《渺小一生》:当时，他不相信这些台词

　 He thought frequently these days of a play he had done in graduate school, by a beetley, plodding woman in the playwriting division who had gone on to have great success as a writer of spy movies but who in graduate school had tried to write Pinteresque dramas about unhappy married couples. If This Were a Movie was about an unhappy married couple—he was a professor of classical music; she was a librettist—who lived in New York. Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been a romance. He had played the husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca, you know! This is life!”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone better awaits her:

最近他常常想起研究生时期演的一出戏，是戏剧写作系一个像甲虫一样单调乏味的女生写的。她后来成为非常成功的间谍片编剧，但她在研究生时期写的都关于不快乐的夫妻，是带有品特风格的剧本。《如果这是电影》这出戏中的先生是古典音乐教授，太太是音乐剧的词作者。两夫妻住在纽约，都四十来岁（当时那是一片灰色的土地，远得不得了且难以想象地黯淡），两人都缺乏幽默感，且长期怀念年轻时的自己，回想当时人生充满前途与希望，两人都很浪漫，而人生本身就是一部浪漫传奇。他演那位丈夫，他早就知道这出戏很烂（里头的台词如：“这不是《托斯卡》，你知道！这是人生！”），但他始终忘不了他在第二幕最后的那段独白。当时那位太太宣布她想离开，说她不认为自己在这段婚姻里得到了满足，她相信还有更好的人在等着她：

　 SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.

赛斯：难道你不明白吗，艾美？你错了，伴侣关系从来不会提供一切，而是提供某些东西。一个人身上可能有你想要的，比方说性爱的吸引力、美好的对话、财务上的资助、思想的契合，或善意、忠实。你可以挑选三种。三种——就这样。如果你很幸运，或许可以挑四种。其他的你得去别处寻找。只有在电影里，你才会找到一个提供一切的人。但现在我们不是在演电影。在真实世界里，你得搞清楚哪三样特质是你想共度一生的，然后你从另一个人身上找寻其他的特质。这才是真实的人生。你不明白这是个陷阱吗？如果你想找到一切都有的，最后你就什么都没有了。

　 AMY: [crying] So what did you pick?

艾美：[哭着]那你挑了哪些？

　 SETH: I don’t know. [beat] I don’t know.

赛斯：我不知道。[捶桌子]我不知道。

　 At the time, he hadn’t believed these words, because at the time, everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was young and attractive and smart and glamorous. Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic. They all chose differently: Roman had chosen beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability, and competence (Sophie was intimidatingly efficient), and aesthetic compatibility. And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation. Kindness. Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there? Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples—in restaurants, on the street, at parties—and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

当时，他不相信这些台词，因为在当时，要找到具备一切的人似乎是可能的；他才23岁，身边的每个人都年轻、有吸引力、聪明又迷人。每个人都认为他们会是几十年的朋友、永远的朋友。但对大部分人来说，这样的事情当然不曾发生。当你年纪渐长，就知道你在挑一起睡觉或交往的人时所重视的特质，未必是你想要一起生活、相处、天天与之共度的人的特质。如果你很聪明、很幸运，你会学到这点并接受它。你摸清什么对你是最重要的并设法寻找，你学会了务实。他们每个人的选择都不一样：罗蒙选择了美貌、贴心、顺从；马尔科姆，在他看来，选择了可靠、能力（苏菲的效率很吓人），以及审美观的契合。他呢？他选择了友谊、对话、善良、思想。三十多岁时，他看着某些人的伴侣关系，提出一个曾在无数晚餐派对上激起讨论的问题：为什么他们会在一起？不过现在，他快要48岁了，他觉得伴侣关系反映了每个人最强烈、但无法清楚表达的渴望，他们的希望和不安全感化为实体，成了另一个人。现在，他在餐厅、在街上、在派对中看着一对对伴侣，会很好奇：为什么你们两个会在一起？你觉得你最不可或缺的是什么？你缺了什么是你希望另一个人提供的？现在他认为，成功的伴侣关系，就是双方都能看出对方最能提供、也是自己最重视的特质。

　 And perhaps not coincidentally, he also found himself doubting therapy—its promises, its premises—for the first time. He had never before questioned that therapy was, at worst, a benign treatment: when he was younger, he had even considered it a form of luxury, this right to speak about his life, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty minutes proof that he had somehow become someone whose life deserved such lengthy consideration, such an indulgent listener. But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.

