《渺小一生》:“你知道我其实不欠你什么。”

　 From the return address, he knew what it was, but he still felt that reflexive curiosity one does when unwrapping anything, even something unwanted. Inside the box were layers of brown paper, and then layers of bubble wrap, and then, wrapped in sheets of white paper, the painting itself.

看到寄件地址，他就知道里头是什么了。即使是你不想要的东西，拆开包裹时你还是会有那种不由自主的好奇。箱子里是几层厚厚的褐色纸，接着是几层气泡垫，然后包着几层白纸，最后才是那幅画。

　 He turned it over. “To Jude with love and apologies, JB,” JB had scribbled on the canvas, directly above his signature: “Jean-Baptiste Marion.” There was an envelope from JB’s gallery taped to the back of the frame, inside of which was a letter certifying the painting’s authenticity and date, addressed to him and signed by the gallery’s registrar.

他把画转到正面。“献给裘德，致上我的爱与歉意，杰比。”杰比在画布上这么写着，就在他的签名“让·巴蒂斯特·马里昂”的上方。画框背面贴着一封杰比代理画廊的信封，里头的信件证明这幅画是真迹，并附上日期，信上还印了画廊的地址，以及登记员签名。

　 He called Willem, who he knew would have already left the theater and was probably on his way home. “Guess what I got today?”

他打电话给威廉，知道他已经离开戏院，大概正在回家的路上：“猜猜我今天收到什么？”

　 There was only the slightest of pauses before Willem answered. “The painting.”

威廉只稍微顿一下，就回答：“那幅画。”

　 “Right,” he said, and sighed. “So I suppose you’re behind this?”

“没错。”他说，然后叹了口气，“所以我想，这件事是你在背后操纵的？”

　 Willem coughed. “I just told him he didn’t have a choice in the matter any longer—not if he wanted you to talk to him again at some point.” Willem paused, and he could hear the wind whooshing past him. “Do you need help getting it home?”

威廉咳嗽：“我只是跟他说，这件事他已经没别的办法了——如果他希望你以后还会跟他讲话的话。”威廉暂停一下，他听得到呼啸的风声，“你需要人帮忙把画搬回家吗？”

　 “Thanks,” he said. “But I’m just going to leave it here for now and pick it up later.” He re-clad the painting in its layers and replaced it in its box, which he shoved beneath his console. Before he shut off his computer, he began a note to JB, but then stopped, and deleted what he’d written, and instead left for the night.

“谢了。”他说，“我打算把画暂时留在这里，以后再搬。”他把画包回原来的层层包装里，放进木箱，然后推到办公桌底下。关掉电脑前，他开始给杰比写一条短信，但是又停下来，删掉原来写的，收拾东西回家。

　 He was both surprised and not that JB had sent him the painting after all (and not at all surprised to learn that it had been Willem who had convinced him to do so). Eighteen months ago, just as Willem was beginning his first performances in The Malamud Theorem, JB had been offered representation by a gallery on the Lower East Side, and the previous spring, he’d had his first solo show, “The Boys,” a series of twenty-four paintings based on photographs he’d taken of the three of them. As he’d promised years ago, JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t, a few of which—including an image in which he was curled into himself in bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw—he alarmingly had no memory of JB even taking. That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind, trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.

杰比最后还是把这幅画送给他了。他很惊讶，但同时也不惊讶（而且一点都不奇怪是威廉说服杰比这么做的）。十八个月前，就在威廉开始演出《马拉穆定理》之前，杰比接到上东城一家画廊的代理邀约，并在今年春天推出了首次个展“男孩们”。那一系列共有二十四幅画，是根据杰比拍摄他们三个人的照片画出来的。杰比遵守几年前的承诺，让他先看了打算画的那些照片。他同意了其中很多张（很不情愿，同意时还难受得反胃，但他知道这个系列对杰比有多么重要），但结果杰比对他不同意的那些照片反倒更有兴趣，其中少数几张（有一张他蜷缩在床上，双眼睁着但看不见，很可怕，左手很不自然地张得很开，像食尸鬼的爪子），他惊慌地发现自己根本不记得杰比拍过那些。那时他们第一次吵架：杰比一直哄他，接着发脾气，又威胁，又大吼，看他不肯改变心意，就试图说服威廉支持他。

　 “You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him once he realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing. “I mean, I don’t technically have to ask your permission here. I could technically just paint whatever the fuck I want. This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know.”

