《渺小一生》:金钱先放在一边。
This fight about taxis was one of many he’d had with JB over the years about blackness, and more specifically, his insufficient blackness. A different fight about taxis had begun when Malcolm (stupidly; he’d recognized his mistake even as he heard himself saying the words) had observed that he’d never had trouble getting a cab in New York and maybe people who complained about it were exaggerating. This was his junior year, during his and JB’s first and last visit to the weekly Black Students’ Union meeting. JB’s eyes had practically engorged, so appalled and gleeful was he, but when it was another guy, a self-righteous prick from Atlanta, who informed Malcolm that he was, number one, barely black, number two, an oreo, and number three, because of his white mother, unable to wholly understand the challenges of being truly black, it had been JB who had defended him—JB was always harassing him about his relative blackness, but he didn’t like it when other people did it, and he certainly didn’t like it when it was done in mixed company, which JB considered everyone except Jude and Willem, or, more specifically, other black people.
多年来，他和杰比为了黑人身份吵过很多架，这是其中之一，或者更精确地说，为了他不够黑而吵。另一次为了出租车吵架，起因是马尔科姆说（很蠢，他一说出口，就知道自己犯了错），他在纽约叫出租车从来没有困难，所以或许是那些抱怨的人太夸张了。那是大三那年，他和杰比第一次、也是最后一次去参加黑人学生联盟每周一次的聚会。杰比听了他的出租车感想，当场瞪大眼睛，厌恶又觉得可笑。不过，当另一个来自亚特兰大、自以为是的混蛋男生告诉马尔科姆说，第一，他几乎不算是黑人；第二，他只是外黑内白的奥利奥饼干；第三，因为他母亲是白人，所以他无法完全了解身为真正黑人所面临的挑战，此时杰比跳出来捍卫他——杰比总是嫌他不够黑，但他可不喜欢别人这么说，尤其不喜欢外人在他们面前说三道四。杰比所谓的外人，就是除了他们四个之外的人，更精确地说，就是其他黑人。
Back in his parents’ house on Seventy-first Street (closer to Park), he endured the nightly parental interrogation, shouted down from the second floor (“Malcolm, is that you?” “Yes!” “Did you eat?” “Yes!” “Are you still hungry?” “No!”), and trudged upstairs to his lair to review once again the central quandaries of his life.
马尔科姆回到他父母位于71街（比较靠近公园大道）的房子，忍受着父母亲从二楼吼出的夜间盘问（“马尔科姆，是你吗？”“是！”“你吃了没？”“吃了！”“你还饿吗？”“不饿！”），然后上楼回到他的小窝，再度检讨他人生的几个主要困境。
Although JB hadn’t been around to overhear that night’s exchange with the taxicab driver, Malcolm’s guilt and self-hatred over it moved race to the top of tonight’s list. Race had always been a challenge for Malcolm, but their sophomore year, he had hit upon what he considered a brilliant cop-out: he wasn’t black; he was post-black. (Postmodernism had entered Malcolm’s frame of consciousness much later than everyone else’s, as he tried to avoid taking literature classes in a sort of passive rebellion against his mother.) Unfortunately, no one was convinced by this explanation, least of all JB, whom Malcolm had begun to think of as not so much black but pre-black, as if blackness, like nirvana, was an idealized state that he was constantly striving to erupt into.
