《渺小一生》:他这辈子最后一次自己走路

　 The last time in his life he would walk on his own—really walk: not just edging along the wall from one room to the next; not shuffling down the hallways of Rosen Pritchard; not inching his way through the lobby to the garage, sinking into the car seat with a groan of relief—had been their Christmas vacation. He was forty-six. They were in Bhutan: a good choice, he would later realize, for his final sustained spell of walking (although of course he hadn’t known that at the time), because it was a country in which everyone walked. The people they met there, including an old acquaintance of theirs from college, Karma, who was now the minister of forestry, spoke of walking not in terms of kilometers but in terms of hours. “Oh yes,” Karma had said, “when my father was growing up, he used to walk four hours to visit his aunt on the weekends. And then he would walk four hours back home.” He and Willem had marveled at this, although later, they had also agreed: the countryside was so pretty, a series of swooping, treed parabolas, the sky above a thin clear blue, that time spent walking here must move more quickly and pleasantly than time spent walking anywhere else.

他这辈子最后一次自己走路，是圣诞假期时。那是真正的走路：不光是沿着墙壁从这个房间慢慢挪到下一个房间；不是在罗森·普理查德律师事务所的走廊上拖着脚步；不是从公寓大厅一点一点移动到车库，然后发出放心的哀叹倒在车里。当时他46岁。他们在不丹。后来他才明白，在这里度过他最后一段行走的时期，是很好的选择（当时他自然还不知道），因为这个国家人人都走路。他们在那里碰到的人（包括大学时代的旧识、现在是林业部长的卡玛）谈起走路都不是讲走了几公里，而是讲走了几小时。“啊，没错。”卡玛说，“我父亲小时候常常周末走四小时去拜访他的姑妈，再走四小时回家。”他和威廉听了惊叹不已，不过后来他们也同意：这里的乡间太漂亮了，一连串陡降、充满树林的拋物线，上方的天空是清朗的浅蓝色，在这里走路，一定比在其他地方都要走得快，更充满愉悦。

　 He hadn’t felt at his best on that trip, although at least he was mobile. In the months before, he had been feeling weaker, but not in any truly specifiable way, not in any way that seemed to suggest some greater problem. He simply lost energy faster; he was achey instead of sore, a dull, constant thud of pain that followed him into sleep and was there to greet him when he woke. It was the difference, he told Andy, between a month speckled by thundershowers and a month in which it rained daily: not heavily but ceaselessly, a kind of dreary, enervating discomfort. In October, he’d had to use his wheelchair every day, which had been the most consecutive days he had ever been dependent on it. In November, although he had been well enough to make Thanksgiving dinner at Harold’s, he had been in too much pain to actually sit at the table to eat it, and he had spent the evening in his bedroom, lying as still as he could, semi-aware of Harold and Willem and Julia coming in to check on him, semi-aware of his apologizing for ruining the holiday for them, semi-aware of the muted conversation among the three of them and Laurence and Gillian, James and Carey, that he half heard coming from the dining room. After that, Willem had wanted to cancel their trip, but he had insisted, and he was glad he had—for he felt there was something restorative about the beauty of the landscape, about the cleanliness and quiet of the mountains, about getting to see Willem surrounded by streams and trees, which was always where he looked most comfortable.

那趟旅行，他觉得自己并没有处于巅峰状态，不过至少还走得动。之前几个月，他觉得越来越虚弱，但没有任何特别的征兆，看不出会有什么更大的问题。他只是很快就失去了活力；身上的酸痛变成疼痛，一种不太强烈、持续的抽痛，每天从起床就开始跟着他，直到入睡。这种差别，他告诉安迪，就像是一个月有零星的雷阵雨，以及一个月每天都下着小雨：不强烈但持续不断，是一种令人沮丧、令人衰弱的不舒服。十月的时候，他每天都得使用轮椅，是他连续使用轮椅最长的一段时间。到了十一月，他好转了一些，可以去哈罗德家赶上感恩节晚餐，但他痛得没法上桌，整个晚上都待在卧室里，尽可能躺着不动。他模糊地意识到哈罗德、威廉和朱丽娅轮流进来看他，自己还为破坏了他们的假期而道歉，也依稀听到他们三人和劳伦斯与吉莉安、詹姆斯与凯瑞从餐厅传来的低声交谈。之后，威廉本来想取消这趟不丹之旅的，但他坚持要去，而且他很庆幸他们去了，因为他觉得去那里会有恢复健康的效果：那里的美丽风景，那些高山的清新与安静，而且还可以看着威廉置身溪流和树林之间——威廉在大自然里看起来总是特别自在。

