《渺小一生》:“当然，除了外星人。”

　 “Sounds interesting,” said Arthur, looking bored. “I don’t think I’ve heard of it, though. Huh. I’ll have to look it up. Well, good for you, Willem.”

“听起来很有趣。”阿瑟说，一副不感兴趣的表情，“不过我应该没听说过。呃，我得去查一下。威廉，你真行。”

　 He hated the way certain people said “good for you, Willem,” as if his job were some sort of spun-sugar fantasy, a fiction he fed himself and others, and not something that actually existed. He especially hated it that night, when not fifty yards away, framed clearly in the window just behind Arthur’s head, happened to be a spotlit billboard mounted atop a building with his face on it—his scowling face, admittedly: he was, after all, fighting off an enormous mauve computer-generated alien—and BLACK MERCURY 3081: COMING SOON in two-foot-high letters. In those moments, he would be disappointed in the Hoodies. They’re no better than anyone else after all, he would realize. In the end, they’re jealous and trying to make me feel bad. And I’m stupid, because I do feel bad. Later, he would be irritated with himself: This is what you wanted, he would remind himself. So why do you care what other people think? But acting was caring what other people thought (sometimes it felt like that was all it was), and as much as he liked to think himself immune to other people’s opinions—as if he was somehow above worrying about them—he clearly wasn’t.

他痛恨某些人说“威廉，你真行”的口气，好像他的工作是什么棉花糖幻象，只能用来唬自己和别人，而非真实存在。那天晚上他尤其火大，因为不到五十码[1]外，就在阿瑟脑袋后方的窗外，碰巧就有块聚光灯照射的广告牌矗立在一栋大楼楼顶，上头有他的脸（一脸难以否认的怒容：毕竟，他正在抵抗一个淡紫色、计算机仿真的巨大怪物），还有两英尺高的大字（《黑色水星三〇八一》，即将上映）。在那些时刻，他会对虎德馆的老友们很失望。他们毕竟不比其他人更高明，他会明白。到头来，他们只是嫉妒，想让我不舒服而已。可是我真蠢，因为我的确觉得不舒服。稍后他对自己很火大。这就是你想要的，他会提醒自己。干吗在乎别人怎么想？但演戏就是会在意他人怎么想（有时感觉那是所有的目的）。尽管他宁愿相信自己对其他人的意见免疫，仿佛已经超越了那个层次，但其实他做不到。

　 “I know it sounds so fucking petty,” he told Jude after that party. He was embarrassed by how annoyed he was—he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else.

“我知道这听起来实在太小家子气了。”那次派对后他告诉裘德。他觉得自己那么火大很丢脸，但他不会跟其他人说。

　 “It doesn’t sound petty at all,” Jude had said. They were driving back to the city from Red Hook. “But Arthur’s a jerk, Willem. He always has been. And years of studying Herodotus hasn’t made him any less of one.”

“听起来一点也不小气。”裘德当时说。他们当时正从瑞德胡克开车回曼哈顿，“但阿瑟是个混蛋，威廉。他向来就是那样。研究过几年希罗多德，一点也没让他不像混蛋。”

　 He smiled, reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I feel there’s something so … so pointless about what I do.”

他不情愿地笑了：“不晓得。”他说，“有时我觉得自己的工作好像很……很没意义。”

　 “How can you say that, Willem? You’re an amazing actor; you really are. And you—”

“威廉，你怎么能这么说？你是个了不起的演员，真的。而且你……”

　 “Don’t say I bring joy to so many people.”

“拜托别说我带给很多人欢乐。”

　 “Actually, I wasn’t going to say that. Your films aren’t really the sorts of things that bring joy to anyone.” (Willem had come to specialize in playing dark and complicated characters—often quietly violent, usually morally compromised—that inspired different degrees of sympathy. “Ragnarsson the Terrible,” Harold called him.)

“其实呢，我没打算这么说。你的电影不是会带来欢乐的那一类。”（威廉已经逐渐被定型，经常被找去演黑暗复杂的角色——通常颇为暴力，往往引发道德争议——因而引发不同程度的同情，哈罗德称呼他为“恐怖的朗纳松”。）

　 “Except aliens, of course.”

