《渺小一生》:他愿意等待。他已经等了许久。
He expected it would be awful to spend his summer around people who might remind him of Hemming, but it was actually pleasant, helpful even. His class had seven students, all around eight years old, all severely impaired, none very mobile, and although part of the day was ostensibly devoted to trying to teach them colors and shapes, most of the time was spent playing with them: reading to them, pushing them around the grounds, tickling them with feathers. During recess all the classrooms opened their doors to the school’s central courtyard, and the space filled with children on such a variety of wheeled contraptions and vessels and vehicles that it sometimes sounded as if it was populated by mechanical insects, all of them squeaking and whirring and clucking at once. There were children in wheelchairs, and children on small, scaled-down mopeds that putted and clicked along the flagstones at a tortoise’s speed, and children strapped prone atop smooth lengths of wood that resembled abbreviated surfboards on wheels, and who pulled themselves along the ground with their elbowed stumps, and a few children with no means of conveyance at all, who sat in their minders’ laps, the backs of their necks cupped in their minders’ palms. Those were the ones who reminded him most keenly of Hemming.
他本来以为，一整个夏天都要和一堆令他想起亨明的人在一起，一定会很痛苦，但结果却很愉快，甚至很有帮助。他带的那一班有七个学生，都是8岁左右，重度身心障碍、行动不便。尽管表面上有一部分时间是用来教他们认识颜色和形状的，但其实大部分时间都是在跟他们玩：念书给他们听，推着他们的轮椅到游乐场，用羽毛搔他们痒。下课时，所有教室都打开朝向中庭的门，整个空间都是儿童，乘坐各式各样有轮子的奇特机械和交通工具，有时听起来仿佛充满了机械昆虫，发出吱嘎声、呼呼声或咕噜声。有的小孩坐轮椅，有的小孩乘坐小型的机器脚踏车沿石板路龟速前进，还有的小孩趴着，被皮带绑在一段光滑的木板上（看起来像装了轮子的小型冲浪板），然后用他们只到手肘的残肢在地上推着前进。另外还有少数几个小孩完全没有运输工具，他们坐在看护的膝上，看护的双掌托着他们的颈背。这些小孩最容易让他想起亨明。
Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize races around the courtyard. He would always begin these races at the head of the pack, loping with an exaggerated slowness (though not so exaggerated that he appeared too broadly comic; he wanted them to think he was actually trying), but at some point, usually a third of the way around the square, he would pretend to trip on something and fall, spectacularly, to the ground, and all the kids would pass him and laugh. “Get up, Willem, get up!” they’d cry, and he would, but by that point they would have finished the lap and he would come in last place. He wondered, sometimes, if they envied him the dexterity of being able to fall and get up again, and if so, if he should stop doing it, but when he asked his supervisor, he had only looked at Willem and said that the kids thought he was funny and that he should keep falling. And so every day he fell, and every afternoon, when he was waiting with the students for their parents to come pick them up, the ones who could speak would ask him if he was going to fall the next day. “No way,” he’d say, confidently, as they giggled. “Are you kidding? How clumsy do you think I am?”