虽然杰比这一晚没能听到他和出租车司机的交谈，但马尔科姆因为这场谈话所产生的愧疚和自我厌恶把种族提升到了今夜清单上的第一名。对马尔科姆来说，种族一直是个挑战，但在他们大二那年，他忽然灵光一闪，想到一个他自认绝妙的逃避方式：他不是黑人，他是后黑人（后现代主义进入马尔科姆意识的时间，比其他任何人都晚，因为他一直避免选择文学方面的课程，算是对他母亲的一种消极反抗）。不幸的是，他的解释说服不了任何人，最不能接受的就是杰比，而马尔科姆已经开始认为杰比不太算是黑人，而是前黑人，仿佛黑人身份就像涅槃一样，是一种他不断努力要进入的理想状态。
And anyway, JB had found yet another way to trump Malcolm, for just as Malcolm was discovering postmodern identity, JB was discovering performance art (the class he was in, Identity as Art: Performative Transformations and the Contemporary Body, was favored by a certain kind of mustachioed lesbian who terrified Malcolm but for some reason flocked to JB). So moved was he by the work of Lee Lozano that for his midterm project, he decided to perform an homage to her entitled Decide to Boycott White People (After Lee Lozano), in which he stopped talking to all white people. He semi-apologetically, but mostly proudly, explained his plan to them one Saturday—as of midnight that night, he would stop talking to Willem altogether, and would reduce his conversational output with Malcolm by a half. Because Jude’s race was undetermined, he would continue speaking to him, but would only do so in riddles or Zen koans, in recognition of the unknowability of his ethnic origins.
但无论如何，杰比又找到一个方式赢过马尔科姆，因为就如同马尔科姆发现了后现代身份，杰比也发现了行为艺术（他修的那门课“身份认同即艺术：实现的转化和当代身体”，尤其是某些留小胡子的女同性恋的菜。她们会把马尔科姆吓坏，但出于某些原因，却特别吸引杰比）。李·洛萨诺（Lee Lozano）太让他感动了，因此他决定用他的期中作业执行一个向她致敬的计划，标题为《决定抵制白人（仿李·洛萨诺）》，在这个计划中，他不能跟任何白人说话。一个星期六，他半带歉意、但主要是很自豪地向三位好友解释这个计划——因为当天半夜12点开始，他就完全不跟威廉讲话了，然后他把跟马尔科姆讲的话减少到一半。而裘德的种族不明，他继续跟他讲话，但只用谜语或禅宗公案的方式，以呼应他族裔的未知性。
Malcolm could see by the look that Jude and Willem exchanged with each other, brief and unsmiling though, he observed irritatedly, full of meaning (he always suspected the two of them of conducting an extracurricular friendship from which he was excluded), that they were amused by this and were prepared to humor JB. For his part, he supposed he should be grateful for what might amount to a period of respite from JB, but he wasn’t grateful and he wasn’t amused: he was annoyed, both by JB’s easy playfulness with race and by his using this stupid, gimmicky project (for which he would probably get an A) to make a commentary on Malcolm’s identity, which was really none of JB’s business.
光是从裘德和威廉彼此交换的表情，短暂又没有丝毫笑容，但其中充满含义（他总是怀疑他们两个背着他暗中经营友谊，把他排除在外），马尔科姆看得出他们被这个事情逗得很乐，也准备好要迎合杰比。至于马尔科姆自己，他猜想这么一来，杰比有一阵子不大会烦他，他应该感到庆幸，但他既不庆幸也没被逗乐。他很不高兴，因为杰比对种族这么轻佻、不当回事，而且他利用这么一个愚蠢、耍花招的计划（大概还会拿个A）去论断马尔科姆的身份认同。这明明不关杰比的事，他没有资格批评的。
Living with JB under the terms of his project (and really, when were they not negotiating their lives around JB’s whims and whimsies?) was actually very much like living with JB under normal circumstances. Minimizing his conversations with Malcolm did not reduce the number of times JB asked Malcolm if he could pick up something for him at the store, or refill his laundry card since Malcolm was going anyway, or if he could borrow Malcolm’s copy of Don Quixote for Spanish class because he’d left his in the basement men’s room in the library. His not speaking to Willem didn’t also mean that there wasn’t plenty of nonverbal communication, including lots of texts and notes that he’d scribble down (“Scrning of Godfather at Rex’s—coming?”) and hand him, which Malcolm was positive was not what Lozano had intended. And his poor-man’s Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini, especially after Ionesco realized that there was a whole other problem set he hadn’t even begun because he had been busy in the men’s room in the library, and class began in forty-three minutes (“But that’s enough time for you, right, Judy?”).