“当然，除了外星人。”

　 “Right, except aliens. Although not even them—you kill them all in the end, don’t you? But Willem, I love watching them, and so do so many other people. That’s got to count for something, right? How many people get to say that, that they can actually remove someone from his daily life?” And when he didn’t answer: “You know, maybe we should stop going to these parties; they’re becoming unhealthy exercises in masochism and self-loathing for us both.” Jude turned to him and grinned. “At least you’re in the arts. I might as well be working for an arms dealer. Dorothy Wharton asked me tonight how it felt waking up each morning knowing I’d sacrificed yet another piece of my soul the day before.”

“对，除了外星人。连他们也不会带来欢乐——到最后你把他们都杀光了，不是吗？可是威廉，我喜欢看那些表演，其他人大多也喜欢。这算是某种成就吧？有多少人可以说他们有办法除掉日常生活中的谁呢？”看他没回答，裘德又说，“你知道，或许我们不该再参加这些派对了。对我们两个来说，这些派对已经变成不健康的受虐和引发自我厌恶的活动了。”裘德转向他咧嘴笑，“至少你还在做艺术方面的工作。我倒不如去帮军火商工作算了。多萝西·沃顿今天晚上还问我，每天早上起床时，知道自己前一天又牺牲了自己一部分的灵魂是什么感觉。”

　 Finally, he laughed. “No, she didn’t.”

他终于大笑了：“不，她不会这么说吧。”

　 “Yes, she did. It was like having a conversation with Harold.”

“会，她就是这么说的。害我觉得好像在跟哈罗德讲话。”

　 “Yeah, if Harold was a white woman with dreadlocks.”

“是啊，如果哈罗德是个绑着辫子头的白种女人。”

　 Jude smiled. “As I said, like having a conversation with Harold.”

裘德微笑：“我刚刚就这么说啊，就像在跟哈罗德讲话。”

　 But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.

其实，他们两人都知道为什么自己会继续参加这类派对，因为那些派对已经变成他们四个人难得相聚的机会之一，有时甚至还是唯一能创造出四人共同回忆的机会，维持他们友谊的生机的机会，就像是把一束束引火柴丢进快要熄灭的黑色炭火里，这是他们假装一切依然如昔的方法。

　 It also provided them an excuse to pretend that everything was fine with JB, when they all three knew that something wasn’t. Willem couldn’t quite identify what was wrong with him—JB could be, in his way, almost as evasive as Jude when it came to certain conversations—but he knew that JB was lonely, and unhappy, and uncertain, and that none of those sensations were familiar ones to him. He sensed that JB—who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well—was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities. So he organized these outings, and they all obediently followed as they had always done, giving him the small kindness of letting him be the leader, the one who decided for them, always.

这也为他们提供一个借口，假装杰比一切都好，但其实他们三个都明白并非如此。威廉也说不出他哪里不对劲（碰到某些特定的话题，杰比也会用自己的方式躲避，几乎像裘德一样厉害），只知道杰比很寂寞、很不快乐、很彷徨，而这些感觉都不是杰比熟悉的。他感觉到，热爱大学时代，对于其中的结构、阶级和小圈子生态都应付自如的杰比，如今在每个派对中都试图重现他们四个人曾拥有的那种轻松、不必多想的友谊。当时他们还不清楚自己的专业定位，却因为都拥有抱负而凝聚起来，没有被各自的日常现实分隔。所以杰比筹划大家出门参加派对，其他三个也一如既往地乖乖遵从，甘心让他当领袖，让他为大家做决定。

　 He would have liked to have seen JB one-on-one, just the two of them, but these days, when he wasn’t with his college friends, JB ran with a different crowd, one consisting mostly of art world hangers-on, who seemed to be only interested in doing lots of drugs and then having dirty sex, and it simply wasn’t appealing to him. He was in New York less and less often—just eight months in the past three years—and when he was home, there were the twin and contradictory pressures to spend meaningful time with his friends and to do absolutely nothing at all.