“你知道我其实不欠你什么。”杰比发现说服不了威廉时，这么告诉裘德，“我的意思是，严格来说，我根本不必征求你的同意。严格来说，我他妈的可以爱画什么就画什么。问你一声只是礼貌，你知道。”

　 He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so. “You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.

他可以说一大堆理由来驳倒杰比，但他实在气得不想说了：“你答应过我的，杰比。”他说，“这样应该就够了。”他还可以补上一句：“你是我的朋友，你本该这么做。”但他几年前就明白，杰比对友谊和随之而来的责任的定义跟他不一样，而且这件事没有讨论的空间：要么你就接受，不然就拉倒，而他当时决定接受。但是最近他开始觉得，要接受杰比和他的种种限制很吃力，似乎让人愤怒、疲倦、辛苦得没有必要了。

　 In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less of a philistine. Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.

到最后，杰比不得不认输。展览开幕前的几个月，他偶尔会暗示被他称为“失去的画作”的那几件作品很伟大，把裘德画得不那么僵硬、胆怯或害羞，而且没那么庸俗（这是杰比最喜欢的论点）。后来，他觉得很难堪，因为自己竟然这么好骗，相信杰比会尊重他的意愿。

　 The opening had been on a Thursday in late April shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a night so unseasonably cold that the plane trees’ first leaves had frozen and cracked, and rounding the corner onto Norfolk Street, he had stopped to admire the scene the gallery made, a bright golden box of light and shimmered warmth against the chilled flat black of the night. Inside, he immediately encountered Black Henry Young and a friend of theirs from law school, and then so many other people he knew—from college, and their various parties at Lispenard Street, and JB’s aunts, and Malcolm’s parents, and long-ago friends of JB’s that he hadn’t seen in years—that it had taken some time before he could push through the crowd to look at the paintings themselves.

画展开幕日是四月下旬的一个星期四，就在他30岁生日过后不久。那天晚上冷得反常，梧桐树刚冒出来的嫩叶都被冻得碎裂。他转过街角来到诺福克街，停下来欣赏那家灯火通明的画廊，它像个明亮的金色箱子似的，在寒冷单调的黑夜里散发暖意。才刚进去，他就碰到了黑亨利·杨和他们在法学院认识的一个朋友，接着又碰到好多熟人，有大学时代的旧识，也有去利斯本纳街参加派对认识的人，还有杰比的两个阿姨，马尔科姆的父母，以及他好几年没见的杰比老友。因此他花了好多时间才挤过人群，看到那些画。

　 He had always known that JB was talented. They all did, everyone did: no matter how ungenerously you might occasionally think of JB as a person, there was something about his work that could convince you that you were wrong, that whatever deficiencies of character you had ascribed to him were in reality evidence of your own pettiness and ill-temper, that hidden within JB was someone of huge sympathies and depth and understanding. And that night, he had no trouble at all recognizing the paintings’ intensity and beauty, and had felt only an uncomplicated pride in and gratitude for JB: for the accomplishment of the work, of course, but also for his ability to produce colors and images that made all other colors and images seem wan and flaccid in comparison, for his ability to make you see the world anew. The paintings had been arranged in a single row that unspooled across the walls like a stave, and the tones JB had created—dense bruised blues and bourbonish yellows—were so distinctly their own, it was as if JB had invented a different language of color altogether.

他一直都知道杰比很有才华。他们每个人都知道：无论你偶尔觉得杰比这个人有多么不厚道，他的作品还是可以让你相信你错了，所有你曾认定是他性格上的缺点，都反过来证明了你自己的小心眼和坏脾气，而且你还会相信杰比其实是个非常有同情心、有深度而宽容的人。那一夜，他毫无困难地看到了那些画的强度与美感，对杰比只有单纯的引以为荣和感激：当然是因为这些作品的成就，也因为杰比有能力画出那种色彩和影像，让其他的色彩和影像变得黯淡、贫弱，此外杰比也有能力让你用全新的眼光看这个世界。那些画排成长长的一列，像五线谱般延伸过几面墙，而杰比创造出的色调——浓密的瘀血蓝和波本黄，仿佛发明了一套截然不同的色彩语言。

