《渺小一生》:这部电影的成绩远超过任何人的预料

　 And then it is Tuesday, a day that feels like summer, and Willem’s last in the city. He leaves for work early that morning but comes home at lunchtime so he can say goodbye.

到了星期二，这一天感觉像夏天，也是威廉待在纽约的最后一天。他那天一早出门上班，不过午餐时间又回家来跟威廉告别。

　 “I’m going to miss you,” he tells Willem, as he always does.

“我会想念你的。”他告诉威廉，一如往常。

　 “I’m going to miss you more,” Willem says, as he always does, and then, also as he always does, “Are you going to take care of yourself?”

“我会更想念你的。”威廉说，一如往常，然后，还是一如往常。“你会好好照顾自己吗？”

　 “Yes,” he says, not letting go of him. “I promise.” He feels Willem sigh.

“会的，”他说，不肯放开他，“我保证。”他感觉到威廉叹气了。

　 “Remember you can always call me, no matter what time it is,” Willem tells him, and he nods.

“别忘了你总是可以打电话给我，不管是几点。”威廉告诉他，他点点头。

　 “Go,” he says. “I’ll be fine,” and Willem sighs again, and goes.

“去吧，”他说，“我会好好的。”威廉又叹气，随即出门。

　 He hates to have Willem leave, but he is excited, too: for selfish reasons, and also because he is relieved, and happy, that Willem is working so much. After they had returned from Vietnam that January, just before he left to film Duets, Willem had been alternately anxious and bluffly confident, and although he tried not to speak of his insecurities, he knew how worried Willem was. He knew Willem worried that his first movie after the announcement of their relationship was, no matter how much he protested otherwise, a gay movie. He knew Willem worried when the director of a science-fiction thriller he wanted to do didn’t call him back as quickly as he had thought he might (though he had in the end, and everything had worked out the way he had hoped). He knew Willem worried about the seemingly endless series of articles, the ceaseless requests for interviews, the speculations and television segments, the gossip columns and the editorials, about his revelation that had greeted them on their return to the States, and which, as Kit told them, they were powerless to control or stop: they would simply have to wait until people grew bored of the subject, and that might take months. (Willem didn’t read stories about himself in general, but there were just so many of them: when they turned on the television, when they went online, when they opened the paper, there they were—stories about Willem, and what he now represented.) When they spoke on the phone—Willem in Texas, he at Greene Street—he could feel Willem trying not to talk too much about how nervous he was and knew it was because Willem didn’t want him to feel guilty. “Tell me, Willem,” he finally said. “I promise I’m not going to blame myself. I swear.” And after he had repeated this every day for a week, Willem did at last tell him, and although he did feel guilty—he cut himself after every one of these conversations—he didn’t ask Willem for reassurances, he didn’t make Willem feel worse than he already did; he only listened and tried to be as soothing as he could. Good, he’d praise himself after they’d hung up, after every time he’d kept his mouth closed against his own fears. Good job. Later, he’d burrow the tip of the razor into one of his scars, flicking the tissue upward with the razor’s corner until he had cut down to the soft flesh beneath.

他很不想让威廉离开，但是他也很兴奋：因为自私的理由，他松了一口气，另外，看到威廉的工作这么忙，他其实很高兴。那年一月他们从越南回来后，在出发去拍《二重唱》之前，威廉不是陷入焦虑，就是虚张声势的信心十足；威廉尽量不谈自己的不安全感，但他知道威廉有多担心。他知道威廉担心他在宣布两人恋情后的第一部电影就是同性恋电影（无论他怎么抗议说不是）。他知道有一部科幻惊悚片威廉很想演，但试镜后导演迟迟没打电话来，让威廉很担心（后来还是打来了，而且一切发展都如他期望的那般顺利）。他知道他们一回到美国，那些永无止境、关于他们恋情的报道文章，还有不间断的专访要求、种种推测和电视片段、八卦专栏和杂志评论，都会让威廉很担心。基特则告诉他们，他们没有办法控制或阻止，只能等到大家对这个主题厌倦，而这个过程可能要花上好几个月（通常威廉不去读自己的报道，但这些报道实在太多了：他们看电视、上网、打开报纸，就会不小心看到威廉的新闻，或是他现在代表的意义）。他们通电话时（威廉在德州，他在格林街），他感到威廉试着不去谈他有多紧张，也知道这是因为威廉不希望他觉得内疚。“告诉我吧，威廉，”他最后终于说，“我保证我不会怪自己。我发誓。”他这么重复了一星期后，威廉终于告诉他。尽管他的确觉得内疚（每回这类对话之后，他都会割自己），但他没要求威廉保证不离开他，知道这只会让威廉感觉更糟；他只是倾听，设法安慰对方。很好，每回挂了电话、他再次忍住没说出自己的恐惧时，都会这么称赞自己。做得很好。稍后，他会把刮胡刀片的尖端压进一道疤里，把那肌肉组织往上挑开来，直到他能往下割到柔软的肉里。