他很愿意私下跟杰比见面，就他们两个。但最近这阵子，如果杰比不跟他的大学朋友一起玩，就会跑去找另一批完全不同的人，大部分都是想攀附艺术圈的人。这些人唯一的兴趣就是嗑很多药，然后随便乱上床，这类事情他实在没兴趣。他越来越不常在纽约（过去三年只有八个月）。当他难得待在纽约时，就会感到两股彼此矛盾的压力，一方面想跟朋友好好共度时光，一方面只想什么都不做。

　 Now, though, he kept moving toward Jude, who had at least been released by Marta and her grouchy friend and was talking to their friend Carolina (seeing this, he felt guilty anew, as he hadn’t talked to Carolina in months and he knew she was angry with him), when Francesca blocked his path to reintroduce him to a woman named Rachel with whom he had worked four years ago on a production of Cloud 9, for which she had been the assistant dramaturg. He was happy enough to see her again—he had liked her all those years ago; he had always thought she was pretty—but he knew, even as he was talking to her, that it would go no further than a conversation. After all, he hadn’t been exaggerating: he started filming in five weeks. Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn’t really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term.

现在，他继续朝裘德走去，发现他终于被马尔塔和她爱发牢骚的朋友放过，正在跟他们的朋友卡罗莱娜讲话。（看到这一幕，他又生出罪恶感，因为他好几个月没跟卡罗莱娜联系，知道她正在生自己的气。）此时，弗朗西斯卡忽然挡住他的路，要重新介绍他认识一个叫蕾切尔的女人，四年前他们曾在舞台剧《九重天》共事，她是剧场指导助理。他挺开心能再碰到她（四年前他就很喜欢她，一直觉得她很漂亮），但这会儿跟她讲话，他知道他们顶多就是聊一下而已，毕竟，他再过五个星期就要去外地拍戏了。现在不是陷入复杂新恋情的时候，而且他实在没有力气玩一夜情了，因为他知道，一夜情有可能以一种有趣的方式，变得跟长期恋情一样磨人。

　 Ten minutes or so into his conversation with Rachel, his phone buzzed, and he apologized and checked the message from Jude: Leaving. Don’t want to interrupt your conversation with the future Mrs. Ragnarsson. See you at home.

跟蕾切尔聊了大约十分钟，他的手机振动起来，他道歉一声，看了一下裘德传来的短信：走了。不想打扰你和未来朗纳松太太的谈话，回家见。

　 “Shit,” he said, and then to Rachel, “Sorry.” Suddenly, the spell of the party ended, and he was desperate to leave. Their participation in these parties were a kind of theater that the four of them agreed to stage for themselves, but once one of the actors left the stage, there seemed little point in continuing. He said goodbye to Rachel, whose expression changed from perplexed to hostile once she realized he was truly leaving and she wasn’t being invited to leave with him, and then to a group of other people—Marta, Francesca, JB, Malcolm, Edie, Carolina—at least half of whom seemed deeply annoyed with him. It took him another thirty minutes to extricate himself from the apartment, and on his way downstairs, he texted Jude back, hopefully, You still here? Leaving now, and then, when he didn’t get a reply, Taking train. Picking something up at the apt—see you soon.

“狗屎。”他说，然后对蕾切尔说，“对不起。”忽然间，派对的魔力消失了，他只想赶快离开。他们参加的这类派对是某种剧场，由他们四个讲好自己出演，但一旦其中一个演员离开舞台，继续演下去就没有意义了。他跟蕾切尔说再见（她一明白他真的要走，而且没邀请她一起，表情就从困惑变成敌意），再跟其他一群人道别——马尔塔、弗朗西斯卡、杰比、马尔科姆、伊迪、卡罗莱娜——至少有一半人因此很不高兴。他又花了三十分钟才终于从那个公寓脱身，下楼时，他抱着希望回了裘德的短信：你还在吗？我要走了。没等到回应，他又发：我坐地铁。先回我公寓拿点东西，晚点见。