或许这并非出于巧合，他发现自己生平第一次怀疑心理咨询的效果及假设。之前，他向来认为心理咨询至少是一种温和的治疗，不曾质疑。他年轻时，甚至认为心理咨询是一种奢侈，因为这是一种权利，能让你畅谈自己的人生五十分钟，基本上不会被打断，这证明他已经成为一个人物，他的人生值得这样花时间思考、值得有人宽容地倾听。但现在，他意识到自己的不耐烦，觉得心理咨询有一种阴险的迂腐，暗示人生是可以补救的，而且有一种社会常态存在，要引导病人符合这样的常态。

　 “You seem to be holding back, Willem,” said Idriss—his shrink now for years—and he was quiet. Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of judgment (but wasn’t that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a problem you hadn’t known existed. Over the years, he’d had friends who had been convinced that their childhoods were happy, that their parents were basically loving, until therapy had awakened them to the fact that they had not been, that they were not. He didn’t want that to happen to him; he didn’t want to be told that his contentment wasn’t contentment after all but delusion.

“威廉，你好像有所隐瞒。”他看了好几年的心理咨询师伊德里斯说，他没回应。心理咨询、心理咨询师，都保证了绝少的批判（但是去跟一个人谈，却不被批判，不是根本不可能吗？）。然而，在每个问题后面都是一个小小的督促，轻推你一下，无可避免地促使你认知到某些缺陷，解决一个你原先不知道存在的问题。多年来，他有些朋友一直相信自己的童年很快乐，父母基本上很慈爱，直到心理咨询唤醒他们，让他们认识到自己并不快乐，父母也并不慈爱。他不希望这样的事情发生在自己身上，他不想让人告诉他说他的满足根本不是满足，而是错觉。

　 “And how do you feel about the fact that Jude doesn’t ever want to have sex?” Idriss had asked.

“那你对于裘德根本不想做爱的事实，有什么感觉？”伊德里斯问。

　 “I don’t know,” he’d said. But he did know, and he said it: “I wish he wanted to, for his sake. I feel sad that he’s missing one of life’s greatest experiences. But I think he’s earned the right not to.” Across from him, Idriss was silent. The truth was, he didn’t want Idriss to try to diagnose what was wrong with his relationship. He didn’t want to be told how to repair it. He didn’t want to try to make Jude, or himself, do something neither of them wanted to because they were supposed to. Their relationship was, he felt, singular but workable: he didn’t want to be taught otherwise. He sometimes wondered if it was simple lack of creativity—his and Jude’s—that had made them both think that their relationship had to include sex at all. But it had seemed, then, the only way to express a deeper level of feeling. The word “friend” was so vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying—how could he use the same term to describe what Jude was to him that he used for India or the Henry Youngs? And so they had chosen another, more familiar form of relationship, one that hadn’t worked. But now they were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.

“我不知道。”他说。其实他知道，于是他说，“我真希望他想要，为了他自己好。我很难过他失去人生最棒的体验之一。但我想，他已经得到了不做爱的权利。”在他对面，伊德里斯保持沉默。其实他不希望伊德里斯试图诊断他的伴侣关系有什么问题。他不想要别人告诉他如何修补。他不想逼裘德或他自己去做他们两个都不想做的事情，只因为他们应该这么做。他们的伴侣关系，他觉得，是独特而可行的；他不想要别人来指手画脚地跟他说不行。他有时很好奇，会不会只是因为他和裘德缺乏创意，才会让两人都觉得“朋友”这个字眼太模糊、太难以描述、太难满足了。他怎么有办法将用在印蒂亚或两个亨利·杨身上的字眼，拿来描述裘德对他的意义？所以他们选择了另一个、一般人比较熟悉的伴侣形式，但是行不通。现在他们发明了自己的伴侣形态，没有被历史正式承认，也不是诗歌中传诵不朽的，但感觉上更真实，也更不受限。

