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《渺小一生》:“野心的灌肠。”

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2020年04月02日

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  “What process?”

“什么过程?”

  “Um, the transition process?” He should’ve stopped when he saw Edie’s befuddlement, but he didn’t. “JB said you were transitioning?”

“唔,转换的过程?”他看到伊迪糊涂的表情时就该停下来的,但是他没停,“杰比说你正在转换?”

  “Yeah, to Hong Kong,” said Edie, still frowning. “I’m going to be a freelance vegan consultant for medium-size hospitality businesses. Wait a minute—you thought I was transitioning genders?”

“是啊,转换到香港。”伊迪说,还是皱着眉头,“我要去那当自由接活的素食顾问,帮一些中型酒店从业者规划。慢着——你以为我要转换性别?”

  “Oh god,” he said, and two thoughts, separate but equally resonant, filled his mind: I am going to kill JB. And: I can’t wait to tell Jude about this conversation. “Edie, I’m so, so sorry.”

“啊,老天。”他说,脑袋里同时冒出两个不同的念头:我要宰了杰比,还有我等不及要告诉裘德这段对话了,“伊迪,真是太对不起了。”

  He remembered from college that Edie was tricky: little, little-kid things upset her (he once saw her sobbing because the top scoop of her ice cream cone had tumbled onto her new shoes), but big things (the death of her sister; her screaming, snowball-throwing breakup with her girlfriend, which had taken place in the Quad, and which everyone at Hood had leaned out of their windows to witness) seemed to leave her unfazed. He wasn’t sure into which category his gaffe fell, and Edie herself appeared equally uncertain, her small mouth convoluting itself into shapes in confusion. Finally, though, she started laughing, and called across the room at someone—“Hannah! Hannah! Come here! You’ve got to hear this!”—and he exhaled, apologized to and congratulated her again, and made his escape.

他还记得大学时代伊迪就有点怪:芝麻绿豆大的事情就会让她崩溃(他有回看到她大哭,只因为她手上冰淇淋最顶端的那个球掉到了新鞋子上),但大事却让她无动于衷(她姐姐过世;她跟她女友分手时在宿舍外头的方院里尖叫、丢雪球,当时虎德馆里的每个人都探出窗子看热闹)。他不确定自己刚刚说错话是属于大事还小事,看起来伊迪自己也同样不确定,她小小的嘴困惑地扭成不同的形状。不过最后,她开始大笑,喊着房间另一头的某个人:“汉娜!汉娜!过来!你一定要听听这事!”他松了口气,跟她道歉并道贺,然后赶紧溜掉。

  He started across the room toward Jude. After years—decades, almost—of these parties, the two of them had worked out their own sign language, a pantomime whose every gesture meant the same thing—save me—albeit with varying levels of intensity. Usually, they were able to simply catch each other’s eye across the room and telegraph their desperation, but at parties like this, where the loft was lit only by candles and the guests seemed to have multiplied themselves in the space of his short conversation with Edie, more expressive body language was often necessary. Grabbing the back of one’s neck meant the other person should call him on his phone right away; fiddling with one’s watch-band meant “Come over here and replace me in this conversation, or at least join in”; and yanking down on the left earlobe meant “Get me out of this right now.” He had seen, from the edge of his eye, that Jude had been pulling steadily on his earlobe for the past ten minutes, and he could now see that Marta had been joined by a grim-looking woman he vaguely remembered meeting (and disliking) at a previous party. The two of them were looming interrogatively over Jude in a way that made them appear proprietary and, in the candlelight, fierce, as if Jude were a child who had just been caught breaking a licorice-edged corner off their gingerbread house, and they were deciding whether to broil him with prunes or bake him with turnips.