　 It was a good vacation, but by the end, he was ready to leave. One of the reasons he had been able to convince Willem that they could go on this trip at all was because his friend Elijah, who now ran a hedge fund that he represented, was going on holiday to Nepal with his family, and they caught flights both from and back to New York on his plane. He had worried that Elijah might be in a talkative mood, but he hadn’t been, and he had slept, gratefully, almost the entire way home, his feet and back blazing with pain.

那是个美好的假期，但结束时，他已经准备好要离开了。他一开始能说服威廉成行的原因之一，就是他们的朋友伊利亚（现在主持并操作一个对冲基金）正好跟家人去尼泊尔度假，他们来回纽约都是顺道搭他的私人飞机。他本来担心伊利亚在飞机上会很想讲话，但结果没有。回程时，他很庆幸自己几乎都在睡觉，两脚和背痛得灼热。

　 The day after they returned to Greene Street he couldn’t lift himself out of bed. He was in such distress that his body seemed to be one long exposed nerve, frayed at either end; he had the sense that if he were to be touched with a drop of water, his entire being would sizzle and hiss in response. He was rarely so exhausted, so sore that he couldn’t even sit up, and he could tell that Willem—around whom he made a particular effort, so he wouldn’t worry—was alarmed, and he had to plead with him not to call Andy. “All right,” Willem had said, reluctantly, “but if you’re not better by tomorrow, I’m calling him.” He nodded, and Willem sighed. “Dammit, Jude,” he said, “I knew we shouldn’t’ve gone.”

他们回到格林街公寓的次日，他根本下不了床。痛得好像整个身体是一条长长的、裸露的神经，两端都磨损了；他感觉只要有一滴水掉到他身上，整个人就会嘶嘶作响。他很少这么疲倦、酸痛到根本坐不起来，而且他看得出威廉非常恐慌——他在威廉面前总会特别努力，免得害他担心。他还得恳求威廉不要打电话给安迪。“好吧，”威廉不情愿地说，“可是如果你明天没有好转，我就要打给他了。”他点点头，威廉叹气。“该死，裘德，”他说，“我就知道我们不该去的。”

　 But the next day, he was better: better enough to get out of bed, at least. He couldn’t walk; all day, his legs and feet and back felt as if they were being driven through with iron bolts, but he made himself smile and talk and move about, though when Willem left the room or turned away from him, he could feel his face drooping with fatigue.

但次日，他好转了，至少可以下床了，只是还没办法走路；一整天，他的腿和脚都像是有螺丝朝里钻，但他还是逼自己微笑、谈话、到处移动，不过当威廉离开房间或转开身子，他可以感觉到自己的脸疲倦得垮下来。

　 And then that was how it was, and they both grew used to it: although he now needed his wheelchair daily, he tried to walk every day for as much as he could, even if it was just to the bathroom, and he was careful about conserving his energy. When he was cooking, he made certain he had everything assembled on the counter in front of him before he started so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to the refrigerator; he turned down invitations to dinners, parties, openings, fund-raisers, telling people, telling Willem that he had too much work to attend them, but really he came home and wheeled his way slowly across the apartment, the punishingly large apartment, stopping to rest when he needed to, dozing in bed so he’d have enough life in him to talk to Willem when he returned.

情况就变成这样，他们两个也逐渐习惯了。虽然现在每天都要坐轮椅，他还是尽量多走些路，即使只是走去浴室，而且他会小心保留体力。做饭时，他会确保开始之前把所有东西放在面前的料理台上，免得总是要去冰箱拿；他拒绝了晚餐、派对、开幕仪式、募款餐会的邀约，跟邀请的人和威廉说他工作忙得分不开身，但其实他只是回家，坐在轮椅上缓缓地在公寓里移动。这间公寓大得令人精疲力竭，累了他就停下来休息，然后躺在床上小睡。这样等到威廉回来时，他才有足够的精力聊天。

　 At the end of January he finally went to see Andy, who listened to him and then examined him, carefully. “There’s nothing wrong with you, as such,” he said when he was finished. “You’re just getting older.”