有些坐机器脚踏车和轮椅的小孩会说话，威廉会轻轻朝他们丢海绵发泡大球，或在中庭里组织赛跑。开跑时，他总是跑第一，用夸张的慢速大步向前（不过也不能太夸张，像在搞笑，他希望他们认为他真的很努力想跑赢），但是在中途，通常是跑到三分之一，他会假装绊到什么，很壮观地摔倒在地，所有的小孩就会大笑着超过他。“起来，威廉，起来！”他们喊道。他会起来，但此时他们已经跑到终点，他就成了最后一名。有时他很好奇，他们是否羡慕他有这样灵巧的身手，跌倒了可以再爬起来。若是如此，那他是不是不该再这样跌倒了？可是当他问主管时，主管只是看着威廉，说那些小孩觉得他很滑稽，他应该继续跌倒才对。于是他每天都会跌倒，而且每天傍晚，他陪着学生等家长来接时，可以讲话的学生会问他明天是不是还会跌倒。“不可能。”他会充满信心地说，“你开什么玩笑？你以为我有多笨手笨脚？”那些小孩咯咯笑。
It was, in many ways, a good summer. The apartment was near MIT and belonged to Jude’s math professor, who was in Leipzig for the season, and who was charging them such a negligible rent that the two of them found themselves making small repairs to the place in order to express their gratitude: Jude organized the books that were stacked into quavering, precarious skyscrapers on every surface and spackled a section of wall that had gone puddingy with water damage; Willem tightened doorknobs, replaced a leaky washer, changed the ballcock in the toilet. He started hanging out with another of the teacher’s aides, a girl who went to Harvard, and some nights she would come over to the house and the three of them would make large pots of spaghetti alle vongole and Jude would tell them about his days with the professor, who had decided to communicate with Jude in only Latin or ancient Greek, even when his instructions were things like, “I need more binder clips,” or “Make sure you get an extra shot of soy milk in my cappuccino tomorrow morning.” In August, their friends and acquaintances from college (and from Harvard, and MIT, and Wellesley, and Tufts) started drifting back to the city, and stayed with them for a night or two until they could move into their own apartments and dorm rooms. One evening toward the end of their stay, they invited fifty people up to the roof and helped Malcolm make a sort of clambake on the grill, blanketing ears of corn and mussels and clams under heaps of dampened banana leaves; the next morning the four of them scooped up the shells from the floor, enjoying the castanety clatter they made as they were tossed into trash bags.
从很多角度来看，那都是一个美好的夏天。他住在麻省理工学院附近，那是裘德的数学教授的公寓（教授暑假去了德国莱比锡）。因为教授收的房租实在太少，他和裘德就忍不住替那房子做一些小小的整修工作，以示感激。裘德把四处堆得老高、摇摇欲坠的书整理好，又用补墙粉把一块因漏水而烂糊的墙面补好；他把松掉的门钮拴紧，还修好漏水的洗衣机，换掉马桶水箱里的浮球阀。他开始跟那个老师的另一个助理交往，是个哈佛的女生。有些夜晚她会过来，他们三人会做一大锅白酒蛤蜊意大利面，裘德会聊起他跟那位教授白天工作的状况。那位教授决定只跟裘德讲拉丁语或古希腊语，即使他要说的只是“我需要更多长尾夹”，或是“明天早上我的卡布奇诺一定要多加一份豆奶”。到了八月，他们在学校认识的朋友（还有哈佛的、麻省理工学院的、韦斯利学院的、塔夫茨大学的）陆续回到纽约市，会先跑来跟他们住一两晚，直到可以搬进自己的公寓或宿舍。他们住在那间公寓的日子即将结束，有天晚上他们邀请了五十个人来公寓屋顶开派对，同时帮马尔科姆弄了某种烤蚌野宴：在整根的玉米、贻贝和蛤蜊上头堆了潮湿的香蕉叶，然后拿去烤。次日早晨，他们四个好友捡起地上的贝壳，丢进垃圾袋，享受那种响板似的哗啦声。
But it was also that summer that he realized he wouldn’t go home again, that somehow, without Hemming, there was no point in him and his parents pretending they needed to stay together. He suspected they felt the same way; there was never any conversation about this, but he never felt any particular need to see them again, and they never asked him. They spoke every now and again, and their conversations were, as always, polite and factual and dutiful. He asked them about the ranch, they asked him about school. His senior year, he got a role in the school’s production of The Glass Menagerie (he was cast as the gentleman caller, of course), but he never mentioned it to them, and when he told them that they shouldn’t bother to come east for graduation, they didn’t argue with him: it was nearing the end of foal season anyway, and he wasn’t sure they would have been able to come even if he hadn’t excused them. He and Jude had been adopted by Malcolm’s and JB’s families for the weekend, and when they weren’t around, there were plenty of other people to invite them to their celebratory lunches and dinners and outings.
