《渺小一生》:但他没想到是他们抛弃了他
And then, with each year, they abandoned him further. He had always known he would be the first among the four of them to be a success. This wasn’t arrogance: he just knew it. He worked harder than Malcolm, he was more ambitious than Willem. (He didn’t count Jude in this race, as Jude’s profession was one that operated on an entirely different set of metrics, one that didn’t much matter to him.) He was prepared to be the rich one, or the famous one, or the respected one, and he knew, even as he was dreaming about his riches and fame and respect, that he would remain friends with all of them, that he would never forsake them for anyone else, no matter how overwhelming the temptation might be. He loved them; they were his.
然后，随着每一年过去，他们就把他抛得更远。他一直知道自己会是四个人之中最先成功的。这不是狂妄，他就是知道。他工作比马尔科姆努力，也比威廉更有野心（在这个竞赛中，他没把裘德算在内，因为裘德的专业自有一套完全不同的衡量标准，而那套标准他并不关心）。他早就准备好成为富有的那个，或是成名的那个，或是受尊敬的那个，而且他知道，即使当他梦想着自己变得富有、知名、受尊重时，他依然会是他们三个人的朋友，他永远不会为了其他人而抛弃他们，无论诱惑有多么大。他爱他们；他们是他的。
But he hadn’t counted on them abandoning him, on them outgrowing him through their own accomplishments. Malcolm had his own business. Jude was doing whatever he did impressively enough so that when he was representing JB in a silly argument he’d had the previous spring with a collector he was trying to sue to reclaim an early painting that the collector had promised he could buy back and then reneged on, the collector’s lawyer had raised his eyebrows when JB had told him to contact his lawyer, Jude St. Francis. “St. Francis?” asked the opposing lawyer. “How’d you get him?” He told Black Henry Young about this, who wasn’t surprised. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Jude’s known for being icy, and vicious. He’ll get it for you, JB, don’t worry.” This had startled him: His Jude? Someone who literally hadn’t been able to lift his head and look him in the eye until their sophomore year? Vicious? He simply couldn’t imagine it. “I know,” said Black Henry Young, when he expressed his disbelief. “But he becomes someone else at work, JB; I saw him in court once and he was borderline frightening, just incredibly relentless. If I hadn’t known him, I’d’ve thought he was a giant asshole.” But Black Henry Young had turned out to be right—he got his painting back, and not only that, but he got a letter of apology from the collector as well.
但他没想到是他们抛弃了他，没想到他们因为自己的成就而把他丢在后头。马尔科姆自己创业。裘德在工作上也非常厉害，有回还当了他的代表律师。前一个春天，他和某收藏家之间发生了愚蠢的争执，他想告对方，好讨回一件早期的画作。当初那收藏家承诺他随时可以买回去，结果却食言了。收藏家的律师听到杰比叫他联络自己的律师裘德·圣弗朗西斯时，抬起了眉毛。“圣弗朗西斯？”对方律师问，“你怎么请得到他？”他后来跟黑亨利·杨讲起这件事，但黑亨利·杨并不惊讶。“啊没错，”他说，“裘德是出了名的冰冷无情，而且残酷。他会帮你把画讨回来的，杰比，别担心。”他很吃惊：他的裘德？大二之前根本没法抬头看着你眼睛的裘德？残酷？他实在无法想象。“我知道，杰比，”黑亨利·杨听了他表达自己的难以置信之后说，“不过他工作时就变了一个人。我有回在法庭上看到他，他简直令人害怕，无情得不得了。要不是之前就认识他，我会以为他是个超级大混蛋。”结果黑亨利·杨说得没错，他拿回了那幅画，不仅如此，还收到了那个收藏家的一封道歉信。
And then, of course, there was Willem. The horrible, petty part of him had to admit that he had never, ever expected Willem to be as successful as he was. Not that he hadn’t wanted it for him—he had just never thought it would happen. Willem, with his lack of competitive spirit; Willem, with his deliberateness; Willem, who in college had turned down a starring role in Look Back in Anger to go tend to his sick brother. On the one hand, he had understood it, and on the other hand—his brother hadn’t been fatally ill, not then; even his own mother had told him not to come—he hadn’t. Where once his friends had needed him—for color, for excitement—they no longer did. He didn’t like to think of himself as someone who wanted his friends to be, well, not unsuccessful, but in thrall to him, but maybe he was.