在这个计划的条件下跟杰比一起生活（说实话，他们的生活什么时候不必配合杰比的怪念头或异想天开？），其实就跟平常的状况差不多。尽管谈话次数减到最少，但杰比可没减少要马尔科姆帮些小忙的次数。有时要马尔科姆去商店买个东西，马尔科姆去洗衣服时也要顺道帮他的洗衣卡储值，或说他要去上西班牙课，得向马尔科姆借《堂吉诃德》，因为他自己的掉在图书馆地下室的男厕里了。他不跟威廉说话，但还有很多非口语的沟通方式，包括发一大堆手机短信和写纸条（“雷克斯那边要播放《教父》，一起去？”）递给他，马尔科姆很确定这可不是洛萨诺的本意。而且杰比跟裘德那种二流尤内斯库式的沟通法，碰到需要裘德帮他做微积分作业时，就全部取消了。此时，荒谬剧大师尤内斯库忽然变成意大利独裁者墨索里尼，尤其是尤内斯库发现他还有另一批习题根本没开始做，因为他一直在图书馆的男厕里忙，而再过四十三分钟就要上课了（“可是这些时间你做得完，对吧，小裘？”）。
Naturally, JB being JB and their peers easy prey for anything that was glib and glittery, JB’s little experiment was written up in the school paper, and then in a new black literary magazine, There Is Contrition, and became, for a short tedious period, the talk of the campus. The attention had revived JB’s already flagging enthusiasm for the project—he was only eight days into it, and Malcolm could see him at times almost wanting to explode into talk with Willem—and he was able to last another two days before grandly concluding the experiment a success and announcing that his point had been made.
当然了，杰比还是维持一贯的作风，而他们的同龄人很容易就会被这类油滑的东西所吸引，杰比的小小实验登上了校刊，接着一个新的黑人文学杂志《真诚悔改》也报道了，而且有一小段时间成为校园话题。这种瞩目重新燃起杰比对这个计划逐渐失去的热情——他才进行了八天而已，马尔科姆看得出他有时几乎憋不住要跟威廉讲话了——于是他又撑了两天，才得意地宣布这个实验很成功，他的观点已经得到充分表达了。
“What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”
“什么观点？”马尔科姆问，“你不讲话照样也可以搞得白人很烦啊，就跟你讲话的时候没两样。”
“Oh, fuck you, Mal,” said JB, but lazily, too triumphant to even engage with him. “You wouldn’t understand.” And then he headed off to see his boyfriend, a white guy with a face like a praying mantis’s who was always regarding JB with a fervent and worshipful expression that made Malcolm feel slightly sick.
