《渺小一生》:“等你大一点。”
“Jude,” he began, but he didn’t know how to continue.
“裘德……”他起了头，但不知道接着该说什么。
“You’d better get them,” Jude said, and although each word came out as a gasp, he smiled at Willem again.
“你最好去救他们。”裘德说。就算每个字都在喘，他仍再度对威廉露出微笑。
“Fuck ’em,” he said, “I’ll stay here with you,” and Jude laughed a little, although he winced as he did so, and carefully tipped himself backward until he was lying on his side, and Willem helped lift his legs up onto the bed. His sweater was freckled with more flecks of rust, and Willem picked some of them off of him. He sat on the bed next to him, unsure where to begin. “Jude,” he tried again.
“让他们去死。”他说，“我留在这里陪你。”裘德还是笑了一声。他痛得皱起脸，小心翼翼往后倾斜，直到侧躺下来，威廉帮忙把他的两腿抬起来放上床。他的毛衣上也有铁锈碎屑，威廉帮他挑掉一些，然后紧挨着裘德坐在床上，不确定该从何说起。“裘德。”他又试了一次。
“Go,” Jude said, and closed his eyes, although he was still smiling, and Willem reluctantly stood, shutting the window and turning off the bedroom light as he left, closing the door behind him, heading for the stairwell to save Malcolm and JB, while far beneath him, he could hear the buzzer reverberating through the staircase, announcing the arrival of the evening’s first guests.
“去吧。”裘德说，闭上眼睛，但还在微笑。于是威廉不情愿地站起来，关上窗子，离开时熄掉卧室的灯，然后出了房间，关上门，走向楼梯间去解救马尔科姆和杰比。在远远的下方，他听到楼梯底下传来的电铃声，宣告晚上第一批客人抵达了。
[ II ]
第二部分
The Postman
后男人
1
1
SATURDAYS WERE FOR work, but Sundays were for walking. The walks had begun out of necessity five years ago, when he had moved to the city and knew little about it: each week, he would choose a different neighborhood and walk from Lispenard Street to it, and then around it, covering its perimeter precisely, and then home again. He never skipped a Sunday, unless the weather made it near impossible, and even now, even though he had walked every neighborhood in Manhattan, and many in Brooklyn and Queens as well, he still left every Sunday morning at ten, and returned only when his route was complete. The walks had long ceased to be something he enjoyed, although he didn’t not enjoy them, either—it was simply something he did. For a period, he had also hopefully considered them something more than exercise, something perhaps restorative, like an amateur physical therapy session, despite the fact that Andy didn’t agree with him, and indeed disapproved of his walks. “I’m fine with your wanting to exercise your legs,” he’d said. “But in that case, you should really be swimming, not dragging yourself up and down pavement.” He wouldn’t have minded swimming, actually, but there was nowhere private enough for him to swim, and so he didn’t.
星期六要工作，星期天则要出门走路。五年前刚开始走时是出于必要，当时他刚搬到纽约市，对环境很不熟悉。每星期他都会挑一个不同的街区，从利斯本纳街走过去，然后绕着那个区域走完周围一圈，这才回家。除非天气实在不允许，否则他一次都没有漏掉。即使是现在，即使他已经走遍曼哈顿的每一个街区，也走过布鲁克林和皇后区的许多区域，他还是每星期天上午10点出门，把预定的路线走完，才会回家。这些星期天的步行，对他早已不是什么乐在其中的事，不过他也没有不乐在其中，只不过是他每星期会做的事情罢了。有一阵子，他还满怀希望，认为走这些路不光是运动，或许还有复健的功效，就像是一次业余的物理治疗，但是安迪不同意，也表明不赞成他这样走。“你想活动一下双腿，我没意见。”他老这么说，“不过如果是这样，你真的应该游泳，而不是拖着身子在人行道上上下下。”其实他不讨厌游泳，只是找不到足够有隐私的地方，于是就没游了。
Willem had occasionally joined him on these walks, and now, if his route took him past the theater, he would time it so they could meet at the juice stand down the block after the matinee performance. They would have their drinks, and Willem would tell him how the show had gone and would buy a salad to eat before the evening performance, and he would continue south, toward home.
威廉偶尔会加入这些行程。最近，如果他的路线经过戏院，就会算好午后场演出结束的时间，两人在戏院那个街区的果汁摊会合。他们会一起喝果汁，威廉会告诉他那出戏的演出状况如何，然后买一份沙拉在晚场演出前填个肚子，而他则会继续往南，朝家的方向走。
They still lived at Lispenard Street, although both of them could have moved into their own apartments: he, certainly; Willem, probably. But neither of them had ever mentioned leaving to the other, and so neither of them had. They had, however, annexed the left half of the living room to make a second bedroom, the group of them building a lumpy Sheetrocked wall one weekend, so now when you walked in, there was only the gray light from two windows, not four, to greet you. Willem had taken the new bedroom, and he had stayed in their old one.