到了一月底，他终于去见安迪了。安迪听了他描述的状况，仔细帮他检查。“确切地说，你没有什么不对劲。”安迪检查之后说，“你只是年纪大了而已。”

　 “Oh,” he said, and they were both quiet, for what was there for them to say? “Well,” he said, at last, “maybe I’ll get so weak that I’ll be able to convince Willem I don’t have the energy to go to Loehmann any longer,” because one night that fall he had—stupidly, drunkenly, romantically even—promised Willem he’d see Dr. Loehmann for another nine months.

“喔，”他说，两个人都沉默了，不然还能说什么？“唔，”最后他终于说，“或许我会虚弱到可以说服威廉，说我没有力气再去娄曼医生那边了。”因为那年秋天有一夜，他喝醉了发傻，甚至有点太过浪漫，答应威廉他会再去娄曼医生那边九个月。

　 Andy had sighed but had smiled, too. “You’re such a brat,” he said.

安迪叹了气，但也露出微笑。“你真的很皮。”安迪说。

　 Now, though, he thinks back on this period fondly, for in every other way that mattered, that winter was a glorious time. In December, Willem had been nominated for a major award for his work in The Poisoned Apple; in January, he won it. Then he was nominated again, for an even bigger and more prestigious award, and again, he won. He had been in London on business the night Willem won, but had set his alarm for two a.m. so he could wake and watch the ceremony online; when Willem’s name was called, he shouted out loud, watched Willem, beaming, kiss Julia—whom he had brought as his date—and bound up the stairs to the stage, listened as he thanked the filmmakers, the studio, Emil, Kit, Alan Turing himself, Roman and Cressy and Richard and Malcolm and JB, and “my in-laws, Julia Altman and Harold Stein, for always making me feel like I was their son as well, and, finally and most important, Jude St. Francis, my best friend and the love of my life, for everything.” He’d had to stop himself from crying then, and when he got through to Willem half an hour later, he had to stop himself again. “I’m so proud of you, Willem,” he said. “I knew you would win, I knew it.”

现在，他充满深情地回想这段时期，因为就其他每个重要的方面而言，那个冬天都是一段灿烂的时光。十二月，威廉因为《毒苹果》的演出被一个重要的电影奖提名；一月，他得奖了。接着他获得另一个更重要、更有威望的电影奖提名，而且又得奖了。威廉得奖的那天晚上，他刚好去伦敦出差，但是设了凌晨2点的闹钟，好爬起来看在线实况转播；当颁奖人宣布威廉的名字时，他大喊出声，看着威廉满脸笑容地吻了陪他出席的朱丽娅，走上阶梯来到舞台，听着威廉谢谢制片和导演、电影公司、埃米尔、基特、艾伦·图灵本人，还有罗蒙、克雷西、理查德、马尔科姆、杰比，还有“我的岳父母哈罗德·斯坦和朱丽娅·阿特曼，他们总是让我觉得我也是他们的儿子，还有最后也最重要的，谢谢裘德·圣弗朗西斯，我最好的朋友、我毕生的挚爱。谢谢你给我的一切”。他当时勉强忍着没哭，等到半个小时后终于跟威廉联络上时，他又得忍着哭。“我真是以你为荣，威廉。”他说，“我就知道你会得奖，我就知道。”

　 “You always think that,” Willem laughed, and he laughed too, because Willem was right: he always did. He always thought Willem deserved to win awards for whatever he was nominated for; on the occasions he didn’t, he was genuinely perplexed—politics and preferences aside, how could the judges, the voters, deny what was so obviously a superior performance, a superior actor, a superior person?