“啊，去你的，马尔科姆。”杰比说，但口气并不强烈，因为他得意得根本懒得跟他吵，“你不会懂的。”然后他就跑去找他男友了，他男友是个有张螳螂脸的白人，总是用一脸热情和崇拜的表情看着杰比，让马尔科姆觉得有点想吐。
At the time, Malcolm had been convinced that this racial discomfort he felt was a temporary thing, a purely contextual sensation that was awakened in everyone in college but then evaporated the further from it you moved. He had never felt any particular agita about or pride in being black, except in the most remote ways: he knew he was supposed to have certain feelings about certain things in life (taxicab drivers, for one), but somehow that knowledge was only theoretical, not anything he had experienced himself. And yet blackness was an essential part of his family’s narrative, which had been told and retold until it was worn to a shine: how his father had been the third black managing director at his investment firm, the third black trustee at the very white boys’ preparatory school that Malcolm had attended, the second black CFO of a major commercial bank. (Malcolm’s father had been born too late to be the first black anything, but in the corridor in which he moved—south of Ninety-sixth Street and north of Fifty-seventh; east of Fifth and west of Lexington—he was still as rare as the red-tailed hawk that sometimes nested in the crenellations of one of the buildings opposite theirs on Park Avenue.) Growing up, the fact of his father’s blackness (and, he supposed, his own), had been trumped by other, more significant matters, factors that counted for more in their slice of New York City than his father’s race: his wife’s prominence in the Manhattan literary scene, for example, and, most important, his wealth. The New York that Malcolm and his family occupied was one divided not along racial lines but rather tax brackets, and Malcolm had grown up insulated from everything that money could protect him from, including bigotry itself—or so it in retrospect seemed. In fact, it wasn’t until college that he was made to truly confront the different ways in which blackness had been experienced by other people, and, perhaps more stunningly, how apart his family’s money had set him from the rest of the country (although this assumed you could consider his classmates representative of the rest of the country, which you of course couldn’t). Even today, almost a decade after meeting him, he still had trouble comprehending the sort of poverty that Jude had been raised in—his disbelief when he finally realized that the backpack Jude had arrived to college with had contained, literally, everything on earth in his possession had been so intense that it had been almost physical, so profound that he had mentioned it to his father, and he was not in the habit of revealing to his father evidence of his naïveté, for fear of provoking a lecture about his naïveté. But even his father, who had grown up poor in Queens—albeit with two working parents and a new set of clothes every year—had been shocked, Malcolm sensed, although he had endeavored to conceal it by sharing a story of his own childhood deprivation (something about a Christmas tree that had to be bought the day after Christmas), as if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still determined to win, even in the face of another’s clear and inarguable triumph.
当时，马尔科姆相信自己对种族的不安之感只是暂时的，每个人上大学都会经历，等到毕业，不安就会逐渐消失。他从来不觉得身为黑人会特别焦虑或特别光荣，顶多只有一些隐约的感受。他知道自己应该对生活中的某些事情有某些感觉（比如出租车司机），但不知怎的那只是理论上的，他自己并没有亲身体验过。但是黑人身份是他们家庭故事的基本要素，这故事他们讲了又讲，到最后都磨得发亮：他父亲是他服务的那家投资公司有史以来的第三位黑人董事兼总经理，是马尔科姆所就读的那所以白人为主的预备学校的第三位黑人校董，还是一家大型商业银行的第二位黑人财务长（马尔科姆的父亲生得太晚，做什么都不可能是第一个黑人，但是在他晋升的这块街区——96街以南、57街以北，以及第五大道以东、列克星敦大道以西——他还是像偶尔栖息在他们家对面公园大道某栋大楼顶端的红尾鵟鹰一样稀少）。在成长的过程中，他父亲是黑人的事实（以及他自己是黑人的事实），总是被其他更重大、在他们的纽约生活里更有分量的事情盖过。比方说，太太在曼哈顿文学圈的杰出地位，以及最重要的，就是他的财富。马尔科姆一家人所居住的纽约市，不是根据种族界限划分，而是以纳税等级划分的，而且马尔科姆从小就被金钱所能买到的一切保护得太好，不受外界任何事物侵扰，包括偏执心态——回顾起来似乎是如此。事实上，直到上了大学，他才有机会真正面对其他黑人所经历的遭遇，或许更令人震惊的是，他意识到家里的钱是如何让他跟这个国家的其他人格格不入的（虽然这是假设他的同学足以代表这个国家的其他人，但实际上当然不是）。即使到了今天，跟裘德认识快十年了，他还是难以理解裘德成长的环境有多么贫困——当他终于明白裘德带来上大学的那个背包里头装的东西确实就是他所有的财产时，他根本不敢相信。那种感觉强烈到简直像是有形的，深刻得让他忍不住告诉父亲，他平常并不习惯让父亲看到自己天真的证据，很怕引来父亲的一顿教训。马尔科姆感觉到，就连他皇后区贫苦人家出身的父亲（祖父母都得工作，每年只能买一套新衣服）听了都很震惊，只不过他极力掩饰，还说了童年的一个故事（有关他们必须等圣诞节过了的次日才去买圣诞树），仿佛没有特权是一种比赛，即使另一个人已经毫无疑问地胜利了，他还是决心要赢。
However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications. At his age, the only truly important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional accomplishments; and money. And in all three of these aspects, Malcolm was also failing.
