the difference.

I fell asleep near dawn. I dreamed I was standing in a railway station. The train came in and my father got off. He was wearing a camel-hair coat. I ran to him. He didn’t recognize me. I told him who I was. He shook his head no. He said:
I only had daughters.
I dreamed my teeth crumbled, that my blankets suffocated me. I dreamed of my brothers, there was blood everywhere. I’d like to say: I dreamed that the girl I loved and I grew old together. Or I dreamed of a yellow door and an open field. I’d like to say, I dreamed that I’d died and my book was found among my things, and in the years that followed the end of my life, I became famous. And yet.

I picked up the newspaper and cut out the photograph of my Isaac. It was wrinkled, but I smoothed it out. I put it in my wallet, in the plastic part made for a photo. I opened and closed the Velcro a few times to look at his face. Then I noticed that underneath where I cut it out it said,
A memorial service will be—
I couldn’t read the rest. I had to take the photograph out and piece the two parts together.
A memorial service will be held Saturday, October 7, at 10 am at Central Synagogue.

It was Friday. I knew I shouldn’t stay in, so I made myself go out. The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that leans always to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

I took the bus uptown. I told myself I couldn’t go to my own son’s funeral in the wrinkled
shmatta
I call a suit. I didn’t want to embarrass him. More than that, I wanted to make him proud. I got off on Madison Avenue and walked along, looking in the windows. My handkerchief was cold and wet in my hand. I didn’t know which store to go into. Finally, I just chose one that looked nice. I fingered the material on a jacket. A giant
shvartzer
in a shiny beige suit and cowboy boots approached me. I thought he was going to throw me out.
I’m just feeling the fabric
, I said.
You want to try it on
? he asked. I was flattered. He asked me my size. I didn’t know. But he seemed to understand. He looked me over, showed me into a dressing room, and hung the suit on the hook. I took my clothes off. There were three mirrors. I was exposed to parts of myself I hadn’t seen in years. Despite my grief, I took a moment to examine them. Then I put on the suit. The pants were stiff and narrow and the jacket practically came down to my knees. I looked like a clown. The
shvartzer
ripped aside the curtain with a smile. He straightened me out and buttoned me up and spun me around. We both looked into the mirror.
Fits you like a glove,
he announced.
If you wanted,
he said, pinching some material at the back,
we could take it in a drop here. But you don’t need it.
Looks like it was made for you.
I thought: What do I know from fashion? I asked him the price. He reached into the back of my pants and dug around in my
tuchas
.
This one’s
. . .
a thousand,
he announced. I looked at him.
A thousand what?
I said. He laughed politely. We stood in front of the three mirrors. I folded and refolded my wet hanky. With a last shred of composure, I plucked my underwear from where it had lodged between my cheeks. There should be a word for this. The one-string harp.

Out on the street, I kept walking. I knew the suit didn’t matter. But. I needed to do something. To steady myself.

There was a shop on Lexington that advertised passport pictures. I like to go sometimes. I keep them in a little album. Mostly they’re of me, except for one, which is of Isaac, aged five, and another of my cousin, the locksmith. He was an amateur photographer and one day he showed me how to make a pinhole camera. This was the spring of 1947. I stood in the back of his tiny shop watching him fix the photographic paper inside the box. He told me to sit, and shone a lamp on my face. Then he removed the cover over the pinhole. I sat so still I was hardly breathing. When it was finished we went into the darkroom and dropped it in the developing pan. We waited. Nothing. Where I should have been there was only a scratchy grayness. My cousin insisted we do it again, so we did it again, and again, nothing. Three times he tried to take a picture of me with the pinhole camera, and three times I failed to appear. My cousin couldn’t understand it. He cursed the man who sold him the paper, thinking he’d been given a bad batch. But I knew he hadn’t. I knew that the way others had lost a leg or an arm, I’d lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible. I told my cousin to sit in the chair. He was reluctant, but finally he agreed. I took a photograph of him, and as we watched the paper in the developing pan his face appeared. He laughed. And I laughed, too. It was I who’d taken the picture, and if it was proof of his existence, it was also proof of my own. He let me keep it. Whenever I took it out of my wallet and looked at him, I knew I was really looking at me. I bought an album, and fixed it to the second page. On the first page, I put the photo of my son. A few weeks later I passed a drugstore with a photo booth. I went in. From then on, every time I had some spare money I’d go to the booth. In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

When I opened the door of the camera shop a bell tinkled. Ten minutes later I stood on the sidewalk clutching four identical photos of myself. I looked at them. You could call me plenty of things. But. Handsome isn’t one of them. I tucked one in my wallet, next to the picture of Isaac from the newspaper. The rest I threw in the trash.

I looked up. Across the street was Bloomingdale’s. I’d been there once or twice in my day to get a little
shpritz
from one of the perfume ladies. What can I say, it’s a free country. I rode the escalator up and down until I found the suit department on the lower level. This time I looked at the prices first. There was a dark blue suit hanging on the rack that was on sale for two hundred dollars. It looked like it was my size. I took it to the dressing room and tried it on. The pants were too long, but that was to be expected. Same with the sleeves. I walked out of the cubicle. A tailor with a tape measure around his neck motioned me up onto the block. I stepped forward, and as I did I remembered the time my mother sent me to the tailor to pick up my father’s new shirts. I was nine, maybe ten. In the dim interior, the dummies stood together in the corner as if waiting for a train. Grodzenski the tailor was bent over his machine, his foot pedaling. I watched him, fascinated. Every day under his touch, with only the dummies as witness, drab bolts of cloth grew collars, cuffs, ruffles, pockets.
You want to try?
he asked. I sat down in his seat. He showed me how to bring the machine to life. I watched the needle leap up and down, leaving behind it a miraculous path of blue stitches. While I pedaled, Grodzenski brought out my father’s shirts wrapped in brown paper. He motioned me to come behind the counter. He brought out another package wrapped in the same brown paper. Carefully, he removed a magazine. It was a few years old. But. In perfect condition. He handled it with the tips of his finger. Inside were black and silver photographs of women with soft, white skin, as if they were lit from the inside. They modeled dresses of a kind I’d never seen: dresses of pure pearl, of feathers and fringe, dresses that revealed legs, arms, the curve of a breast. A single word slid from Grodzenski’s lips:
Paris
. Silently he turned the pages, and silently I watched. Our breath condensed on the glossy photos. Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked. At last he closed the magazine, slipping it back into the paper. He went back to work. If someone had told me then that Eve had eaten the apple just so that the Grodzenskis of the world could exist, I would have believed it.