当然，还有威廉。他心底糟糕的、小气的那个部分必须承认，他从来、从来没想到威廉会这么成功。他也不是不希望他成功，只不过从来没想到会真的发生。缺乏好胜心的威廉、从容不迫的威廉，大学时代还曾放弃主演《怒回首》的机会，好回家照顾生病的哥哥。一方面他懂，但另一方面他也不懂——他哥哥当时又没病危，就连威廉的母亲也叫他不要回去。以前，他的朋友需要他的活泼和兴奋，但现在不再是如此了。他不喜欢把自己想成一个希望朋友受他控制的人，但或许他就是这样。
The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas. And yet here again, it seemed that Jude and Willem had something he didn’t, something that was protecting them from the suffocating ennui of being successful, from the tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success, because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were becoming a failure. He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?
关于成功，有一点他以前一直不明白，那就是成功会让人变得无趣。失败也会让人无趣，但无趣的方式不同。失败的人会不断努力追求一件事：成功。但成功的人也只会努力维持他们的成功。跑步和原地跑步是不一样的。尽管跑步无论如何都很无聊，但至少是在移动，会经过不同的风景，看到不同的景象。同样的，裘德和威廉似乎拥有一些他没有的东西，能让他们远离成功所带来的那种令人窒息的倦怠，远离那种单调乏味：你一觉醒来明白自己成功了，但接着你每天都要继续做那些让你成功的事情，因为一旦你停下来，你就再也不是成功人士，而是失败人士了。他有时觉得他和马尔科姆真正与裘德和威廉的差异，不是他们的种族或财富，而是裘德和威廉所拥有的无穷的感知惊奇的能力；比起他来，他们的童年过得太可怜、太无趣了，成年后他们似乎长年处于一种眼花缭乱的状态中。他们毕业后的那年六月，欧文夫妇买机票送他们四个去巴黎玩，原来他们家在巴黎第七区有一间公寓。“很小的公寓。”马尔科姆当时忙着澄清。他初中时跟母亲去过巴黎，高中又跟同学去过，大二升大三的暑假也去了。不过直到他看到裘德和威廉的脸，他才强烈地体会到这个城市的美，和它充满希望的魔力。他羡慕他们依然拥有这种被惊呆的能力（不过他也明白，至少对裘德而言，那是经历了漫长而苛刻的童年所得到的回报），羡慕他们一直相信在成年后的人生中会持续地体验到种种惊奇，相信最神奇的岁月还在前面等着他们。他也记得他们第一次吃海胆，他们那种反应让他在不耐烦之余又羡慕得要命（好像他们是海伦·凯勒，才刚明白手上那一摊冰凉的玩意儿有个名字，而他们竟然有幸认识）。身为成人还能发现这个世界的种种愉悦，会是什么样的感觉啊？
And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period—briefer and briefer with each week—the world was splendid and unknown.
他有时觉得，这就是为什么他这么喜欢嗑药的原因。不像很多人以为的，是因为药物可以让你逃避日常生活，而是药物让日常生活似乎不那么日常了。嗑了药之后，在短暂的一段时间内（每个星期渐渐缩短），整个世界会变得美妙而未知。
At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad school. And then they had, slowly but inevitably, become like everyone else. Take the members of Backfat: in school, they had marched topless, the three of them fat and luscious and jiggly, all the way down the Charles to protest cutbacks to Planned Parenthood (no one had been sure how the toplessness had been relevant, but whatever), and played amazing sets in the Hood Hall basement, and lit an effigy of an antifeminist state senator on fire in the Quad. But now Francesca and Marta were talking about having babies, and moving from their Bushwick loft into a Boerum Hill brownstone, and Edie was actually, actually starting a business for real this time, and last year, when he’d suggested they stage a Backfat reunion, they had all laughed, although he hadn’t been joking. His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?
但其他时候他会很纳闷：到底是这个世界失去了色彩，还是他的朋友失去了色彩？从什么时候开始，每个人都变得这么相似？他常常觉得，上回人们这么有趣是在大学时代、研究生时代，然后他们就缓慢但不可避免地变得跟其他人一样了。就拿“背脂”乐团那三个女同志来说吧，在学校的时候，她们三个曾光着上身，晃着肥大又肉感的胸脯一路走到查尔斯河，抗议政府削减了对“计划生育联盟”的补助（没人确定裸身跟这个抗议有什么关系，但管他的）；她们曾在虎德馆地下室演唱了很棒的歌曲，还曾在宿舍外头的方院点火烧掉了某个反女权主义的州参议员的画像。但现在弗朗西斯卡和马尔塔在谈论要生小孩，还从布什维克的工业风公寓搬到波伦丘的褐石公寓。而伊迪这回是真的、真的自己创业了。去年，他建议她们办个重新合体的纪念演唱会，她们全部大笑，但他并没有开玩笑的意思。这种执着的怀旧让他沮丧，感觉自己老了。然而，他忍不住觉得，最光辉灿烂、一切都是荧光色的年代已经过去了。以前每个人都有趣多了。到底发生了什么事？
Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.