　 He thinks it a good sign that the film Willem is shooting in London now is, as Kit would say, a gay film. “Normally I’d say not to,” Kit told Willem. “But it’s too good a script to pass up.” The film is titled The Poisoned Apple, and is about the last few years of Alan Turing’s life, after he was arrested for indecency and was chemically castrated. He idolized Turing, of course—all mathematicians did—and had been moved almost to tears by the script. “You have to do it, Willem,” he had said.

威廉目前在伦敦拍摄的电影，一如基特所说，是一部同性恋电影，他觉得这是个好迹象。“正常状况下，我会劝你别接，”基特告诉威廉，“但这个剧本太棒了，错过可惜。”那部电影叫《毒苹果》，描述英国数学家艾伦·图灵因为猥亵罪被捕并被化学阉割后，人生的最后几年。他崇拜图灵（所有数学家都崇拜图灵），也被那个剧本感动得差点掉泪。“你一定要接这部片子，威廉。”当时他说。

　 “I don’t know,” Willem had said, smiling, “another gay movie?”

“不知道哎，”威廉微笑着说，“又一部同性恋电影？”

　 “Duets did really well,” he reminded Willem—and it had: better than anyone had thought it would—but it was a lazy sort of argument, because he knew Willem had already decided to do the film, and he was proud of him, and childishly excited to see him in it, the way he was about all of Willem’s movies.

“《二重唱》结果相当好啊。”他提醒威廉——的确，这部电影的成绩远超过任何人的预料——但这场争辩不太起劲，因为他知道威廉已经决定要接这部电影了。他很以他为荣，且一如面对威廉拍过的所有电影，他像孩子般兴奋，期待要看他的表现。

　 The Saturday after Willem leaves, Malcolm meets him at the apartment and he drives the two of them north, to just outside Garrison, where they are building a house. Willem had bought the land—seventy acres, with its own lake and its own forest—three years ago, and for three years it had sat empty. Malcolm had drawn plans, and Willem had approved them, but he had never actually told Malcolm he could begin. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, he had found Willem at the dining-room table, looking at Malcolm’s drawings.

威廉离开的那个星期六，马尔科姆来公寓接他，两人开车北上，到纽约州加里森村外的一片土地，他们正在这里盖房子。威廉三年前买下这块土地（七十英亩，有一座湖和一片森林），但一直空着没用。马尔科姆画好设计图，威廉已经同意，但一直没跟马尔科姆说可以动工。可是大约十八个月前的一个早晨，他发现威廉坐在餐桌旁，看着马尔科姆的设计图。

　 Willem held out his hand to him, not lifting his eyes from the papers, and he took it and allowed Willem to pull him to his side. “I think we should do this,” Willem said.

威廉朝他伸出一只手，目光仍停留在纸上，他握住威廉的手，让威廉把他拉到身边。“我想我们应该进行这个了。”威廉说。

　 And so they had met with Malcolm again, and Malcolm had drawn new plans: the original house had been two stories, a modernist saltbox, but the new house was a single level and mostly glass. He had offered to pay for it, but Willem had refused. They argued back and forth, Willem pointing out that he wasn’t contributing anything toward the maintenance of Greene Street, and he pointing out that he didn’t care. “Jude,” Willem said at last, “we’ve never fought about money. Let’s not start now.” And he knew Willem was right: their friendship had never been measured by money. They had never talked about money when they hadn’t had any—he had always considered whatever he earned Willem’s as well—and now that they had it, he felt the same way.