但也是那个夏天，他明白自己不会再回家了。不知怎的，没了亨明之后，他和父母就没必要假装他们该齐聚一堂。他怀疑父母也有同样的感觉，他们从没谈过，但他从不觉得需要回去看他们，他们也没要求过。他们偶尔会通一下电话，对话一如往常，礼貌、实际而尽责。他向他们问起牧场如何，他们问他学校如何。大四那一年，他拿到了学校舞台剧《玻璃动物园》（The Glass Menagerie）的一个角色（当然了，他演的是来访的绅士），但他从没跟父母提过。后来毕业时，他跟他们说不必费事来东岸参加毕业典礼，他们也没跟他争，反正此时是母马生产的季节，就算没劝阻他们，他也不确定他们是不是有空来。那个周末，他和裘德被马尔科姆和杰比的家人收留，就算马尔科姆和杰比不在，还有很多同学邀请他们一起吃庆祝午餐、晚餐，或是出去玩。
“But they’re your parents,” Malcolm said to him once a year or so. “You can’t just stop talking to them.” But you could, you did: he was proof of that. It was like any relationship, he felt—it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn’t it wither? The only thing he missed—besides Hemming—was Wyoming itself, its extravagant flatness, its trees so deeply green they looked blue, the sugar-and-turd apple-and-peat smell of a horse after it had been rubbed down for the night.
“可是他们是你的爸妈啊。”马尔科姆每隔一年左右就会这么跟他说，“你不可能就这样再也不跟他们讲话。”但可以，可以做到：他就是个活生生的证明。他觉得，亲子关系就像任何人际关系：你要时时修剪、奉献、保持警觉，如果双方都不想付出努力，那怎么会不枯萎呢？除了亨明之外，他唯一怀念的就是怀俄明州，那种奢侈的单纯，那种近乎蓝色的深绿色树林，还有晚上帮马儿擦干身子后，它们身上散发出糖和粪便、苹果和泥炭混合的气味。
When he was in graduate school, they died, in the same year: his father of a heart attack in January, his mother of a stroke the following October. Then he had gone home—his parents were older, but he had forgotten how vivid, how tireless, they had always been, until he saw how diminished they had become. They had left everything to him, but after he had paid off their debts—and then he was unsettled anew, for all along he had assumed most of Hemming’s care and medical treatments had been covered by insurance, only to learn that four years after his death, they were still writing enormous checks to the hospital every month—there was very little left: some cash, some bonds; a heavy-bottomed silver mug that had been his long-dead paternal grandfather’s; his father’s bent wedding ring, worn smooth and shiny and pale; a black-and-white portrait of Hemming and Aksel that he’d never seen before. He kept these, and a few other things, too. The rancher who had employed his parents had long ago died, but his son, who now owned the ranch, had always treated them well, and it had been he who employed them long after he might reasonably be expected to, and he who paid for their funerals as well.
他读研究生时，他的父母死了，在同一年：父亲在一月心脏病发，母亲在同年十月中风。那时他回家了——他的父母老了，他已经忘记他们以前多么有活力，多么勤奋不懈，直到他看到他们衰老了好多。他们把所有一切都留给他了，但他还得还清他们的债务——这件事让他生出新的不安，因为长久以来，他一直以为亨明大部分的照护和医疗费用都是保险公司支付的，但他回去后才发现，亨明死后四年，他们每个月还得付医院一大笔钱，之后就没剩什么了：一些现金，一些债券；一个他过世许久的爷爷传下来的厚底银杯；他父亲折弯的婚戒，磨得光滑而白亮；一张亨明和阿克塞尔的黑白照片，他以前从没看过。他留着这些和其他少数几样东西。雇用他父母的牧场主早就过世了，但主人的儿子接手牧场，一直待他们很好，他已经雇用他们太久，可能远超过合理的程度，而且两场葬礼的钱也是他付的。
In their deaths, Willem was able to remember that he had loved them after all, and that they had taught him things he treasured knowing, and that they had never asked from him anything he wasn’t able to do or provide. In less-charitable moments (moments from just a few years prior), he had attributed their lassitude, their unchallenging acceptance of whatever he might or might not do, to a lack of interest: what parent, Malcolm had asked him, half jealously, half pityingly, says nothing when their only child (he had apologized later) tells them he wants to be an actor? But now, older, he was able to appreciate that they had never even suggested he might owe them a debt—not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty. His father, he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm—he was never to know what—that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to the States. They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.