总之，在你大学毕业六年后，种族似乎越来越不是决定性的特征，而那些还在死守着种族，将它视为自己身份核心的人，看起来就会显得幼稚，甚至有点可悲，好像紧抓着年轻时对国际特赦组织或低音号的强烈兴趣不放：这种过时又令人难为情的事情，在申请大学时被强调到神化的地步。但以他现在这个年纪，一个人身份中真正重要的，就是性能力、专业成就，以及金钱。而在这三个方面，马尔科姆也都失败了。
Money he set aside. He would someday inherit a huge amount. He didn’t know how huge, and he had never felt the need to ask, and no one had ever felt the need to tell him, which is how he knew it was huge indeed. Not Ezra huge, of course, but—well, maybe it was Ezra huge. Malcolm’s parents lived much more modestly than they might, thanks to his mother’s aversions to garish displays of wealth, so he never knew if they lived between Lexington and Park because they couldn’t afford to live between Madison and Fifth, or whether they lived between Lexington and Park because his mother would find it too ostentatious to live between Madison and Fifth. He would like to make his own money, he would. But he wasn’t one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it. He would try to earn his way, but it wasn’t wholly up to him.
金钱先放在一边。有一天，他将继承巨额财产。他不知道到底有多少，因为他从不觉得有必要问，也没人觉得有必要告诉他，所以他知道一定相当可观。当然，不像埃兹拉那么多，可是——好吧，或许真有埃兹拉那么多。多亏他母亲对炫富的反感，马尔科姆的父母刻意过得比较简朴，所以他从不知道他们住在列克星敦大道和公园大道之间，是因为他们住不起麦迪逊大道和第五大道之间，还是因为他父母觉得住在麦迪逊大道和第五大道之间太招摇了。他很愿意自己赚钱，真的，但他可不会拿这种事情折磨自己。他会试着自己奋斗，但这不见得能完全由他自己做主。
Sex, and sexual fulfillment, however, was something he did have to take responsibility for. He couldn’t blame his lack of a sex life on the fact that he’d chosen a low-paying field, or on his parents for not properly motivating him. (Or could he? As a child, Malcolm had had to endure his parents’ long groping sessions—often conducted in front of him and Flora—and he now wondered whether their show-offy competence had dulled some competitive spirit within him.) His last real relationship had been more than three years ago, with a woman named Imogene who dumped him to become a lesbian. It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow. Recently, he had seen Imogene (also an architect, although at a public interest group that built experimental low-income housing—exactly the sort of job Malcolm felt he should want to have, even if he secretly didn’t) and had teasingly told her—he had been joking!—that he couldn’t help but feel that he had driven her to lesbianism. But Imogene had bristled and told him that she had always been a lesbian and had stayed with him because he had seemed so sexually confused that she thought she might be able to help educate him.