　 He didn’t, however, mention his growing skepticism about therapy to Jude, because some part of him did still believe in it for people who were truly ill, and Jude—he was finally able to admit to himself—was truly ill. He knew that Jude hated going to the therapist; after the first few sessions he had come home so quiet, so withdrawn, that Willem had to remind himself that he was making Jude go for his own good.

不过，他没有跟裘德提起他对心理咨询越来越存疑，因为一部分的他还是相信心理咨询对真正心理有问题的人管用，而裘德是真的心理有问题（他终于可以跟自己承认了）。他知道裘德痛恨做心理咨询；他前几次去过之后，回家总是很安静、很沉默寡言，搞得威廉还得提醒自己，他是为了裘德好，才逼他去的。

　 Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. “How’s it been with Dr. Loehmann?” he asked one night about a month after Jude had begun.

最后他终于憋不住了。“你跟娄曼医生谈得怎么样了？”他有天晚上问他，那是裘德开始做心理咨询的一个月后。

　 Jude sighed. “Willem,” he said, “how much longer do you want me to go?”

裘德叹气。“威廉，”他说，“你希望我继续去多久？”

　 “I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“不知道，”他说，“我其实没想过这个问题。”

　 Jude had studied him. “So you were thinking I’d go forever,” he said.

裘德审视着他，“所以你觉得我得一直去。”他说。

　 “Well,” he said. (He actually had been thinking that.) “Is it really so awful?” He paused. “Is it Loehmann? Should we get you someone else?”

“这个嘛，”他说（他的确是这么想的），“状况真有那么可怕吗？”他暂停了一下，“是因为娄曼医生吗？我们要不要找别的心理医生？”

　 “No, it’s not Loehmann,” Jude said. “It’s the process itself.”

“不，不是娄曼的问题，”裘德说，“是那个过程本身。”

　 He sighed, too. “Look,” he said. “I know this is hard for you. I know it is. But—give it a year, Jude, okay? A year. And try hard. And then we’ll see.” Jude had promised.

他也叹气了。“听我说，”他开口，“我知道这对你来说很困难。我知道。但是，裘德，先试个一年好吗？一年。努力看看。然后我们再来评估。”裘德答应了。

　 And then in the spring he had been away, filming, and he and Jude had been talking one night when Jude said, “Willem, in the interest of full disclosure, I have something I have to tell you.”

到了春天，他又出远门拍戏。某天晚上他和裘德通电话，裘德说：“威廉，为了完全坦白，我有件事情要告诉你。”

　 “Okay,” he said, gripping the phone tighter. He had been in London, shooting Henry & Edith. He was playing—twelve years too early and sixty pounds too thin, Kit pointed out, but who was counting?—Henry James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton. The film was actually something of a road-trip movie, shot mostly in France and southern England, and he was working his way through his final scenes.

“好。”他说，将手上的电话抓得更紧。他当时在伦敦拍《亨利与伊迪丝》。他饰演刚开始与伊迪丝·华顿展开友谊的亨利·詹姆斯（基特指出，年轻了十二岁，体重轻了快六十磅，但谁会去算呢？）。这部电影其实算公路电影，大部分在法国和英格兰南部拍摄，他当时正在拍最后几场戏。

　 “I’m not proud of this,” he heard Jude say. “But I’ve missed my last four sessions with Dr. Loehmann. Or rather—I’ve been going, but not going.”

“我并不引以为荣，”他听到裘德说，“不过之前跟娄曼医生的四次约诊，我都没去。或者应该说——我去了，但是没去。”