父母过世后，威廉终于想起他毕竟还是爱他们的，还想起他们曾教导他许多他珍爱的知识，而且他们从来不会跟他提出他做不到或满足不了的要求。在比较不厚道的时刻（就在几年前），他把他们无精打采、毫无异议就接受他对未来选择的事归因于缺乏兴趣。马尔科姆曾经半嫉妒、半同情地问他，什么样的父母，在他们唯一的孩子说他想当演员后，会什么反应都没有？（他后来道歉了。）但现在，年纪较长之后，他终于懂得感激他们，他们甚至从没暗示过他该回报些什么，例如他的成功、忠诚或关爱，甚至是忠实。他知道父母移民到美国来的原因之一，就是父亲曾在斯德哥尔摩惹上一些麻烦（他再也无从得知是什么样的麻烦）。他们绝不会要求他像他们一样，连他们都不太想当自己。
And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades—his life—searching bumblingly for a way out that didn’t exist, had never existed.
于是他开始了成年生活，过去三年就像在一个烂泥水塘中浮沉摸索，头上和周围的树遮住了光，使得眼前太暗，让他看不清自己置身的水塘是否有一条河流通往下游，还是座封闭的内陆湖，他可能在这个湖里耗上好几年、几十年或一辈子，跌跌撞撞地寻找一条从来不存在的出路。
If he had an agent, someone to guide him, she might be able to show him how to escape, how to find his way downstream. But he didn’t, not yet (he had to be optimistic enough to think it was still a matter of “yet”), and so he was left in the company of other seekers, all of them looking for that same elusive tributary, through which few left the lake and by which no one ever wanted to return.
如果有个指引他的经纪人，或许可以告诉他如何逃离这座湖，找到通往下游的路。但他还没有经纪人（他得够乐观，才能想着只是“还没有”），于是他被留在这里，跟其他的寻觅者在一起，寻找那条难以捉摸的支流，少数找到的人可以离开这个湖，而离开后没人想再回来。
He was willing to wait. He had waited. But recently, he could feel his patience sharpening itself into something splintery and ragged, chipping into dry little bits.
他愿意等待。他已经等了许久。但最近，他可以感觉到自己的耐心变得尖锐，成为某种裂开的、粗糙不平的东西，甚至裂成一堆碎片。
Still—he was not an anxious person, he was not inclined toward self-pity. Indeed, there were moments when, returning from Ortolan or from a rehearsal for a play in which he would be paid almost nothing for a week’s work, so little that he wouldn’t have been able to afford the prix fixe at the restaurant, he would enter the apartment with a feeling of accomplishment. Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement—for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to call itself a real apartment—but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.
然而，他不是个容易焦虑的人，也没有自怜自艾的倾向。的确，有些时刻，当他从奥尔托兰餐厅回家，或是去排练一出戏回来（他演一星期的酬劳近乎为零，少到连去餐厅点个套餐都不够），走进公寓时，他会有一种成就感。只有对他和裘德而言，利斯本纳街的公寓才可视为一种成就——尽管他努力整修，裘德努力打扫，这里看起来还是一副凄惨模样，而且有种鬼鬼祟祟的感觉，好像连这地方都不好意思自称是一间真正的公寓——但在那些时刻，他偶尔发现自己想着，“这样就够了。这样已经超过我的期望了。”来到纽约，长大成人，站在舞台上说着别人的话！那是一种荒谬的人生，一种非人生，一种他父母和哥哥绝不会梦想拥有的人生，然而他现在每天都可以梦想这样的人生了。
But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents’ house, where the porch light washed the night with honey.
但接着，那种感觉会消散，留下他独自一人看着报纸的文艺版，阅读其他人做着的那些事，而他根本没有那么宽广、那么傲慢的想象力去梦想。在这些时刻，他感觉整个世界好大，他所置身的这个湖好空，夜里好黑，他会希望自己回到怀俄明，站在车道的尽头等待亨明。在那里，他唯一要找到的路，就是回他父母木屋的那条小径，门廊上的昏黄灯光犹如蜂蜜，洗去了黑夜。
First there was the life of the office you saw: forty of them in the main room, each with their own desk, Rausch’s glass-walled room at one end, closest to Malcolm’s desk, Thomasson’s glass-walled room at the other. Between them: two walls of windows, one that looked over Fifth Avenue, toward Madison Square Park, the other of which peered over Broadway, at the glum, gray, gum-stamped sidewalk. That life existed officially from ten a.m. until seven p.m., Monday through Friday. In this life, they did what they were told: they tweaked models, they drafted and redrew, they interpreted Rausch’s esoteric scribbles and Thomasson’s explicit, block-printed commands. They did not speak. They did not congregate. When clients came in to meet with Rausch and Thomasson at the long glass table that stood in the center of the main room, they did not look up. When the client was famous, as was more and more the case, they bent so low over their desks and stayed so quiet that even Rausch began whispering, his voice—for once—accommodating itself to the office’s volume.
