《渺小一生》:“这个乐团叫什么？”

　 On the way out, he walked with Jude. “Jude,” he said quietly, so that the others couldn’t hear him. “Anything that involves you—I’ll let you see in advance. You veto it, and I’ll never show it.”

离开餐厅时，他跟裘德一起走。“裘德，”他低声说，免得另外两个人听到，“任何作品里只要有你，我会事先让你看。若是你否决了，我就永远不展出。”

　 Jude looked at him. “Promise?”

裘德看着他：“你保证？”

　 “Swear to god.”

“我向上帝发誓。”

　 He regretted his offer the instant he made it, for the truth was that Jude was his favorite of the three of them to paint: He was the most beautiful of them, with the most interesting face and the most unusual coloring, and he was the shyest, and so pictures of him always felt more precious than ones of the others.

他一说出口就后悔了，因为三个人之中，他最喜欢画裘德：他是三个人里头最俊美的，他的脸也最有趣，肤色最特别，而且他最害羞，所以他的照片总是比其他人的珍贵。

　 The following Sunday when he was back at his mother’s, he went through some of his boxes from college that he’d stored in his old bedroom, looking for a photograph he knew he had. Finally he found it: a picture of Jude from their first year that someone had taken and printed and which had somehow ended up in his possession. In it, Jude was standing in the living room of their suite, turned partway to the camera. His left arm was wrapped around his chest, so you could see the satiny starburst-shaped scar on the back of his hand, and in his right he was unconvincingly holding an unlit cigarette. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped long-sleeved T-shirt that must not have been his, it was so big (although maybe it really was his; in those days, all of Jude’s clothes were too big because, as it later emerged, he intentionally bought them oversized so he could wear them for the next few years, as he grew), and his hair, which he wore longish back then so he could hide behind it, fizzled off at his jawline. But the thing that JB had always remembered most about this photograph was the expression on Jude’s face: a wariness that in those days he was never without. He hadn’t looked at this picture in years, but doing so made him feel empty, for reasons he wasn’t quite able to articulate.

下个星期天，杰比一回母亲家就去翻他以前在卧室里存放的几个大学时代的纸箱，想找一张他知道自己有的照片。最后终于找到了：是他们大一时某人帮裘德拍的照片，不知怎的最后落到他手上。在照片里，裘德站在他们套房的起居室里，身子斜对着照相机。他的左臂环抱在胸前，所以看得到他手背上那个绸缎般光滑的星芒状疤痕，他的右手则很没说服力地夹着一根没点燃的香烟。他穿着一件蓝白条纹的长袖T恤，一定不是他自己的，因为太大了（虽然说不定还真的是他的，那几年裘德的衣服都太大了，后来他们才知道，他还在长个子，故意买较大号的衣服，以便来年可以继续穿）。当时他的头发留得颇长，垂过下颌，这样他就可以躲在后头。但这张照片让杰比印象最深刻的是裘德脸上的表情：那些日子里，他永远带着一种警惕的神色。杰比已经好几年没看这张照片了，现在看到，他觉得好空虚，但原因是什么，他也说不太上来。

　 This was the painting he was working on now, and for it he had broken form and changed to a forty-inch-square canvas. He had experimented for days to get right that precise shade of tricky, serpenty green for Jude’s irises, and had redone the colors of his hair again and again before he was satisfied. It was a great painting, and he knew it, knew it absolutely the way you sometimes did, and he had no intention of ever showing it to Jude until it was hanging on a gallery wall somewhere and Jude would be powerless to do anything about it. He knew Jude would hate how fragile, how feminine, how vulnerable, how young it made him look, and knew too he would find lots of other imaginary things to hate about it as well, things JB couldn’t even begin to anticipate because he wasn’t a self-loathing nut job like Jude. But to him, it expressed everything about what he hoped this series would be: it was a love letter, it was a documentation, it was a saga, it was his. When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.

他现在正在画的就是这张照片，而且他为此打破了原来的形式，改用一张40英寸见方的画布。他试了好几天，才把裘德那对机警、蛇一般的绿色眼珠画得恰到好处，而且一次又一次重画他的头发，才终于满意。他知道这是一幅很棒的作品（有时候你就是有绝对的把握），而且他根本不打算在展出前给裘德看，反正等到挂在画廊的墙上时，裘德也无力阻止了。他知道裘德一定会痛恨这件作品把他画得很脆弱、很女性化、很弱不禁风，而且很年轻。他也知道裘德还会想象出一大堆痛恨这幅画的理由，而杰比根本无从猜测，因为他不像裘德是个自我厌恶的神经病。对杰比而言，这幅画表达了他希望这个系列所表达的一切：这是一封情书、一篇文献、一个长篇故事，是他的。他在画这件作品时，有时会觉得自己在飞，仿佛画廊、派对、其他艺术家和野心的世界都在他身子底下缩得好小好小，小到可以把这个世界像足球般一脚踢开，看着它滚到某个遥远的轨道，跟他再也无关。

　 It was almost six. The light would change soon. For now, the space was still quiet around him, although distantly, he could hear the train rumbling by on its tracks. Before him, his canvas waited. And so he picked up his brush and began.

快6点了。阳光很快就会黯淡下来。但眼前，整个工作室依然安静，虽然在远处，他听得到列车在轨道上轰隆驶过。在他眼前，画布等待着。于是他拿起画笔，开始工作。

　 There was poetry on the subway. Above the rows of scooped-plastic seats, filling the empty display space between ads for dermatologists and companies that promised college degrees by mail, were long laminated sheets printed with poems: second-rate Stevens and third-rate Roethke and fourth-rate Lowell, verse meant to agitate no one, anger and beauty reduced to empty aphorisms.

