《渺小一生》:“这里的电梯运转都正常吧？”
“Annika, this is my friend Willem,” JB said. “Willem, Annika works in the art department. She’s cool.”
“安妮卡，这位是我的朋友威廉。”杰比说，“威廉，安妮卡在美编组工作。她很酷。”
Annika looked down and stuck out her hand in one movement. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said to the floor. JB kicked Willem in the foot and grinned at him. Willem ignored him.
安妮卡低头的同时伸出手，“很高兴认识你。”她对着地板说。杰比踢了一下威廉的脚，朝他咧嘴一笑。威廉没理他。
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” he said.
“我也很高兴认识你。”他说。
“Well, this is the apartment? It’s my aunt’s? She lived here for fifty years but she just moved into a retirement home?” Annika was speaking very fast and had apparently decided that the best strategy was to treat Willem like an eclipse and simply not look at him at all. She was talking faster and faster, about her aunt, and how she always said the neighborhood had changed, and how she’d never heard of Lispenard Street until she’d moved downtown, and how she was sorry it hadn’t been painted yet, but her aunt had just, literally just moved out and they’d only had a chance to have it cleaned the previous weekend. She looked everywhere but at Willem—at the ceiling (stamped tin), at the floors (cracked, but parquet), at the walls (on which long-ago-hung picture frames had left ghostly shadows)—until finally Willem had to interrupt, gently, and ask if he could take a look through the rest of the apartment.
“好吧，就是这间公寓了。原来是我阿姨的，她在这里住了五十年，最近刚搬进养老院。”安妮卡讲话很快，而且她显然认为最佳策略就是把威廉当成日食，不要看他就好。她讲得越来越快，讲她阿姨老念叨这一带变了，还有她自己搬到市区之前也从没听过利斯本纳街，又说她很抱歉屋子里还没粉刷，不过她阿姨真的才刚搬出去，他们唯一的打扫机会就是上周末。她哪里都看，就是不看威廉——看天花板（锤印锡板），看地板（裂了，不过是拼花木地板），看墙壁（上头长年挂着的相框留下一个个幽灵似的印子）——直到最后威廉不得不柔声打断她，问她能不能看一下公寓的其他部分。
“Oh, be my guest,” said Annika, “I’ll leave you alone,” although she then began to follow them, talking rapidly to JB about someone named Jasper and how he’d been using Archer for everything, and didn’t JB think it looked a little too round and weird for body text? Now that Willem had his back turned to her, she stared at him openly, her rambling becoming more inane the longer she spoke.
“啊，尽量看。”安妮卡说，“我就不打扰你们了。”但接着，她就跟在他们后头，讲话还是很快，跟杰比说起一个叫贾斯珀的，总是什么都要用Archer字体，杰比不觉得正文用这种字体，看起来有点太圆太诡异吗？现在威廉背对着她，她就敢盯着他看了。她讲得越久，那些闲扯就越显得愚蠢。
JB watched Annika watch Willem. He had never seen her like this, so nervous and girlish (normally she was surly and silent and was actually a bit feared in the office for creating on the wall above her desk an elaborate sculpture of a heart made entirely of X-ACTO blades), but he had seen lots of women behave this way around Willem. They all had. Their friend Lionel used to say that Willem must have been a fisherman in a past life, because he couldn’t help but attract pussy. And yet most of the time (though not always), Willem seemed unaware of the attention. JB had once asked Malcolm why he thought that was, and Malcolm said he thought it was because Willem hadn’t noticed. JB had only grunted in reply, but his thinking was: Malcolm was the most obtuse person he knew, and if even Malcolm had noticed how women reacted around Willem, it was impossible that Willem himself hadn’t. Later, however, Jude had offered a different interpretation: he had suggested that Willem was deliberately not reacting to all the women so the other men around him wouldn’t feel threatened by him. This made more sense; Willem was liked by everyone and never wanted to make people feel intentionally uncomfortable, and so it was possible that, subconsciously at least, he was feigning a sort of ignorance. But still—it was fascinating to watch, and the three of them never tired of it, nor of making fun of Willem for it afterward, though he would normally just smile and say nothing.