他穿过房间,朝裘德走去。多年来(到现在将近二十年了)参加过这么多派对,他们两个发明出一套自己的暗号,每个手势的含义都一样:救我,但紧急程度不同。通常,他们只要看着对方、用嘴型表达就行了,但是像今天这样的派对,整间公寓只点着蜡烛,而且就在他跟伊迪短暂交谈的那一会儿,客人的数量似乎暴增了好几倍,这时他们就得用上更夸张的肢体语言了。抓着颈背表示对方应该立刻打电话给自己;转动表带表示“过来这里取代我,或至少加入这场谈话”;拉左边耳垂表示“马上把我弄走”。十分钟之前,他早已用余光瞄见裘德一直拉着耳垂。现在他看到除了马尔塔之外,裘德旁边还有一个表情严肃的女人,他模糊地记得之前在一场派对上见过她(而且不喜欢)。她们低头对着轮椅上的裘德提问,看起来很霸道,而且在烛光下显得格外凶狠,好像裘德是个小孩,刚刚弄断了她们姜饼屋一角的甘草糖边缘,被她们当场逮住,而她们一时无法决定要拿他跟梅干一起烧烤,还是跟大头菜一起进烤箱烘焙。

  He tried, he’d later tell Jude, he really did; but he was at one end of the room and Jude was at the other, and he kept getting stopped and tangled in conversations with people he hadn’t seen in years and, more annoyingly, people he had seen just a few weeks ago. As he pressed forward, he waved at Malcolm and pointed in Jude’s direction, but Malcolm gave him a helpless shrug and mouthed “What?” and he made a dismissive gesture back: Never mind.

他试了,稍后他会告诉裘德,他真的试过了;但他在房间这一头,裘德在另一头,他中途不断被拦下来,跟一些多年不见的人谈话,更烦的是,有的人他几周前才见过。当他努力往前挤时,还曾朝马尔科姆挥手,指着裘德的方向,但马尔科姆无奈地耸耸肩,用嘴型说着“什么”,他只好比个放弃的手势:算了。

  I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, as he pushed through the crowd, but the truth was that he usually didn’t mind these parties, not really; a large part of him even enjoyed them. He suspected the same might be true of Jude as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent—certainly he did fine for himself at parties, and people always wanted to talk to him, and although the two of them always complained to each other about JB and how he kept dragging them to these things and how tedious they were, they both knew they could simply refuse if they really wanted to, and they both rarely did—after all, where else would they get to use their semaphores, that language that had only two speakers in the whole world?

我得离开才行,他挤过人群时心想。但老实说,他通常不介意这些派对,甚至颇有些乐在其中。他怀疑裘德也是如此,不过或许没那么享受——这类派对他当然应付自如,大家总是想找他讲话。尽管他们两个私底下总是抱怨杰比,他总是拖着他们去这类场合,这些冗长无聊的派对,但他们心里也明白,如果他们真的不想去,拒绝就是了,但他们很少拒绝——毕竟,他们得去哪里,才能把这套全世界只有两个人会讲的语言派上用场。

  In recent years, as his life had moved further from college and the person he had been, he sometimes found it relaxing to see people from there. He teased JB about how he had never really graduated from Hood, but in reality, he admired how JB had maintained so many of his, and their, relationships from then, and how he had somehow managed to contextualize so many of them. Despite his collection of friends from long ago, there was an insistent present tenseness to how JB saw and experienced life, and around him, even the most dedicated nostalgists found themselves less inclined to pick over the chaff and glitter of the past, and instead made themselves contend with whoever the person standing before them had become. He also appreciated how the people JB had chosen to remain friendly with were, largely, unimpressed with who he had become (as much as he could be said to have become anyone). Some of them behaved differently around him now—especially in the last year or so—but most of them were dedicated to lives and interests and pursuits that were so specific and, at times, marginal, that Willem’s accomplishments were treated as neither more nor less important than their own. JB’s friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers—he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money—and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB’s Hood Hall assortment, wasn’t defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it. (People had actually said that to him at these parties: “Oh, I didn’t see Black Mercury 3081. But were you proud of your work in it?” No, he hadn’t been proud of it. He had played a brooding intergalactic scientist who was also a jujitsu warrior and who successfully and single-handedly defeated a gargantuan space monster. But he had been satisfied with it: he had worked hard and had taken his performance seriously, and that was all he ever hoped to do.) Sometimes he wondered whether he was being fooled, if this entire circle of JB’s was a performance art piece in itself, one in which the competitions and concerns and ambitions of the real world—the world that sputtered along on money and greed and envy—were overlooked in favor of the pure pleasure of doing work. Sometimes this felt astringent to him, in the best way: he saw these parties, his time with the Hoodies, as something cleansing and restorative, something that returned him to who he once was, thrilled to get a part in the college production of Noises Off, making his roommates run lines with him every evening.