老了，他猜想。随之而来的，就是工作、金钱、子女。预防死亡的事物，确保人生有意义的事物，提供抚慰、背景与内容的事物。大家就这样被生物学和传统习俗支配着往前走，就连最心怀不敬的人都无法抵抗。
But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn’t noticed earlier. Malcolm had always been conventional, of course, but he had expected, somehow, more from Willem and Jude. He knew how awful this sounded (and so he never said it aloud), but he often thought that he had been cursed with a happy childhood. What if, instead, something actually interesting had happened to him? As it was, the only interesting thing that had happened to him was that he had attended a mostly white prep school, and that wasn’t even interesting. Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have had nothing to write about. And then there was someone like Jude, who hadn’t grown up like everyone else, and didn’t look like everyone else, and yet who JB knew was constantly trying to make himself exactly like everyone else. He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did. But Jude spent most of his time trying to stand still and look down, as if by doing so, no one would notice he existed. This had been sad and yet somewhat understandable in college, when Jude had been so childlike and bony that it made JB’s joints hurt to look at him, but these days, now that he’d grown into his looks, JB found it simply enraging, especially as Jude’s self-consciousness often interfered with his own plans.
但那是他的同伴。他真正想知道的是他的朋友们怎么会变得这么传统，而且为什么他没有更早留意到。当然了，马尔科姆一直很传统，但不知怎的，他对威廉和裘德的期望更高。他知道这听起来有多可怕（所以他从没说出口），但他常想自己是因为快乐的童年而遭殃的。如果他童年有过什么真正有趣的遭遇呢？唯一发生在他身上有趣的事情，就是读了一所大部分是白人的预备学校，但根本不有趣。感谢老天他不是作家，不然他就没有东西可以写了。像裘德，成长的过程不像其他人，看起来也不像其他人，然而杰比知道，裘德一直努力让自己看起来跟其他人没有两样。如果可以交换，他当然很愿意拥有威廉的容貌；他愿意杀掉某个可爱的小动物，以换取裘德的外形——那种神秘的跛行（其实比较像滑行），还有他的脸和身体。但裘德大部分时间都设法挺直身子并低着头，好像这么一来，就不会有人注意到他的存在。这样真的很可惜，在大学时代还可以理解，当时的裘德像个小孩，瘦巴巴的，光是看着他都会让杰比觉得关节发疼。但现在，裘德已经长大成人，杰比看他还那样就会很生气，尤其是裘德的难为情往往跟他自己的计划相冲突。
“Do you want to spend your life just being completely average and boring and typical?” he’d once asked Jude (this was during their second big fight, when he was trying to get Jude to pose nude, an argument he’d known even before he’d begun it that he had no chance at all of winning).
“你这辈子想永远当个一般、无聊、典型的人吗？”他有回问裘德。（这是在他们第二度大吵期间，当时他想说服裘德让他画裸像，但在开口前就明白自己完全没有胜算。）
“Yes, JB,” Jude had said, giving him that gaze he sometimes summoned, which was intimidating, even slightly scary, in its flat blankness. “That’s in fact exactly what I want.”
“是的，杰比。”裘德当时回答他，用那种偶尔刻意表现出来的空荡、平静的眼神看他，令人生畏，甚至有点可怕，“其实那恰恰就是我想要的。”
Sometimes he suspected that all Jude really wanted to do in life was hang out in Cambridge with Harold and Julia and play house with them. Last year, for example, JB had been invited on a cruise by one of his collectors, a hugely wealthy and important patron who had a yacht that plied the Greek islands and that was hung with modern masterpieces that any museum would have been happy to own—only they were installed in the bathroom of a boat.
有时他怀疑裘德这辈子唯一想要的，就是在剑桥市跟哈罗德、朱丽娅一起玩扮家家酒。比如去年，杰比的一个收藏家邀请他参加巡航之旅，那位收藏家非常有钱，而且是重要的艺术赞助人，有艘游艇定期往返于希腊诸岛间，船上还有博物馆级的现代艺术大师作品，虽然都放在船上的洗手间里。
Malcolm had been working on his project in Doha, or somewhere, but Willem and Jude had been in town, and he’d called Jude and asked him if he wanted to go: The collector would pay their way. He would send his plane. It would be five days on a yacht. He didn’t know why he even needed to have a conversation. “Meet me at Teterboro,” he should’ve just texted them. “Bring sunscreen.”