你看到的办公室生活是第一种：他们四十个人在主办公区里，每个人都有一张办公桌，劳施的玻璃墙办公室在一端，离马尔科姆的办公桌最近，而托马森的玻璃墙办公室则在另一头。他们两人之间的主办公区有两面玻璃墙，一面俯瞰着第五大道，面向麦迪逊广场公园；另一面墙则面对百老汇大道，可以看到底下那条死气沉沉、黏着口香糖渣的灰色人行道。这种办公室生活从每星期一到星期五的早上10点正式开始，直到下午7点。在这种生活里，他们奉命做事：调整模型，草图一画再画，解译劳施那难认的潦草字迹以及托马森明确得像是印出来的指示。他们不讲话，也不凑在一起。每当客户进来，跟劳施和托马森到主办公区正中央那张玻璃长桌开会时，他们也不会抬头看。如果客户很有名（现在这样的状况越来越多了），他们就把头埋得极低，静悄悄的，静得连劳施都开始讲悄悄话，难得地配合起了办公室的音量。
Then there was the second life of the office, its real life. Thomasson was less and less present anyway, so it was Rausch whose exit they awaited, and sometimes they had to wait for a long time; Rausch, for all his partygoing and press-courting and opining and traveling, was in reality a hard worker, and although he might go out to an event (an opening, a lecture), he might also return, and then things would have to be hastily reassembled, so that the office he walked back into would resemble the office he had left. It was better to wait for the nights he would disappear completely, even if it meant waiting until nine or ten o’clock. They had cultivated Rausch’s assistant, brought her coffees and croissants, and knew they could trust her intelligence on Rausch’s arrivals and departures.
然后还有办公室的第二种生活——真正的生活。反正托马森已经出现得越来越少，所以他们期待的是劳施离开。有时他们要等好久，劳施这个人，尽管总是到处参加派对、巴结媒体、发表意见、观光旅行，但他工作其实很卖力。虽然他可能会出去参加一些公开活动（开幕酒会或是演讲），但他还是有可能回来，于是大家得赶紧匆忙收拾，好让他回来时看到的办公室和离开时的一样。但最好是等到他彻底离开，即使这表示要等到9点或10点。他们长期跟劳施的助理打好关系，常常帮她买咖啡和可颂面包，知道他们可以相信她所掌握的关于劳施进出的情报。
But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music was turned on (they rotated among the fifteen of them who got to choose), and takeout menus materialized, and on everyone’s computers, work for Ratstar Architects was sucked back into digital folders, put to sleep, unloved and forgotten, for the night. They allowed themselves an hour of waste, of impersonating Rausch’s weird Teutonic boom (some of them thought he was secretly from Paramus and had adopted the name—Joop Rausch, how could it not be fake?—and the extravagant accent to obscure the fact that he was boring and from Jersey and his name was probably Jesse Rosenberg), of imitating Thomasson’s scowl and way of marching up and down the length of the office when he wanted to perform for company, barking at no one in particular (them, they supposed), “It’s ze vurk, gentlemen! It’s ze vurk!” They made fun of the firm’s most senior principal, Dominick Cheung, who was talented but who was becoming bitter (it was clear to everyone but him that he would never be made a partner, no matter how often Rausch and Thomasson promised him), and even of the projects they worked on: the unrealized neo-Coptic church wrought from travertine in Cappadocia; the house with no visible framework in Karuizawa that now wept rust down its faceless glass surfaces; the museum of food in Seville that was meant to win an award but didn’t; the museum of dolls in Santa Catarina that never should’ve won an award but did. They made fun of the schools they’d gone to—MIT, Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia, Harvard—and how although they’d of course been warned that their lives would be misery for years, how they had all of them, to a one, assumed they’d be the exception (and now all, to a one, secretly thought they still would be). They made fun of how little money they made, how they were twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-two, and still lived with their parents, a roommate, a girlfriend in banking, a boyfriend in publishing (a sad thing, when you had to sponge off of your boyfriend in publishing because he made more than you). They bragged of what they would be doing if they hadn’t gone into this wretched industry: they’d be a curator (possibly the one job where you’d make even less than you did now), a sommelier (well, make that two jobs), a gallery owner (make it three), a writer (all right, four—clearly, none of them were equipped to make money, ever, in any imagining). They fought about buildings they loved and buildings they hated. They debated a photography show at this gallery, a video art show at another. They shouted back and forth at one another about critics, and restaurants, and philosophies, and materials. They commiserated with one another about peers who had become successes, and gloated over peers who had quit the business entirely, who had become llama farmers in Mendoza, social workers in Ann Arbor, math teachers in Chengdu.