最近几年,当他的生活离大学时代越来越远,也离当年的自己越来越远,他有时会发现,看到当年的那些熟人可以让他放松。他曾取笑过杰比从来没有真正从虎德馆毕业,但其实,他佩服杰比可以替他们一路维系那么多当年的交情,也佩服他总有办法掌握那么多人的动态。尽管有那么多老朋友,杰比对生活的看法和体验方式总坚持一种现在时。在他身边,就连最怀旧的人也没办法像他那样反复对过往的种种好坏小事一再检视,宁可接受老友变成现在的模样。他也很感激杰比选择保持交情的那些人大部分都对现在的他无动于衷(他变成任何人都无妨)。其中有些人现在对待他的态度大不相同,尤其是最近一年左右,但大部分人的生活、兴趣和职业都太独特了,甚至过于冷僻,在他们眼中,威廉的成就并不比他们自己的成就更重要,或更不重要。杰比的朋友是诗人、行为艺术家、学者、现代舞者和哲学家——有回马尔科姆说,杰比跟大学时代每一个最不可能赚钱的人都交上了朋友——而他们的生活,就是补助、住处、奖金和奖项。在杰比的虎德馆交际圈内,成功的定义不是看你的票房数字(那是他的经纪人和经理人的标准),或是跟你一起演戏的人以及你得到的评论(那是他研究生同学的标准),单纯只看你的作品有多厉害,还有你是否引以为荣。(在这类派对上,还常常有人这么跟他说:“啊,我没看过《黑色水星三〇八一》,但是你为自己的表现感到骄傲吗?”不,他并不引以为荣。他演的是一个忧愁而神秘的银河系科学家,也是柔术高手,他独自击败了一个庞大的太空怪物。但他对自己的表现很满意:他很努力工作,认真对待自己的表演,这就是他唯一期望能做到的。)有时他很好奇自己是不是被愚弄了,是否杰比的整个朋友圈本身就是一件行为艺术作品。在里头,所有真实世界(始终只谈金钱,贪婪、嫉妒的世界)的竞争、关注和野心都被忽略了,人们只关注工作带来的纯粹愉悦。有时从最好的方面来看,这种观点对他有止血作用,他把这些派对、这些和虎德馆老友们相处的时间当成某种净化和滋补品,让他重新成为以往的自己:为了在学校公演的《噪音远去》中得到一个角色而兴奋不已,还每天晚上逼着室友陪他对台词。

  “A career mikva,” said Jude, smiling, when he told him this.

“事业的浸礼池。”裘德听他说出这个想法后,就微笑着说。

  “A free-market douche,” he countered.

“利伯维尔场的灌洗。”他回应。

  “An ambition enema.”

“野心的灌肠。”

  “Ooh, that’s good!”

“哇,这个好!”

  But sometimes the parties—like tonight’s—had the opposite effect. Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it: he was, and forever would be, Willem Ragnarsson of Hood Hall, Suite Eight, someone bad at math and good with girls, an identity both simple and understandable, his persona drawn in two quick brushstrokes. They weren’t wrong, necessarily—there was something depressing about being in an industry in which he was considered an intellectual simply because he didn’t read certain magazines and websites and because he had gone to the college he had—but it made his life, which he knew was small anyway, feel smaller still.

但有时这些派对(比方今天的)则会造成反效果。有时他发现自己怨恨别人对他的定义,总是被简化且多年来从未改变:他以前是、且永远是虎德馆八号套房的威廉·朗纳松,数学很烂,但女人缘很好,简单、容易被理解,迅速两笔就能画出形象。这个定义不见得是错的(在这一行他被视为知识分子,是因为他不看某些杂志和网站,而且读过那所大学,这的确会让人有点沮丧),他本来就知道自己这一生很渺小,但这么一来,他觉得更渺小了。

  And sometimes he sensed in his former peers’ ignorance of his career something stubborn and willful and begrudging; last year, when his first truly big studio film had been released, he had been at a party in Red Hook and had been talking to a Hood hanger-on who was always at these gatherings, a man named Arthur who’d lived in the loser house, Dillingham Hall, and who now published an obscure but respected journal about digital cartography.