杰比观察着安妮卡打量威廉。他从来没见过她这样，紧张又充满少女态（通常她在办公室里沉默又易怒，其实还有点令人担心，因为她办公桌上方的墙面放了一个她自制的心形雕塑，完全是用笔刀雕出来的），可是杰比看过太多女人碰到威廉就这样。他们全都见过。他们的朋友莱诺以前老说威廉上辈子一定是渔夫，天生就是会吸引猫咪[1]。然而大多数时候（但不是每次都这样），威廉似乎对女人的关注浑然不觉。杰比有回问马尔科姆为什么威廉会这样，马尔科姆说他认为是因为威廉没注意到。杰比听了只是哼了一声，他心里真正的想法是：马尔科姆是他认识的人里头最迟钝的，如果连马尔科姆都注意到女人碰到威廉的反应，威廉自己不可能没注意到。不过稍后，裘德提出另一个不同的解释：他说威廉可能是刻意不回应那些女人，这样在场的其他男人就不会觉得受到威胁。这个说法比较合理，人人都喜欢威廉，他也绝对不会想害别人不舒服，所以有可能（至少在潜意识里）他只是装傻而已。可是啊——那真是个奇观，让他们三个百看不厌，而且事后老拿来取笑威廉，不过他通常只是笑一笑，什么也不说。
“Does the elevator work well here?” Willem asked abruptly, turning around.
“这里的电梯运转都正常吧？”威廉忽然转身问。
“What?” Annika replied, startled. “Yes, it’s pretty reliable.” She pulled her faint lips into a narrow smile that JB realized, with a stomach-twist of embarrassment for her, was meant to be flirtatious. Oh, Annika, he thought. “What exactly are you planning on bringing into my aunt’s apartment?”
“什么？”安妮卡回答，吓了一跳，“是的，蛮可靠的。”她薄薄的嘴唇扯出一个小小的微笑，杰比胃里一紧，他知道安妮卡的那个笑是想放电，替她觉得难为情。啊，安妮卡，他心想。“你们是打算搬什么东西进来啊？”
“Our friend,” he answered, before Willem could. “He has trouble climbing stairs and needs the elevator to work.”
“我们的朋友。”杰比抢在威廉前头回答，“他爬楼梯有困难，所以需要电梯。”
“Oh,” she said, flushing again. She was back to staring at the floor. “Sorry. Yes, it works.”
“喔。”她说，又脸红了。然后回头瞪着地板看，“对不起。没错，电梯能用。”
The apartment was not impressive. There was a small foyer, little larger than the size of a doormat, from which pronged the kitchen (a hot, greasy little cube) to the right and a dining area to the left that would accommodate perhaps a card table. A half wall separated this space from the living room, with its four windows, each striped with bars, looking south onto the litter-scattered street, and down a short hall to the right was the bathroom with its milk-glass sconces and worn-enamel tub, and across from it the bedroom, which had another window and was deep but narrow; here, two wooden twin-bed frames had been placed parallel to each other, each pressed against a wall. One of the frames was already topped with a futon, a bulky, graceless thing, as heavy as a dead horse.
这间公寓没什么好的。进门的门厅很小，比门垫大不了多少，门厅往右通向厨房（一个闷热、油腻的小方间），往左通向餐厅，或许可以放下一张小牌桌。餐厅和客厅只隔着一道矮墙，里头有四个窗子，装了铁窗，朝南开向一条散落着垃圾的街道。沿着一条短廊往前走，右边是浴室，里头有乳白灯罩的壁灯和旧搪瓷浴缸，浴室对面则是卧房，里头有一扇窗，整个房间深而窄，左右靠墙平行放着两张双人床的木制床架，其中一个上头已经放了日式床垫，巨大而丑陋，重得像一匹死马。
“The futon’s never been used,” Annika said. She told a long story about how she was going to move in, and had even bought the futon in preparation, but had never gotten to use it because she moved in instead with her friend Clement, who wasn’t her boyfriend, just her friend, and god, what a retard she was for saying that. Anyway, if Willem wanted the apartment, she’d throw in the futon for free.
“这张日式床垫没用过。”安妮卡说。她讲了一个漫长的故事，说她本来要搬进来，甚至先买了那张床垫，结果却没机会用，因为她后来又搬去她朋友克莱门那里了，不是男朋友，只是朋友。老天，她真是白痴，讲这干吗。总之，如果威廉决定租下这间公寓，床垫就免费送他。
Willem thanked her. “What do you think, JB?” he asked.
威廉谢了她。“你觉得怎么样，杰比？”他问。
What did he think? He thought it was a shithole. Of course, he too lived in a shithole, but he was in his shithole by choice, and because it was free, and the money he would have had to spend on rent he was instead able to spend on paints, and supplies, and drugs, and the occasional taxi. But if Ezra were to ever decide to start charging him rent, no way would he be there. His family may not have Ezra’s money, or Malcolm’s, but under no circumstances would they allow him to throw away money living in a shithole. They would find him something better, or give him a little monthly gift to help him along. But Willem and Jude didn’t have that choice: They had to pay their own way, and they had no money, and thus they were condemned to live in a shithole. And if they were, then this was probably the shithole to live in—it was cheap, it was downtown, and their prospective landlord already had a crush on fifty percent of them.