但是性，或是性成就，则是他必须负起责任的。他不能把缺乏性生活归咎于自己选择了一个薪水低的行业，或归咎于他父母没有适度地激励他（或者他可以归咎给父母？马尔科姆从小就得忍受父母漫长的爱抚，还常常当着他和弗洛拉的面。现在他很好奇，他们那样炫耀自己的本领，是否让他心中的好胜精神减低了）。他上一次认真谈恋爱，是三年多前的事了，跟一个名叫伊莫金的女人，后来她甩了他，变成了女同志。即使到现在，他还是不清楚自己真的是身体上受伊莫金吸引，或只是很放心有个人做决定，而他乐意听从。最近碰到伊莫金时（她也是建筑师，不过是在一个专门盖实验性低收入住宅的公益团体服务——正是马尔科姆觉得自己会想做的那种工作，尽管他心底并不想），马尔科姆开玩笑说，他忍不住觉得是自己把她逼成女同志的（他真的是在开玩笑），但伊莫金忽然发起火来，说她一直是女同志，之前跟他在一起，是因为他似乎对性很困惑，她觉得自己或许可以帮忙开示他。
But since Imogene, there had been no one. Oh, what was wrong with him? Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged. In his early twenties, he had tried falling in and out of love with various people—friends of Flora’s, classmates, one of his mother’s clients, a debut novelist who had written a literary roman à clef about being a sexually confused firefighter—and yet still didn’t know to whom he might be attracted. He often thought that being gay (as much as he also couldn’t stand the thought of it; somehow it, like race, seemed the province of college, an identity to inhabit for a period before maturing to more proper and practical realms) was attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics. He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black, but he was certain he possessed the interests that would be required if he were gay.
但在伊莫金之后，他就没再跟谁交往了。啊，他是怎么回事？性和性倾向，这两件事都是他在大学时代就该搞清楚的，大学是最后一个容忍，甚至鼓励这类困惑的地方。他二十出头时，曾试过跟不同的人谈恋爱——有的是弗洛拉的朋友，有的是同学，还有一个是他母亲的客户，刚写了一本纯文学纪实小说，主角是一个对性困惑的消防员——但还是不知道自己会被什么样的人吸引。他常常想，身为同性恋者（尽管他也常常受不了自己这样想，但不知怎的，同性恋者的身份就像种族一样，都是大学的领土范围，你可以用这个身份在大学里待一段时间，直到你更成熟，进入更适当、更务实的领域），最大的吸引力，就是伴随而来的附带属性，包括种种政治主张和理想，以及同性恋者信奉的美学。他似乎缺乏身为黑人那种受害和受伤的意识，以及永无休止的愤怒，但他很确定自己具备了同性恋者所应有的兴趣。
He fancied himself already half in love with Willem, and at various points in love with Jude too, and at work he would sometimes find himself staring at Eduard. Sometimes he noticed Dominick Cheung staring at Eduard as well, and then he would stop himself, because the last person he wanted to be was sad, forty-five-year-old Dominick, leering at an associate in a firm that he would never inherit. A few weekends ago, he had been at Willem and Jude’s, ostensibly to take some measurements so he could design them a bookcase, and Willem had leaned in front of him to grab the measuring tape from the sofa, and the very nearness of him had been suddenly unbearable, and he had made an excuse about needing to get into the office and had abruptly left, Willem calling after him.
马尔科姆常会幻想自己有点爱上威廉，又有几度想着自己爱上了裘德，上班时，他有时会不自觉盯着爱德华看。有时他注意到多米尼克·张也凝视着爱德华，然后他就会阻止自己再看，因为他最不想成为的人，就是凄惨、45岁的多米尼克，在一家他永远不可能成为合伙人的事务所里，色眯眯地盯着一个同事看。几星期前，他去威廉和裘德合租的公寓，表面上是去量尺寸，帮他们设计一个书柜。威廉在他面前倾身要去拿沙发上的卷尺，他整个人这么靠近，忽然令人难以负荷，于是马尔科姆编了个借口说要赶回办公室，就忽然离开了，惹得威廉在后头直喊他。
He had in fact gone to the office, ignoring Willem’s texts, and had sat there at his computer, staring without seeing the file before him and wondering yet again why he had joined Ratstar. The worst thing was that the answer was so obvious that he didn’t even need to ask it: he had joined Ratstar to impress his parents. His last year of architecture school, Malcolm had had a choice—he could have chosen to work with two classmates, Jason Kim and Sonal Mars, who were starting their own firm with money from Sonal’s grandparents, or he could have joined Ratstar.