于是他们又跟马尔科姆碰面，马尔科姆画出新的设计图。原来的房子是一栋两层楼的现代主义坡顶盐盒式房屋，但新的房子是一层楼，大部分都是玻璃。他提出他要出钱，但威廉拒绝了。他们争辩了半天。威廉指出格林街公寓的维修费用他从来没分摊过，他说他不在乎。“裘德，”威廉最后说，“我们从来没为钱吵过，就不要破这个例吧。”他知道威廉说得没错：他们的友谊从来不是用钱衡量的。他们没钱时从来不谈钱（他总觉得无论自己赚多少，那些钱也是威廉的），现在他们有钱了，他的感觉还是一样。

　 Eight months ago, when Malcolm was breaking ground, he and Willem had gone up to the property and had wandered around it. He had been feeling unusually well that day, and had even allowed Willem to hold his hand as they walked down the gentle hill that sloped from where the house would sit, and then left, toward the forest that held the lake in its embrace. The forest was denser than they had imagined, the ground so thick with pine needles that their every footfall sank, as if the earth beneath them was made of something rubbery and squashy and pumped half full of air. It was difficult terrain for him, and he grasped Willem’s hand in earnest, but when Willem asked him if he wanted to stop, he shook his head. About twenty minutes later, when they were almost halfway around the lake, they came to a clearing that looked like something out of a fairy tale, the sky above them all dark green fir tops, the floor beneath them that same soft pelt of the trees’ leavings. They stopped then, looking around them, quiet until Willem said, “We should just build it here,” and he smiled, but inside him something wrenched, a feeling like his entire nervous system was being tugged out of his navel, because he was remembering that other forest he had once thought he’d live in, and was realizing that he was to finally have it after all: a house in the woods, with water nearby, and someone who loved him. And then he shuddered, a tremor that rippled its way through his body, and Willem looked at him. “Are you cold?” he asked. “No,” he said, “but let’s keep walking,” and so they had.

八个月前，马尔科姆破土动工了。当时他和威廉北上，在这片土地上漫游。那天他感觉出奇的好，甚至让威廉牵着他的手从房子的工地走下缓坡，然后左转，朝环绕湖泊的森林走去。那片森林比他们想象的更浓密，满地厚厚的松针让他们每一步都往下陷，好像脚下的土地是某种有弹性、柔软、灌了一半空气的东西。这片地形对他来说并不好走，他认真握紧威廉的手，但威廉问他要不要停下休息时，他摇了摇头。大约走了二十分钟，环湖快一半，他们来到一片宛如出自童话的林间空地，上方的天空充满墨绿色的冷杉树顶，脚下则是同样厚而柔软的落叶。他们在此停了下来，默默看着四周，最后威廉说：“我们应该把房子盖在这里。”他微笑，但心底有个东西猛地一扯，仿佛他整个神经系统都被人从肚脐拉出来，因为他想起另一片森林，他小时候以为会去住的那个，这才明白自己的愿望终于实现了：树林里的一栋房子，附近有水，还有个爱他的人。他打了个寒噤，颤抖蹿遍全身，威廉看着他。“你冷吗？”他问。“不冷，”他说，“我们继续走吧。”于是他们就离开了。

　 Since then, he has avoided the woods, but he loves coming up to the site, and is enjoying working with Malcolm again. He or Willem go up every other weekend, though he knows Malcolm prefers it when he goes, because Willem is largely uninterested in the details of the project. He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects—hammers; wrenches; pliers—he’s embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors. Aside from the house and the garage, there is an outdoor pool and, in the barn, an indoor pool: the house will be done in a little more than three months, the pool and barn by the following spring.