他们还住在利斯本纳街，尽管两个人各自都租得起公寓了：他当然没问题，威廉大概也没问题。但两个人都没提过要搬走，于是就这样继续下去。不过他们把左半边客厅隔出来，变成第二间卧室。他们一群人找了个周末，砌了一道不太平整的石膏板墙，所以现在走进他们那间公寓，客厅里只有两扇窗透进灰灰的光，而不是原来的四扇窗。威廉搬进了这间新卧室，他则留在原来的卧室。
Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see Willem’s play—a family drama called The Malamud Theorem, about a literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a physicist—five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call, he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage’s very elevation announced Willem’s ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily accessible to him.
这阵子除了去剧院外头碰面之外，他都没什么机会看到威廉了。尽管威廉老在说自己有多懒，但他看起来一直在工作，或者试着要工作。三年前，他29岁生日那天，威廉发誓要在30岁以前辞掉奥尔托兰餐厅的工作。而就在他30岁生日前的两个星期，他们两人待在少了一半的客厅里，威廉正担心自己辞职后是不是过得下去，忽然接到一通电话，得到了他等待多年的机会。那通电话找他去演的剧后来相当成功，让威廉得到了足够的注意，于是十三个月后，他永远地辞掉了奥尔托兰的工作，超过他自己定下的期限刚好一年。威廉的戏他总共去看了五次［那是一出刻画家庭生活的戏剧，叫《马拉穆定理》（The Malamud Theorem），讲一个老年痴呆症初期的文学教授和与他疏远的物理学家儿子］，两次是跟马尔科姆和杰比去，一次是陪周末来纽约的哈罗德和朱丽娅。每回看戏，他都忘了台上那位是他的老友、他的室友，到了谢幕时，他觉得光荣又惆怅，仿佛那高起的舞台宣告威廉走进了人生另一个更优越的领域，他再也无法轻易企及。
His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely resemble what a thirty-year-old’s life ought to be. The same was not true for his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they had and hadn’t done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and promises. Things had changed, then. The second bedroom, for example, was erected partly out of Willem’s fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety—the fear that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it with their own radical announcements—inspired Malcolm’s hasty coming out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when he started dating a woman.
他自己接近30岁时，并没有引发任何潜在的恐慌。不用急着做些什么，也没必要重新安排人生的重要事项，使它们更符合30岁该有的人生。但对于其他三个好友却并非如此，他30岁以前的那三年，总是听他们悼念过去的十年，检讨自己做到了什么、没做到什么，还列出种种自我厌恶与期许的事项，因此做出种种改变。比方第二间卧室，当初会隔出来的一部分原因，就是威廉担心自己都28岁了，还跟大学室友住在同一个房间，而同样的焦虑——这种恐惧本身就像童话里讲的，仿佛一过30岁生日，他们就会忽然变成别的什么，自己完全无法控制，除非做出一些革命性的宣告，先发制人——让马尔科姆匆忙草率地跟父母出柜，但次年他又回到异性恋者的领域，开始跟一个女人交往。
But despite his friends’ anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable age. He clearly remembered being a very young boy—this was when he lived in the monastery—and asking Brother Michael, who liked to tell him of the travels he had taken in his other life, when he too might be able to travel.
其他朋友都很焦虑，但他知道自己会很高兴进入30岁，原因正是他们所痛恨的：因为那是一个绝对无法否认的成人年龄（他很期待45岁，因为到时他就可以说，他当成人的时间已经是当儿童时间的两倍有余了）。在他成长期间，30岁曾经是一个遥远、无法想象的年纪。他清楚记得自己很小的时候（当时他还住在修道院）曾问过迈克修士，那时迈克修士喜欢跟他回忆自己成为修士之前的旅行，还说他有朝一日也可以去。
“When you’re older,” Brother Michael had said.
“等你大一点。”当时迈克修士这么说。
“When?” he’d asked. “Next year?” Then, even a month had seemed as long as forever.
“什么时候？”他问，“明年吗？”在当时，连一个月都漫长得像是永远。
“Many years,” Brother Michael had said. “When you’re older. When you’re thirty.” And now, in just a few weeks, he would be.