他觉得怎么样？他觉得这是个破烂狗窝。当然，他自己也住在一个破烂狗窝，但那是出于自己的选择，因为那里不要钱，他可以把省下的房租拿来买颜料、生活用品，还有迷幻药，以及偶尔搭趟出租车。但如果埃兹拉哪天忽然要收他房租，他才不会住在那儿。他家不像埃兹拉家或马尔科姆家那么有钱，但他的家人也绝不会让他花钱住在一个破烂狗窝里。他们会替他找个更好的住处，每个月接济他一点。但威廉和裘德就没有办法了，他们得自食其力，而且没钱就注定要住破烂狗窝。既然如此，那或许就该搬进眼前这个狗窝——这里很便宜，又在市区，而且他们未来的房东已经对他们其中的一个有了好感。
So “I think it’s perfect,” he told Willem, who agreed. Annika let out a yelp. And a hurried conversation later, it was over: Annika had a tenant, and Willem and Jude had a place to live—all before JB had to remind Willem that he wouldn’t mind Willem paying for a bowl of noodles for lunch, before he had to get back to the office.
所以，“我觉得这里很完美。”他告诉威廉，而威廉也赞成，安妮卡轻呼了一声。匆匆交谈之后，一切都敲定了：安妮卡找到了房客，威廉和裘德有了住的地方。末了，杰比提醒威廉，要他替自己出钱买碗面当午餐，然后他就得回去上班了。
JB wasn’t given to introspection, but as he rode the train to his mother’s house that Sunday, he was unable to keep himself from experiencing a vague sort of self-congratulation, combined with something approaching gratitude, that he had the life and family he did.
杰比不是那种天生会内省的人，不过那个星期天，他搭地铁去母亲家的路上不禁有点沾沾自喜，还有一种近乎感激的情绪，为自己拥有的人生和家庭感到庆幸。
His father, who had emigrated to New York from Haiti, had died when JB was three, and although JB always liked to think that he remembered his face—kind and gentle, with a narrow strip of mustache and cheeks that rounded into plums when he smiled—he was never to know whether he only thought he remembered it, having grown up studying the photograph of his father that sat on his mother’s bedside table, or whether he actually did. Still, that had been his only sadness as a child, and even that was more of an obligatory sadness: He was fatherless, and he knew that fatherless children mourned the absence in their lives. He, however, had never experienced that yearning himself. After his father had died, his mother, who was a second-generation Haitian American, had earned her doctorate in education, teaching all the while at the public school near their house that she had deemed JB better than. By the time he was in high school, an expensive private day school nearly an hour’s commute from their place in Brooklyn, which he attended on scholarship, she was the principal of a different school, a magnet program in Manhattan, and an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. She had been the subject of an article in The New York Times for her innovative teaching methods, and although he had pretended otherwise to his friends, he had been proud of her.
他父亲是从海地移民来到纽约的，在杰比3岁时就过世了。虽然杰比总是认为他记得父亲的脸（和善又温柔，唇上一道细细的小胡子，笑起来圆圆的两颊像李子），但他永远不确定是真的记得，或只是从小就仔细打量母亲床头柜上那张父亲的照片，才以为自己记得。不过，这是小时候唯一让他忧伤的事，而且这更像是一种必需的忧伤：他没有父亲，他也知道没有父亲的小孩会为人生的这个缺憾而伤感。然而，他从来没有真正感觉到那种渴望。父亲过世后，他的母亲，海地第二代移民，拿到了博士学位，之后就一直在他们家附近的公立学校教书，她认为杰比该读更好的学校。等到杰比上高中时，他拿到奖学金，去布鲁克林一所昂贵的私立学校读书，乘车上学要将近一小时；此时他母亲是曼哈顿一所重点公立学校的校长，同时也是布鲁克林学院的兼职教授。她曾因为种种创新教学法被《纽约时报》报道，杰比心底很以母亲为荣，虽然在朋友面前他都假装不是如此。
She had always been busy when he was growing up, but he had never felt neglected, had never felt that his mother loved her students more than she loved him. At home, there was his grandmother, who cooked whatever he wanted, and sang to him in French, and told him literally daily what a treasure he was, what a genius, and how he was the man in her life. And there were his aunts, his mother’s sister, a detective in Manhattan, and her girlfriend, a pharmacist and second-generation American herself (although she was from Puerto Rico, not Haiti), who had no children and so treated him as their own. His mother’s sister was sporty and taught him how to catch and throw a ball (something that, even then, he had only the slightest of interest in, but which proved to be a useful social skill later on), and her girlfriend was interested in art; one of his earliest memories had been a trip with her to the Museum of Modern Art, where he clearly remembered staring at One: Number 31, 1950, dumb with awe, barely listening to his aunt as she explained how Pollock had made the painting.