一旦劳施下班、不再回来，整个办公室立刻从南瓜变成了马车。音乐打开（他们十五个人轮流放自己喜欢的），外卖餐厅的菜单拿出来，每个人的电脑上为瑞司塔建筑师事务所进行的工作被收回电子档案夹中，进入休眠模式，那一晚不再被理睬。他们任由自己浪费一小时，模仿劳施那种奇怪的日耳曼人式的低沉声音（他们有些人认为他其实是新泽西州帕拉默斯人，后来改了这个名字——约普·劳施，怎么可能不是假的？——又装出一副浓重的口音，好隐瞒他是个无趣的新泽西人的事实，而且他的本名大概是杰西·罗森堡）；而模仿托马森，就会学他不甘寂寞时，气呼呼地从办公室这头走到那头，没有特定对象地咆哮：“这是工作，各位！这是工作啊！”他们取笑事务所里最资深的主任建筑师多米尼克·张，他很有才华，但逐渐变得愤世嫉俗（除了他自己之外，每个人都觉得他显然当不上合伙人了，无论劳施和托马森怎么一再跟他保证）；他们甚至取笑他们做过的设计方案：那座以卡帕多西亚的石灰华所建造的新科普特教堂，后来没盖成；日本轻井泽那栋没有明显结构的房子，如今缺乏特征的玻璃表面上流淌着锈斑；西班牙塞维利亚那座食物博物馆，本来有希望得奖，结果没得；圣卡塔琳娜那座玩偶博物馆，根本不该得奖的，却得了。他们取笑自己上过的学校（麻省理工学院、耶鲁大学、罗得岛设计学院、哥伦比亚大学、哈佛大学），取笑尽管他们都曾被警告，说他们的人生会惨上好几年，但他们所有人都一致假设自己会是例外（而且现在仍然一致暗自这么以为）。他们取笑自己赚的钱好少，取笑自己27岁、30岁或32岁了，还跟父母住、跟室友住、跟从事金融业的女友住、跟从事出版业的男友住（还得压榨你从事出版业的男友，因为他赚得比你还多，真是太惨了）。他们吹嘘如果当初没进悲惨的建筑业，他们会做哪一行：他们会成为策展人（大概是唯一赚得比现在少的工作）、葡萄酒侍酒师（好吧，唯二）、画廊老板（唯三）、作家（好吧，唯四——显然他们没有一个有赚钱的能力，再怎么想象都没用）。他们为了自己喜欢的建筑物和讨厌的建筑物而吵架。他们为了这个画廊的摄影展和另一个画廊的录像艺术展而争执。他们大声讨论评论家，还有餐厅、哲学、材质。他们同情彼此有同辈获得成功，也对于有同辈完全离开这一行，跑去门多萨养骆马，去安娜堡当社工人员，或去成都当数学老师而幸灾乐祸。
During the day, they played at being architects. Every now and then a client, his gaze helicoptering slowly around the room, would stop on one of them, usually either Margaret or Eduard, who were the best-looking among them, and Rausch, who was unusually attuned to shifts in attention away from himself, would call the singled-out over, as if beckoning a child to the adults’ dinner party. “Ah, yes, this is Margaret,” he’d say, as the client looked at her appraisingly, much as he had minutes before been looking at Rausch’s blueprints (blueprints finished in fact by Margaret). “She’ll be running me out of town someday soon, I’m sure.” And then he’d laugh his sad, contrived, walrus-bark laugh: “Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
白天时，他们扮演建筑师。有时会有客户来，目光缓缓在办公室里打转，然后停留在其中一人身上，通常不是玛格丽特就是爱德华，这两个是俊男美女，而不习惯目光焦点被人抢走的劳施，就会把客户注意的那个人叫过来，好像把一个小孩叫到成人的晚餐席上。“啊，是的，这位是玛格丽特。”他说，此时客户打量着她，就像几分钟前他打量着劳施的蓝图一样（那蓝图其实是玛格丽特完成的）。“她很快就会把我给干掉啦，我很确定。”然后他会大笑，笑得很悲惨、很刻意，像是海象在叫，“啊——哈——哈——哈！”
Margaret would smile and say hello, and roll her eyes at them the moment she turned around. But they knew she was thinking what they were all thinking: Fuck you, Rausch. And: When? When will I replace you? When will it be my turn?