他真的回到了办公室，也不管威廉传来的简讯，就坐在电脑前，视而不见地盯着眼前的那些档案，再一次想着自己为什么要加入瑞司塔建筑师事务所。最惨的是，答案实在太明显了，问都不必问：他加入瑞司塔是为了讨父母的欢心。在建筑研究所的最后一年，马尔科姆有两个选择，他可以选择跟两个同学杰森·金和索纳尔·马尔斯一起工作（他们正要创业，金主是索纳尔的祖父母），或是加入瑞司塔。
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason had said when Malcolm had told him of his decision. “You realize what your life is going to be like as an associate at a place like that, don’t you?”
“你一定是在开玩笑。”当马尔科姆说出自己的决定时，杰森说，“你知道在那种地方当建筑设计师，会是什么样的状况吧？”
“It’s a great firm,” he’d said, staunchly, sounding like his mother, and Jason had rolled his eyes. “I mean, it’s a great name to have on my résumé.” But even as he said it, he knew (and, worse, feared Jason knew as well) what he really meant: it was a great name for his parents to say at cocktail parties. And, indeed, his parents liked to say it. “Two kids,” Malcolm had overheard his father say to someone at a dinner party celebrating one of Malcolm’s mother’s clients. “My daughter’s an editor at FSG, and my son works for Ratstar Architects.” The woman had made an approving sound, and Malcolm, who had actually been trying to find a way to tell his father he wanted to quit, had felt something in him wilt. At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.
“那家事务所很棒。”他坚定地说，口气像他母亲，杰森翻了个白眼。“我的意思是，这家事务所的名字放在履历表上会很好看。”但就连他说这话的时候，也已经明白自己真正的意思（更糟的是，他担心杰森也心知肚明）：这间事务所的名字，他父母在鸡尾酒会上说出来会很有面子，而且他父母的确很喜欢提。“两个小孩。”有回在母亲某个客户的庆功晚宴上，马尔科姆无意间听到他父亲对某个女人说，“我女儿在FSG文学出版社当编辑，我儿子在瑞司塔建筑师事务所工作。”那个女人发出赞叹声。马尔科姆本来正打算找机会跟父亲说他想辞职，一听到这番话马上畏缩了。在这样的时候，他会很羡慕他的好友们，原因正是他一度怜悯他们的：没有人对他们抱任何期望，他们的家人很平凡（或根本没有家人），他们可以单凭自己的野心去开创自己的生活。
And now? Now Jason and Sonal had had two projects appear in New York and one in The New York Times, while he was still doing the sort of work he had done in his first year of architecture school, working for two pretentious men at a firm they had pretentiously named after a pretentious Anne Sexton poem, and getting paid almost nothing to do it.
现在呢？现在杰森和索诺尔有两个案子登上《纽约》杂志、一个登上《纽约时报》，而马尔科姆还在做他研究所第一年做的事情。他服务于一家建筑师事务所，老板是两个做作的男人，事务所的名字很做作，是根据安妮·赛克斯顿（Anne Sexton）一首做作的诗命名的，而且领的薪水低得要命。
He had gone to architecture school for the worst reason of all, it seemed: because he loved buildings. It had been a respectable passion, and when he was a child, his parents had indulged him with tours of houses, of monuments wherever they had traveled. Even as a very young boy, he had always drawn imaginary buildings, built imaginary structures: they were a comfort and they were a repository—everything he was unable to articulate, everything he was unable to decide, he could, it seemed, resolve in a building.
看来当初他读建筑研究所是出于最糟糕的原因：因为他喜欢建筑物。这是个体面的爱好，而且从小只要跟着家人去旅行，他父母就会任由他去参观各种大宅或历史建筑物。年纪还很小时，他就总是在画想象中的建筑物，建造想象中的结构。那是一种抚慰，也是一种寄托——他无法清晰表达、无法决定的一切，似乎都可以用一栋建筑物解决。