“你总是觉得我会得奖。”威廉大笑，他也笑了，因为威廉说得没错：他总是这么想。他总觉得威廉不管被提名什么，都应该得奖；要是没有，他就真的很困惑——不管政治和偏好，那些评审或投票者，怎么可以否定那么优秀的表演、那么优秀的演员、那么优秀的人？

　 In his meetings the next morning—in which he had to stop himself from not crying, but smiling, dopily and incessantly—his colleagues congratulated him and asked him again why he hadn’t gone to the ceremony, and he had shaken his head. “Those things aren’t for me,” he said, and they weren’t; of all the awards shows, all the premieres, all the parties that Willem went to for work, he had attended only two or three. This past year, when Willem was being interviewed by a serious, literary magazine for a long profile, he vanished whenever he knew the writer would be present. He knew Willem wasn’t offended by this, that he attributed his scarcity to his sense of privacy. And while this was true, it wasn’t the only reason.

次日早晨开会时，他得忍着别哭，而是愚蠢地不断微笑。他的同事纷纷向他道贺，再度问他为什么没去参加颁奖典礼，他摇摇头。“那些事情不适合我。”他说，也的确如此。所有的颁奖典礼、首映会，所有威廉工作上要参加的派对，他只参加过两三次。过去一年，威廉曾接受某个严肃文学杂志的专访，要做长篇的特写报道，只要是那个作者要出现的场合，他就会避开。他知道威廉没有不高兴，他把他避免露面归因于他重视隐私。这也没有错，但其实不是唯一的原因。

　 Once, shortly after they had become a couple, there had been a picture of them that had run with a Times story about Willem and the first installment he had completed in a spy movie trilogy. The photo had been taken at the opening of JB’s fifth, long-delayed show, “Frog and Toad,” which had been exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and much more abstract than JB’s previous work. (They hadn’t quite known what to think of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. “Arnold Lobel?” he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. “Hello?!” But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel’s books as children, and they’d had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) Curiously, it had been this show, even more than the initial New York magazine story about Willem’s new life, that had made their relationship real for their colleagues and peers, despite the fact that most of the paintings had been made from photographs taken before they had become a couple.

他们成为一对之后不久，《纽约时报》曾刊登过一篇有关威廉的报道，谈到他刚拍完一系列间谍电影三部曲的第一部，配了一张他们两个人的照片。那张照片是在杰比拖延许久的第五次个展“青蛙与蟾蜍”的开幕酒会上拍的，展览里的画作全都是画他和威廉，但非常模糊，而且比起杰比之前的作品都更抽象（对于这个展览的标题他们不知该做何感想，尽管杰比宣称这个标题充满深情。他们问起时，杰比对着他们尖叫：“阿诺德·洛贝尔[2]？听过吗？！”但他和威廉小时候都没看过洛贝尔的童书，还得跑去买，才能搞懂这个典故）。奇怪的是，这个展览让他的同事和同辈真正知道他们是一对，甚至比当初一开始报道威廉新生活的《纽约》杂志还要有影响力，尽管展览中大部分画作依据的照片，都是他们在一起之前拍的。

　 It was also this show that would mark, as JB later said, his ascendancy: they knew that despite his sales, his reviews, his fellowships and accolades, he was tormented that Richard had had a mid-career museum retrospective (as had Asian Henry Young), and he hadn’t. But after “Frog and Toad,” something shifted for JB, the way that The Sycamore Court had shifted things for Willem, the way that the Doha museum had shifted things for Malcolm, even the way—if he was to be boastful—that the Malgrave and Baskett suit had shifted things for him. It was only when he stepped outside his firmament of friends that he realized that that shift, that shift they had all hoped for and received, was rarer and more precious than they even knew. Of all of them, only JB had been certain that he deserved that shift, that it was absolutely going to happen for him; he and Malcolm and Willem had had no such certainty, and so when it was given to them, they were befuddled. But although JB had had to wait the longest for his life to change, he was calm when it finally did—something in him seemed to become defanged; he became, for the first time since they had known him, mellowed, and the constant prickly humor that fizzed off of him like static was demagnetized and quieted. He was glad for JB; he was glad he now had the kind of recognition he wanted, the kind of recognition he thought JB should have received after “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days.”