玛格丽特会微笑着打招呼，然后一转身就朝他们翻白眼。但他们知道她想的跟他们所有人都一样：去你的，劳施。还有：什么时候？什么时候我会取代你？什么时候轮到我？
In the meantime, all they had was play: after the debating and the shouting and the eating, there was silence, and the office filled with the hollow tappings of mice being clicked and personal work being dragged from folders and opened, and the grainy sound of pencils being dragged across paper. Although they all worked at the same time, using the same company resources, no one ever asked to see anyone else’s work; it was as if they had collectively decided to pretend it didn’t exist. So you worked, drawing dream structures and bending parabolas into dream shapes, until midnight, and then you left, always with the same stupid joke: “See you in ten hours.” Or nine, or eight, if you were really lucky, if you were really getting a lot done that night.
同时，他们也只能继续扮演建筑师：在辩论、大喊、吃东西之后，大家安静下来，办公室充满点击鼠标、把各自的工作从档案夹里拖出来打开的空洞声响，还有铅笔画过纸张的沙沙声。虽然他们的上班时间都一样，也使用同样的公司资源，但从来没有人要求看别人的工作，仿佛他们一起决定要假装别人的工作不存在。于是你工作，画出你梦想中的结构，把一道道拋物线弯成梦想的形状，直到半夜12点，然后你离开，总是开着同样的蠢玩笑：“十个小时后见啦。”或者九个小时，或者八个小时——如果你运气真的不错，如果你这一晚真的完成了很多工作。
Tonight was one of the nights Malcolm left alone, and early. Even if he walked out with someone else, he was never able to take the train with them; they all lived downtown or in Brooklyn, and he lived uptown. The benefit to walking out alone was that no one would witness him catching a cab. He wasn’t the only person in the office with rich parents—Katharine’s parents were rich as well, as, he was pretty sure, were Margaret’s and Frederick’s—but he lived with his rich parents, and the others didn’t.
今晚马尔科姆独自离开办公室，而且颇早。即使他跟其他同事一起走出去，他也没办法跟他们一起去搭乘地铁，其他人都住在下城或布鲁克林，而他住在上城。独自走出来的好处就是不会有人看到他拦出租车。他不是办公室里唯一有富爸爸的人，凯瑟琳的爸妈也很有钱，此外他很确定玛格丽特和弗雷德里克家境也不错。但他还跟他的富爸爸住在一起，其他人则没有。
He hailed a taxi. “Seventy-first and Lex,” he instructed the driver. When the driver was black, he always said Lexington. When the driver wasn’t, he was more honest: “Between Lex and Park, closer to Park.” JB thought this was ridiculous at best, offensive at worst. “You think they’re gonna think you’re any more gangster because they think you live at Lex and not Park?” he’d ask. “Malcolm, you’re a dumbass.”
他招了辆出租车。“71街和列克星敦大道交叉口。”他告诉司机。碰到司机是黑人时，他总是说列克星敦大道。如果司机不是黑人，他就会比较诚实：“在列克星敦大道和公园大道之间，靠公园大道。”杰比觉得他这样，说好听一点是荒谬，说难听一点就是侮辱人。“你以为他们要是认为你住列克星敦大道，而不是公园大道，就会觉得你比较像帮派分子吗？”他问，“马尔科姆，你也太蠢了。”