地铁上有诗。就在一排排塑料椅上方，夹在皮肤科诊所和函授学院的广告之间，一块块长形薄板，上头印着诗：二流的史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens），三流的罗特克（Theodore Roethke）和四流的洛厄尔（Robert Lowell），那些诗不打算鼓动任何人，愤怒和优美都消退了，只剩空洞的警句。

　 Or so JB always said. He was against the poems. They had appeared when he was in junior high, and for the past fifteen years he had been complaining about them. “Instead of funding real art and real artists, they’re giving money to a bunch of spinster librarians and cardigan fags to pick out this shit,” he shouted at Willem over the screech of the F train’s brakes. “And it’s all this Edna St. Vincent Millay–type shit. Or it’s actually good people they’ve neutered. And they’re all white, have you noticed that? What the fuck is up with that?”

杰比总是这么说。他反对那些诗。这些诗从他初中时代开始就出现在地铁车厢里，过去十五年他一直在抱怨。“他们不去找真正的艺术和真正的艺术家，却花钱去找一堆老小姐图书馆员和穿开襟毛衣的同性恋，选出了这些狗屎。”他在F线火车尖锐的刹车声中朝威廉吼着，“结果选出来都是这些埃德娜·圣文森特·米莱（Edna St.Vincent Millay）型的狗屎，或是一些被阉割的好诗人，而且全是白人，你注意到了吗？这他妈的到底是怎么回事？”

　 The following week, Willem saw a Langston Hughes poster and called JB to tell him. “Langston Hughes?!” JB groaned. “Let me guess—‘A Dream Deferred,’ right? I knew it! That shit doesn’t count. And anyway, if something really did explode, that shit’d be down in two seconds flat.”

第二个星期，威廉看到一张兰斯顿·休斯（Langston Hughes）的海报，打电话告诉杰比。“兰斯顿·休斯？！”杰比抱怨，“我猜猜看——《延迟的梦》什么的，对不对？我就知道！那首烂诗不算数。总之，如果真有什么爆炸，那首诗会在两秒钟后被毁掉。”

　 Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: “Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.” Underneath, someone has written in black marker, “Dont worry man I cant get no pussy either.” He closes his eyes.

那天下午，威廉对面是一首汤姆·冈恩（Thom Gunn）的诗：“他们的恋爱／只存在于讨论中。”在诗底下，有人用黑色马克笔写着：“老兄，别担心，我也找不到女人跟我上床。”他闭上眼睛。

　 It’s not promising that he’s this tired and it’s only four, his shift not even begun. He shouldn’t have gone with JB to Brooklyn the previous night, but no one else would go with him, and JB claimed he owed him, because hadn’t he accompanied Willem to his friend’s horrible one-man show just last month?

他这么累真是不太妙，而且现在才4点，他的值班时间都还没到。他前一夜不该跟杰比去布鲁克林的，但其他人都不跟他去，而杰比又说他欠他的，因为他上个月不是才陪威廉去看他朋友可怕的独角戏吗？

　 So he’d gone, of course. “Whose band is this?” he’d asked as they waited on the platform. Willem’s coat was too thin, and he’d lost one of his gloves, and as a result he had begun assuming a heat-conserving posture—arms wrapped around his chest, hands folded into his armpits, rocking back on his heels—whenever he was forced to stand still in the cold.

于是他去了，当然了。“这回是谁的乐团？”他在地铁站台上等车时问杰比。威廉的大衣太薄了，而且他掉了一只手套，所以每回必须在冷风中站立不动时，他就选取一个保暖的姿势：双臂环抱胸前，双手夹在腋下，挺直身子。

　 “Joseph’s,” said JB.

“约瑟夫的。”杰比说。

　 “Oh,” he said. He had no idea who Joseph was. He admired JB’s Felliniesque command of his vast social circle, in which everyone was a colorfully costumed extra, and he and Malcolm and Jude were crucial but still lowly accessories to his vision—key grips or second art directors—whom he regarded as tacitly responsible for keeping the entire endeavor grinding along.

“喔。”他说。他不知道约瑟夫是谁。他欣赏杰比有如电影导演费利尼斯克一般指挥他交游广阔的社交圈，在其中，每个人都是身穿鲜艳制服的临时演员。他和马尔科姆及裘德的任务很重要，但在杰比眼中照样是地位低下的附属品，比如灯光道具组长或副艺术总监，他心照不宣地认为他们三个有责任让整个剧组持续运作下去。

　 “It’s hard core,” said JB pleasantly, as if that would help him place Joseph.

“那是硬核舞曲。”杰比愉快地说，好像认为这样有助于他想起约瑟夫是谁。

　 “What’s this band called?”

“这个乐团叫什么？”

　 “Okay, here’s the thing,” JB said, grinning. “It’s called Smegma Cake 2.”

“好吧，你听好了。”杰比说，咧嘴笑了，“叫包皮垢二号。”

　 “What?” he asked, laughing. “Smegma Cake 2? Why? What happened to Smegma Cake 1?”

“什么？”他大笑着问，“包皮垢二号？为什么？那包皮垢一号怎么了？”

　 “It got a staph infection,” JB shouted over the noise of the train clattering into the station. An older woman standing near them scowled in their direction.

“感染葡萄球菌了。”杰比在火车进站的噪音中大声喊道。一个站在附近的老妇人朝他们皱起眉头。