而有时,从昔日同伴对他事业的无知,他感觉到某种顽固、刻意和不满。去年,他拍的第一部真正的大片上映期间,他刚好去布鲁克林的瑞德胡克参加派对,跟一个以前常去虎德馆、现在总是参加这些聚会的男生聊天。他叫阿瑟,以前住在失败者大本营迪林厄姆馆,现在办了一份关于数字地图制作方法的杂志《历史》,冷僻但相当受尊崇。

  “So, Willem, what’ve you been doing lately?” Arthur asked, finally, after talking for ten minutes about the most recent issue of The Histories, which had featured a three-dimensional rendering of the Indochinese opium route from eighteen thirty-nine through eighteen forty-two.

“那么,威廉,你在做什么?”阿瑟终于开口问,前十分钟他都在谈最近一期《历史》的专题,用3D算法绘制出1839年到1842年中南半岛的鸦片路线图。

  He experienced, then, that moment of disorientation he occasionally had at these gatherings. Sometimes that very question was asked in a jokey, ironic way, as a congratulations, and he would smile and play along—“Oh, not much, still waiting at Ortolan. We’re doing a great sablefish with tobiko these days”—but sometimes, people genuinely didn’t know. The genuine not-knowing happened less and less frequently these days, and when it did, it was usually from someone who lived so far off the cultural grid that even the reading of The New York Times was treated as a seditious act or, more often, someone who was trying to communicate their disapproval—no, their dismissal—of him and his life and work by remaining determinedly ignorant of it.

那一刻,他体会到了自己在这类聚会中偶尔会滋出的那种茫然迷失之感。有时这个问题是用一种开玩笑、讽刺的方式提出的,被当成一种道贺,然后他会微笑配合:“啊,没什么大不了的,还在奥尔托兰端盘子。我们最近的银鳕鱼配飞鱼卵很受欢迎。”但有时问的人是真的不知道。这种状况现在越来越少发生了,偶尔发生时,提问者通常是某个生活圈离文化界很远、连阅读《纽约时报》对他们来说都算煽动叛乱行为的人。不过更常见的是,某个人坚定地无视他和他的生活与工作,为了表达他们的不以为然,不,是不屑。

  He didn’t know Arthur well enough to know into which category he fell (although he knew him well enough to not like him, the way he pressed so close into his space that he had literally backed into a wall), so he answered simply. “I’m acting.”

他跟阿瑟没熟到确知他属于哪一类(不过倒是熟到足以不喜欢这个人,尤其阿瑟总是喜欢在跟人讲话时凑得很近,搞得他都后退到贴着墙壁了),于是他只回答:“我在演戏。”

  “Really,” said Arthur, blandly. “Anything I’d’ve heard of?”

“真的啊。”阿瑟淡淡地说,“有什么是我听过的吗?”

  This question—not the question itself, but Arthur’s tone, its carelessness and derision—irritated him anew, but he didn’t show it. “Well,” he said slowly, “they’re mostly indies. I did something last year called The Kingdom of Frankincense, and I’m leaving next month to shoot The Unvanquished, based on the novel?” Arthur looked blank. Willem sighed; he had won an award for The Kingdom of Frankincense. “And something I shot a couple of years ago’s just been released: this thing called Black Mercury 3081.”

这个问题——不是问题本身,而是阿瑟那种不在乎和嘲弄的口气——让他无名火起,但是他按捺着没有表现出来。“唔,”他缓缓说,“大部分都是独立制片。我去年拍了一部《乳香王国》,下个月要离开纽约去拍《不败者》,是由福克纳的小说改编的。”阿瑟一脸木然。威廉叹气:他还因为《乳香王国》得了奖。“另外我两年前拍的一部电影才刚上映,叫《黑色水星三〇八一》。”


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