自此开始，他总是避开那些树林，但他喜欢来到这片土地，也很开心跟马尔科姆再度合作。每隔一周，他或威廉就会来这里看一下，但他知道马尔科姆比较喜欢他来，因为威廉对项目的细节大都没兴趣。威廉信任马尔科姆，但马尔科姆不想要信任：他想要有个人让他炫耀他在土耳其伊兹密尔外一个小采矿场找到的那种带银色条纹的大理石，然后跟他争辩太贵有多贵；他想要有个人闻闻他找来当浴缸的那块岐阜[1]柏木；来检视像三叶虫般嵌在水泥地板的种种物件——槌子、扳手、钳子等。除了房子和车库，这里有户外游泳池，谷仓里还有一座室内游泳池：房子大约三个月后会完工，池塘和谷仓则会在明年春天前完成。

　 Now he walks through the house with Malcolm, running his hands over its surfaces, listening to Malcolm instruct the contractor on everything that needs fixing. As always, he is impressed watching Malcolm at work: he never tires of watching any of his friends at work, but Malcolm’s transformation has been the most gratifying to witness, more so than even Willem’s. In these moments, he remembers how carefully and meticulously Malcolm built his imaginary houses, and with such seriousness; once, when they were sophomores, JB had (accidentally, he claimed later) set one on fire when he was high, and Malcolm had been so angry and hurt that he had almost started crying. He had followed Malcolm as he ran out of Hood, and had sat with him on the library steps in the cold. “I know it’s silly,” Malcolm had said after he’d calmed down. “But they mean something to me.”

现在他跟着马尔科姆走过屋子，双手摸过各种表面，听着马尔科姆指挥承造商解决各式各样的事情。一如往常，观察马尔科姆工作总是令他叹为观止：他总是看不厌朋友工作，但目睹马尔科姆的转变让他最有满足感，比威廉犹有过之。在这些时刻，他就会想起马尔科姆以前是多么小心、一丝不苟地制作想象中的房子模型，而且是那么认真；大二那年，有一回杰比嗑药嗑多了，放火烧掉一个房屋模型（他后来宣称是不小心的），马尔科姆又气又伤心，差点当场哭出来。他追着马尔科姆跑出虎德馆，在寒风中陪他坐在图书馆前的阶梯上。“我知道这样很蠢，”马尔科姆冷静下来后，说，“但是那些模型对我是有意义的。”

　 “I know,” he’d said. He had always loved Malcolm’s houses; he still has the first one Malcolm ever made him all those years ago, for his seventeenth birthday. “It’s not silly.” He knew what the houses meant to Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words. “What does Malcolm have to worry about?” JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.

“我知道。”他说。他一直很喜欢马尔科姆做的房子模型，到现在还留着多年前马尔科姆做给他的第一个，是他17岁的生日礼物。“这样并不蠢。”他知道那些房子对马尔科姆的意义：它们是一种控制权，提醒他，尽管他人生中有种种不确定，有一件事是他完全可以操控、永远可以表达言语无法说出的。“马尔科姆有什么好担心的？”杰比看到马尔科姆焦虑时，就会这么问他们，但是他懂：马尔科姆担心是因为活着本来就要担心。人生很可怕；人生是不可知的。即使马尔科姆家那么有钱，也不能让他完全免疫。人生会丢出种种意外难题给他，他得试着回答，就像他们其他人一样。他们全都以自己的方式在寻求舒适感——马尔科姆用他的房子、威廉用他的女朋友、杰比用他的画笔、他用他的刮胡刀片——这些东西只属于他们，可以用来抵抗这个广阔得令人胆寒、难以面对的世界，以及其中持续不断的每一分钟、每一小时、每一天。

　 These days, Malcolm works on fewer and fewer residences; in fact, they see far less of him than they once did. Bellcast now has offices in London and Hong Kong, and although Malcolm handles most of the American business—he is now planning a new wing of the museum at their old college—he is increasingly scarce. But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

这几年，马尔科姆越来越少接住宅设计了；事实上，他们看到马尔科姆的机会少了很多。钟模如今在伦敦和香港都有分公司，尽管马尔科姆负责大部分的美国业务（他正在为他们大学母校的博物馆设计一栋新的翼楼），但已经越来越难分身了。不过他们的房子，马尔科姆还是亲自监督，而且每次相约来视察时从不失约，也从不改期。他们离开工地前，他一手放在马尔科姆的肩膀上。“马尔，”他说，“我怎么谢你都不够。”马尔科姆听了微笑：“这是我最喜欢的项目，裘德，”他说，“而且是设计给我最喜欢的人。”