马尔科姆当时在多哈或哪里忙他的案子，但威廉和裘德在纽约，于是他打电话给裘德，问他要不要一起去：全部由那个收藏家出钱，他会派私人飞机来接他们，然后一起在游艇上过五天。他不知道自己为什么还要打电话问，其实发条短信给他们就行了：跟我在泰特伯洛机场碰面，要带防晒油。
But no, he had asked, and Jude had thanked him. And then Jude had said, “But that’s over Thanksgiving.”
但是，他问了。裘德谢谢他，接着说：“可是那是感恩节。”
“So?” he’d asked.
“所以呢？”他问。
“JB, thank you so much for inviting me,” Jude had said, as he listened in disbelief. “It sounds incredible. But I have to go to Harold and Julia’s.”
“杰比，很谢谢你邀请我，”裘德说，他不敢置信地听着，“听起来好像很棒，但是我得去哈罗德和朱丽娅家。”
He had been gobsmacked by this. Of course, he too was very fond of Harold and Julia, and like the others, he too could see how good they were for Jude, and how he’d become slightly less haunted with their friendship, but come on! It was Boston. He could always see them. But Jude said no, and that was that. (And then, of course, because Jude said no, Willem had said no as well, and in the end, he had ended up with the two of them and Malcolm in Boston, seething at the scene around the table—parental stand-ins; friends of the parental stand-ins; lots of mediocre food; liberals having arguments with one another about Democratic politics that involved a lot of shouting about issues they all agreed on—that was so clichéd and generic that he wanted to scream and yet held such bizarre fascination for Jude and Willem.)
他完全目瞪口呆。当然，他也很喜欢哈罗德和朱丽娅，而且跟其他人一样，他看得出来他们对裘德多么有益，让裘德变得没那么依赖他们的友谊，但是拜托！那是波士顿，他随时都可以去看他们。但是裘德说不，没得商量。（然后，当然，因为裘德说不，于是威廉也说不。到最后，他只好跟着他们两个和马尔科姆去了波士顿，看着晚餐桌上的场景生闷气——替身父母，替身父母的朋友，一大堆平庸的食物，自由派争执着民主党的政治，为了一些他们全都同意的议题而大声叫嚷。这一切真是老套平凡得让他想尖叫，不过对裘德和威廉却有种异乎寻常的魅力。）
So which had come first: becoming close to Jackson or realizing how boring his friends were? He had met Jackson after the opening of his second show, which had come almost five years after his first. The show was called “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked” and was exactly that: a hundred and fifty fifteen-by-twenty-two-inch paintings on thin pieces of board of the faces of everyone he had ever known. The series had been inspired by a painting he had done of Jude and given to Harold and Julia on the day of Jude’s adoption. (God, he loved that painting. He should have just kept it. Or he should have exchanged it: Harold and Julia would’ve been happy with a less-superior piece, as long as it was of Jude. The last time he had been in Cambridge, he had seriously considered stealing it, slipping it off its hook in the hallway and stuffing it into his duffel bag before he left.) Once again, “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” was a success, although it hadn’t been the series he had wanted to do; the series he had wanted to do was the series he was working on now.
所以哪个先发生：是先跟杰克逊走得近，还是先领悟到他的好友们有多么无趣？他是在第二次个展开幕时认识杰克逊的，也就是他举办第一次个展将近五年后。那次个展的标题是“我认识的每个人、我爱过的每个人、我恨过的每个人、我上过的每个人”，而且展览内容就是如此：一百五十幅十五乘二十二英寸的画作，上面是一张张画在薄纸板上的脸，都是他认识的人。激发这个系列的灵感，是他在裘德被收养那天送给哈罗德和朱丽娅的一幅裘德画像。（老天，他好爱那幅画。他真该自己留着的。或者应该用另一幅比较不那么出色的去交换：反正只要是画裘德，哈罗德和朱丽娅都会很高兴。上回他去剑桥市的时候，还认真考虑要偷走那幅画，趁离开前从门厅的挂钩上拿下来，塞进他的大旅行袋里。）再一次，“我认识的每个人”个展很成功，虽然那个系列并不是他真正想做的；他真正想做的，是他手头正在进行的系列。
Jackson was another of the gallery’s artists, and although JB had known of him, he had never actually met him before, and was surprised, after being introduced to him at the dinner after the opening, how much he had liked him, how unexpectedly funny he was, because Jackson was not the type of person he’d normally gravitate toward. For one thing, he hated, really hated Jackson’s work: he made found sculptures, but of the most puerile and obvious sort, like a Barbie doll’s legs glued to the bottom of a can of tuna fish. Oh god, he’d thought, the first time he’d seen that on the gallery’s website. He’s being represented by the same gallery as I am? He didn’t even consider it art. He considered it provocation, although only a high-school student—no, a junior-high student—would consider it provocative. Jackson thought the pieces Kienholzian, which offended JB, and he didn’t even like Kienholz.