在杰比的成长过程中，母亲总是很忙，但他从不觉得被忽略，也从不觉得母亲爱学生胜过爱自己。家里还有他的外婆，会做他爱吃的菜，唱法语歌给他听，而且天天都跟他说他是个不得了的宝贝，是个天才，说他是她一生最重要的男人。他还有两个阿姨，一个是她母亲的姐姐，在曼哈顿当刑警，另一个是她的药剂师女朋友，也是第二代移民（不过是从波多黎各来的，不是海地）。她们没有子女，所以把杰比当成自己的小孩。他的亲阿姨是运动健将，教他如何传接球（他小时候一点兴趣也没有，不过后来证明这是很管用的社交技巧）；她女友则对艺术有兴趣，杰比最早的记忆之一，就是跟着她去参观纽约现代艺术博物馆，他清楚地记得自己呆呆瞪着《壹：三十一号，一九五〇》（One:Number 31,1950）这件作品，敬畏不已，他阿姨在一旁解释波洛克（Jackson Pollock）当初怎么创作这幅油画时，他几乎充耳不闻。
In high school, where a bit of revisionism seemed necessary in order to distinguish himself and, especially, make his rich white classmates uncomfortable, he blurred the truth of his circumstances somewhat: He became another fatherless black boy, with a mother who had completed school only after he was born (he neglected to mention that it was graduate school she had been completing, and so people assumed that he meant high school), and an aunt who walked the streets (again, they assumed as a prostitute, not realizing he meant as a detective). His favorite family photograph had been taken by his best friend in high school, a boy named Daniel, to whom he had revealed the truth just before he let him in to shoot their family portrait. Daniel had been working on a series of, as he called it, families “up from the edge,” and JB had had to hurriedly correct the perception that his aunt was a borderline streetwalker and his mother barely literate before he allowed his friend inside. Daniel’s mouth had opened and no sound had emerged, but then JB’s mother had come to the door and told them both to get in out of the cold, and Daniel had to obey.
上高中后，他觉得应该稍微做些修正，让自己与众不同，更让富有的白人同学不舒服，便故意改动了自己的家庭背景：他变成了另一个没有父亲的黑人男孩，母亲在他出生后才完成学业（故意不提她在研究生院完成学业，于是大家以为他指的是高中毕业），阿姨的工作是在街上走来走去（大家又以为那是妓女，不晓得他指的是刑警）。他最喜欢的全家福照片，是高中时他最要好的朋友丹尼尔帮他们拍的，一直到让丹尼尔进家门拍照之前，杰比才向他吐露实情。当时丹尼尔在进行一系列他称为“从边缘力争上游”的家庭照拍摄计划，而杰比不得不匆忙修正阿姨是街头妓女、母亲受教育不多的错误印象后，才让朋友进门。当时丹尼尔的嘴巴张得好大，还没发出声音，杰比的母亲就来到门边，说天气这么冷，叫他们两个赶紧进屋，丹尼尔只好照做。
Daniel, still stunned, positioned them in the living room: JB’s grandmother, Yvette, sat in her favorite high-backed chair, and around her stood his aunt Christine and her girlfriend, Silvia, to one side, and JB and his mother to the other. But then, just before Daniel could take the picture, Yvette demanded that JB take her place. “He is the king of the house,” she told Daniel, as her daughters protested. “Jean-Baptiste! Sit down!” He did. In the picture, he is gripping both of the armrests with his plump hands (even then he had been plump), while on either side, women beamed down at him. He himself is looking directly at the camera, smiling widely, sitting in the chair that should have been occupied by his grandmother.
依然处于震惊状态中的丹尼尔让他们在客厅摆好位置：杰比的外婆伊薇特坐在她最喜欢的高背椅上，一边站着他阿姨克里斯蒂娜和她女友西尔维娅，一边则是杰比和他母亲。但接着，丹尼尔还没来得及拍，伊薇特就要求杰比坐在她的位置上。两个女儿抗议起来，但伊薇特告诉丹尼尔：“他是这个家的国王。”又说，“让·巴蒂斯特[2]，坐下！”他坐了。在照片中，他胖嘟嘟的双手抓着椅子的扶手（即便是在那时，他就胖嘟嘟的），站在他两边的女人满面笑容地朝他看。他的双眼直视镜头，露出大大的笑容，坐在那张原本应该给他外婆坐的椅子上。