　 Back in the city, he drops Malcolm off in Cobble Hill and then drives over the bridge and north, to his office. This is the final piece of pleasure he finds in Willem’s absences: because it means he can stay at work later, and longer. Without Lucien, work is simultaneously more and less enjoyable—less, because although he still sees Lucien, who has retired to a life of, as he says, pretending to enjoy golf in Connecticut, he misses talking to him daily, misses Lucien’s attempts to appall and provoke him; more, because he has found that he enjoys chairing the department, that he enjoys being on the firm’s compensation committee, deciding how the company’s profits will be divvied up each year. “Who knew you were such a powermonger, Jude?” Lucien asked him when he admitted this, and he had protested: it wasn’t that, he told Lucien—it was that he took satisfaction in seeing what had actually been brought in each year, how his hours and days at the office—his and everyone else’s—had translated themselves into numbers, and then those numbers into cash, and then that cash into the stuff of his colleagues’ lives: their houses and tuitions and vacations and cars. (He didn’t tell Lucien this part. Lucien would think he was being romantic, and there would be a wry, ironic lecture on his tendency toward sentimentalism.)

回到纽约市区，他先送马尔科姆到布鲁克林科布尔山的家，然后往北过桥回曼哈顿，到自己的办公室去。这是他发现威廉不在所带来的最后一部分乐趣：因为这表示他可以加班到更晚、工作时间更久。没了吕西安，他的工作变得更愉快，也更不愉快——更不愉快，是因为他还是常常看到吕西安，只是他已经退休了，而且一如他自己说的，假装很享受在康涅狄格州打高尔夫球的生活。他很想念每天跟吕西安谈话，想念吕西安总是想吓他或挑衅他；更愉快，则是因为他发现自己很喜欢主持这个部门，很喜欢成为事务所里薪酬委员会的一分子，可以决定公司每一年的利润如何分配。有回他跟吕西安承认这一点，吕西安问他：“裘德，谁知道你居然这么喜欢玩弄权力啊？”他抗议：不是这样的。他告诉吕西安，他的满足感来自看着每年实际赚进多少钱、看着他和其他人花在公司的时间转化为数字，然后这些数字变成钱，这些钱再变成同事生活中的东西：他们的房子、学费、假期、汽车（最后这部分他没告诉吕西安，因为吕西安会觉得他太浪漫了，又会挖苦地批评他多愁善感的倾向）。

　 Rosen Pritchard had always been important to him, but after Caleb it had become essential. In his life at the firm, he was assessed only by the business he secured, by the work he did: there, he had no past, he had no deficiencies. His life there began with where he had gone to law school and what he had done there; it ended with each day’s accomplishments, with each year’s tallies of billable hours, with each new client he could attract. At Rosen Pritchard, there was no room for Brother Luke, or Caleb, or Dr. Traylor, or the monastery, or the home; they were irrelevant, they were extraneous details, they had nothing to do with the person he had created for himself. There, he wasn’t someone who cowered in the bathroom, cutting himself, but instead a series of numbers: one number to signify how much money he brought in, and another for the number of hours he billed; a third representing how many people he oversaw, a fourth for how much he rewarded them. It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he worked; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable.

罗森·普理查德律师事务所对他来说一直很重要，而在跟凯莱布的那一段结束后，就变得更不可或缺。他在事务所的这部分人生中，评估他价值的，纯粹是他完成的业务，以及他所做的工作。在事务所里，他没有过去，没有缺陷。他在那里的人生始自他上的是哪一所法学院、在里头做了什么，止于他每天达到的成就、每年的工时，以及他吸引到的新客户。在罗森·普理查德，没有给卢克修士、凯莱布、特雷勒医生、修道院或少年之家的空间；那些都是不相干的，都是无关的细节，跟他为自己创造出来的这个大律师形象一点边也扯不上。在罗森·普理查德，他不是那个躲在浴室里割自己的人，而是一连串数字：一个数字代表他为事务所赚了多少钱，另一个数字是他的工时，第三个数字代表他管理的员工数量，第四个数字是他奖励他们的分红。这种事情他从来没办法跟好友们解释，他们对于他的工作量既惊叹又同情。他永远没办法告诉他们，只有在那个办公室里，被工作和那些人（他知道他的朋友认为这些人简直呆滞又乏味）环绕，才是他自觉最像个人、最有尊严、最不脆弱的时候。