“要很多年。”迈克修士说，“等到你大一点。等到你30岁。”如今，再过几个星期，他就30岁了。
On those Sundays, when he was readying to leave for his walk, he would sometimes stand, barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him, and the small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel. Here, time was his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked. He would stand before the tiny hallway closet—an alcove, really, over which they had strung a length of burlap—and admire the stores within it. At Lispenard Street, there were no late-night scrambles to the bodega on West Broadway for a roll of toilet paper, no squinching your nose above a container of long-spoiled milk found in the back corner of the refrigerator: here, there was always extra. Here, everything was replaced when it needed to be. He made sure of it. In their first year at Lispenard Street he had been self-conscious about his habits, which he knew belonged to someone much older and probably female, and had hidden his supplies of paper towels under his bed, had stuffed the fliers for coupons into his briefcase to look through later, when Willem wasn’t home, as if they were a particularly exotic form of pornography. But one day, Willem had discovered his stash while looking for a stray sock he’d kicked under the bed.
那些星期天，准备出门走路前，有时他会赤脚站在厨房里，周围的一切都好安静，那间丑陋的小公寓感觉就像某种奇迹。在这里，时间是他的，空间是他的，每一扇门都可以关上，每一扇窗子都可以锁上。他可以站在那小小的门厅衣柜前（其实只是一个小凹洞，他们在里头钉了一条麻绳），欣赏着里面的东西。在利斯本纳街，不必为了一卷卫生纸，三更半夜跑去西百老汇大道上的小杂货店；不必凑着鼻子闻从冰箱深处挖出来的那盒过期鲜奶还能不能喝。在这里，总是有多余的备用品。在这里，该换该修的东西就会被换被修。他一直确保做到这一点。刚搬进利斯本纳街的第一年，他曾对自己的种种习惯很不好意思，因为通常是年纪大的人，大概都是女性，才会有这些习惯。于是他把备用的卫生纸藏在自己的床底下，把折价券传单塞在公文包里，打算等稍后威廉不在家时再仔细研究，好像那些传单是某种特别刺激的黄色书刊。但是有一天，因为威廉要找一只不慎踢到床底下的袜子，就发现了他囤积的卫生纸。
He had been embarrassed. “Why?” Willem had asked him. “I think it’s great. Thank god you’re looking out for this kind of stuff.” But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.
他觉得很难为情。“为什么？”威廉问他，“我觉得这样太棒了。谢天谢地，还好有你在处理这类事情。”不过这还是让他很心虚，在他爆满的档案里又加了一项证据，证明他过于神经质，证明他设法装出来的表象根本瞒不了人。
And yet—as with so much else—he couldn’t help himself. To whom could he explain that he found as much contentment and safety in unloved Lispenard Street, in his bomb-shelter stockpilings, as he did in the facts of his degrees and his job? Or that those moments alone in the kitchen were something akin to meditative, the only times he found himself truly relaxing, his mind ceasing to scrabble forward, planning in advance the thousands of little deflections and smudgings of truth, of fact, that necessitated his every interaction with the world and its inhabitants? To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he’d had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.
然而就像其他很多事情，他改不掉这些习惯。他能跟谁解释，他发现置身于讨人厌的利斯本纳街、他囤积的物资中，那种满足感和安全感一点也不逊于学业或工作所能带来的。又能跟谁解释，他发现自己在厨房独处的那些时刻几乎处于类似冥想的状态，他的脑袋不再慌张地设想，预先计划几千个稍微偏离或扭曲的真相、事实，才能与这个世界和其他人互动？他知道没办法跟任何人解释，连威廉都不能。多年来，他已经学会隐藏自己的想法，与其他三位好友不同，他学会不要为了有别于他人而透露自己的种种怪癖，不过别人要是愿意分享自己的怪癖，他倒是很乐意听，也引以为傲。
Today he would walk to the Upper East Side: up West Broadway to Washington Square Park, to University and through Union Square, and up Broadway to Fifth, which he’d stay on until Eighty-sixth Street, and then back down Madison to Twenty-fourth Street, where he’d cross east to Lexington before continuing south and east once more to Irving, where he’d meet Willem outside the theater. It had been months, almost a year, since he had done this circuit, both because it was very far and because he already spent every Saturday on the Upper East Side, in a town house not far from Malcolm’s parents’, where he tutored a twelve-year-old boy named Felix. But it was mid-March, spring break, and Felix and his family were on vacation in Utah, which meant he ran no risk of seeing them.
今天他会走到上东城：沿西百老汇大道往北到华盛顿广场公园，转入大学街，经过联合广场，沿着百老汇大道接上第五大道，继续往北走到86街，然后回头，沿着麦迪逊大道走到24街，往东转到列克星敦大道，再继续往东南，来到尔文街的剧院区，跟威廉在剧院外头碰面。这条路线他走了好多个月，快一年了。因为这条路线很远，也因为他每个星期六都会待在上东城，在离马尔科姆父母家不远处的一栋连排别墅里当家教，帮一个叫菲利克斯的12岁男孩补习。但现在是三月中的春假，菲利克斯跟家人去犹他州度假了，这表示他不会有遇到他们的风险。