杰克逊也是那个画廊代理的艺术家。杰比知道这个人，但是之前从没见过，在开幕后的例行晚宴上经人介绍认识后，他很惊讶自己那么喜欢他，也惊讶他居然这么有趣。杰克逊不是平常会吸引他的那一型。首先，他非常、非常讨厌杰克逊的作品，他做的是现成物雕塑，但都使用了最愚蠢又明显的那类现成物，比如，把芭比娃娃的两条腿粘在一个鲔鱼罐头的底部。啊老天，他第一次在画廊网站上看到那件作品时心想，他跟我是同一间画廊代理的？他甚至不觉得那是艺术，而是挑衅，不过只有高中生——不，初中生——才会认为那是挑衅。杰克逊认为自己的作品有金霍尔兹（Edward Kienholz）的特征，让杰比觉得被冒犯了，而且他根本不喜欢金霍兹。
For another, Jackson was rich: so rich that he had never worked a single day in his life. So rich that his gallerist had agreed to represent him (or so everyone said, and god, he hoped it was true) as a favor to Jackson’s father. So rich that his shows sold out because, it was rumored, his mother—who had divorced Jackson’s father, a manufacturer of some sort of essential widget of airplane machinery, when Jackson was young and married an inventor of some sort of essential widget of heart transplant surgeries—bought out all his shows and then auctioned the pieces, driving up the prices and then buying them back, inflating Jackson’s sales record. Unlike other rich people he knew—including Malcolm and Richard and Ezra—Jackson only rarely pretended not to be rich. JB had always found the others’ parsimoniousness put-on and irritating, but seeing Jackson once smack down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep the change, had sobered him. There was something obscene about how careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional, and his mother’s son.
第二，杰克逊很有钱，有钱到他这辈子没有上过一天班。有钱到他的画廊经理会同意代理他（每个人都是这样说，老天，他希望这是真的）是为了给杰克逊父亲一个人情。有钱到他的展览作品全部卖光光，谣传是因为他的母亲（某种飞机基本机械零件的生产商，她在杰克逊很小的时候就和他父亲离婚了，嫁给了一个投资心脏移植手术所需的某种基本小装置的商人）买下了所有作品，然后送去拍卖，把价钱顶高后再买回来，好抬高杰克逊的成交价纪录。跟他所认识的其他有钱人（包括马尔科姆、理查德、埃兹拉）不同，杰克逊很少假装自己不是有钱人。每次杰比发现其他的有钱朋友假装节省，就觉得这些人很烦；但有回清晨3点他们嗑多了药咯咯傻笑，又饿得半死，跑去杂货店买两条巧克力棒，他看到杰克逊拿出一张百元大钞拍在桌面，跟店员说不用找了，这让他当场清醒过来。杰克逊对钱的漫不经心有种令人厌恶的特质，提醒杰比：尽管他不这么认为，但其实他自己也很无趣、很传统，而且是他母亲的乖儿子。
For a third, Jackson wasn’t even good-looking. He supposed he was straight—at any rate, there were always girls around, girls whom Jackson treated disdainfully and yet who drifted after him, lint-like, their faces smooth and empty—but he was the least sexy person JB had ever met. Jackson had very pale hair, almost white, and pimple-stippled skin, and teeth that were clearly once expensive-looking but had gone the color of dust and whose gaps were grouted with butter-yellow tartar, the sight of which repulsed JB.
第三点，杰克逊甚至长得不好看。他猜想他是异性恋者，无论如何，他身边总是围绕着年轻女人，杰克逊对待她们的态度很轻蔑，但那些皮肤光滑、表情空虚的女人还是老缠着他，像甩不掉的线头似的。他是杰比见过最不性感的人了。杰克逊的头发是浅黄色，几近纯白的，一脸痘疤，牙齿看起来显然很昂贵，但已经转为脏灰色，牙缝间结了一道道奶油黄的牙结石，让杰比看了就恶心。