这个展览也将证实（一如杰比后来所说的）杰比的优越地位：他们都知道杰比的作品销售状况很好，获得很正面的评论，而且得到了许多奖金和荣誉，但他一直很介意理查德被美术馆邀请办过生涯中期的回顾展（亚裔亨利·杨也有），他自己却没有。但是在“青蛙与蟾蜍”之后，事态有了根本的转变，就像《梧桐法院》是威廉事业上的突破点，多哈博物馆是马尔科姆事业上的突破点，如果他自夸一点，马格瑞夫与贝斯凯的诉讼案也是他事业上的突破点。直到他踏出了朋友圈，才明白这个突破（他们都期望过并且终于得到）比他们原先以为的更罕见，也更珍贵。在他们四个人之中，只有杰比确定自己应该得到这样的突破，这样的事情一定会发生在自己身上；他和马尔科姆和威廉从来没有这样的确定感，所以当这个突破发生在他们身上时，他们都糊里糊涂的。尽管这样的转机，杰比等得最久，但终于等到时，他相当冷静，身上的一些棱角似乎被磨平了；认识杰比这么久，这是他们第一次觉得他变得圆滑，那种长年带刺的幽默感从杰比身上消失了，仿佛静电被消磁，总算安静下来。他很替杰比高兴；他很高兴杰比现在终于得到了自己想要的认可，而且他认为在“秒，分，时，日”那次个展后，杰比就该得到认可了。

　 “The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,” Willem had said after they’d first seen the show, in JB’s studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.

“问题是，我们两个谁是青蛙、谁又是蟾蜍？”威廉说。他们第一次看那个展览的作品，是在杰比的工作室，那天深夜他们买了那几本童书回家念给对方听，一边念一边忍不住大笑。

　 He’d smiled; they had been lying in bed. “Obviously, I’m the toad,” he said.

他微笑；此时他们躺在床上。“很明显啊，我是蟾蜍。”他说。

　 “No,” Willem said, “I think you’re the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.”

“不，”威廉说，“我想你是青蛙；你眼珠的颜色跟它的皮肤一样。”

　 Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. “That’s your evidence?” he asked. “And so what do you have in common with the toad?”

威廉的口气好认真，听得他咧嘴笑了。“那就是你的证据？”他问，“那你跟蟾蜍有什么共同点？”

　 “I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,” Willem said, and they began laughing again.

“我想我有一件跟它一样的夹克。”威廉说，他们又开始大笑。

　 But really, he knew: he was the toad, and seeing the picture in the Times of the two of them together had reminded him of this. He wasn’t so bothered by this for his own sake—he was trying to care less about his own anxieties—but for Willem’s, because he was aware of how mismatched, how distorted a couple they made, and he was embarrassed for him, and worried that his mere presence might be somehow harmful to Willem. And so he tried to stay away from him in public. He had always thought that Willem was capable of making him better, but over the years he feared: If Willem could make him better, didn’t that also mean that he could make Willem sick? And in the same way, if Willem could make him into someone less difficult to regard, couldn’t he also make Willem into something ugly? He knew this wasn’t logical, but he thought it anyway, and sometimes as they were getting ready to go out, he glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror, his stupid, pleased expression, as absurd and grotesque as a monkey dressed in expensive clothes, and would want to punch the glass with his fist.

但其实他知道：他才是蟾蜍，看着《纽约时报》那张他们两个合影的照片，他又想起了这件事。他不太为自己担心（他现在尽量不要在乎自己的焦虑），而是为威廉担心，因为他意识到他们是多么不相配、不正常的一对。他替威廉感到难为情，也担心他光是出现，就可能会害到威廉。于是他设法避免跟威廉一起出现在公共场合。他总是觉得威廉有办法让他更好，但这些年来他一直担心：如果威廉能让他更好，那不就表示他会害威廉变糟？同样的，如果威廉能让他成为一个比较不碍眼的人，那他不也害威廉变丑了？他知道这个想法不合逻辑，但反正他就是这样想。有时他们准备好要出门时，他会在浴室的镜子里看自己一眼，看着自己愚蠢、高兴的表情，荒谬、怪诞得像只猴子穿上昂贵的衣服。他很想揍镜子里的自己一拳。