　 He stopped to admire Willem and the Girl, one of the pictures he had already seen and had indeed already bought, in which JB had painted Willem turned away from the camera but for his eyes, which seemed to look directly back at the viewer, but were actually looking at, presumably, a girl who had been standing in Willem’s exact sightline. He loved the expression on Willem’s face, which was one he knew very well, when he was just about to smile and his mouth was still soft and undecided, somehow, but the muscles around his eyes were already pulling themselves upward. The paintings weren’t arranged chronologically, and so after this was one of himself from just a few months ago (he hurried past the ones of himself), and following that an image of Malcolm and his sister, in what he recognized from the furniture was Flora’s long-departed first West Village apartment (Malcolm and Flora, Bethune Street).

他停下来欣赏《威廉与女孩》，这幅他在展前已经看过，而且已经买下。画中的威廉并没有面对镜头，双眼似乎转过来直视观者，不过想必是看着照相机后头的一个女孩。他很爱威廉脸上的表情，那是他非常熟悉的：正要微笑、嘴巴还很柔软且尚未启动，但眼睛周围的肌肉已经开始往上拉了。那些画没有按照时间顺序排列，所以排在这幅之后的是几个月前的他（他碰到画自己的作品就快步略过），再下一幅是《马尔科姆与弗洛拉，柏森街》，马尔科姆和他姐姐，他从里头的家具认出这是弗洛拉在西村的第一间公寓，不过她早就搬走了。

　 He looked around for JB and saw him talking to the gallery director, and at that moment, JB straightened his neck and caught his eye, and gave him a wave. “Genius,” he mouthed to JB over people’s heads, and JB grinned at him and mouthed back, “Thank you.”

他四处看了一圈要找杰比，发现他在和画廊经理交谈。那一刻，杰比拉长脖子看到他，朝他挥了挥手。“天才。”他隔着人群用嘴型向杰比示意。杰比咧嘴笑了，也用嘴型回他：“谢谢。”

　 But then he had moved to the third and final wall and had seen them: two paintings, both of him, neither of which JB had ever shown him. In the first, he was very young and holding a cigarette, and in the second, which he thought was from around two years ago, he was sitting bent over on the edge of his bed, leaning his forehead against the wall, his legs and arms crossed and his eyes closed—it was the position he always assumed when he was coming out of an episode and was gathering his physical resources before attempting to stand up again. He hadn’t remembered JB taking this picture, and indeed, given its perspective—the camera peeking around the edge of the doorframe—he knew that he wasn’t meant to remember, because he wasn’t meant to be aware of the picture’s existence at all. For a moment, the noise of the space blotted out around him, and he could only look and look at the paintings: even in his distress, he had the presence of mind to understand that he was responding less to the images themselves than to the memories and sensations they provoked, and that his sense of violation that other people should be seeing these documentations of two miserable moments of his life was a personal reaction, specific only to himself. To anyone else, they would be two contextless paintings, meaningless unless he chose to announce their meaning. But oh, they were difficult for him to see, and he wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.

接着，他转到第三面、也是最后一面墙，看到那两幅画，都是画他的，两件杰比都没先让他看过。第一幅里面的他非常年轻，手拿一根香烟。第二幅他觉得是根据两年前拍的照片画的，他坐在床沿弯着腰，前额靠墙，双腿和双脚交叉，眼睛闭着——每次他疼痛发作结束都是这个姿势，集中全身的力气，设法再站起来。他不记得杰比拍了这张照片，也的确，这幅画的角度（相机从门框边缘往内窥看）说明杰比不打算让人记得他拍了照，因为根本是偷拍。一时之间，整个展览空间的声音笼罩在他周围，他只能盯着那两幅画看了又看：即使心里很痛苦，他还是明白自己的反应主要不是因为这两个画面，而是画面勾起的回忆和感觉，也明白他因为其他人竟能看到他人生中两个悲惨时刻的记录而产生的被侵犯感，只是个人的感受，只对他自己有意义。对其他任何人来说，这只是两件没有背景的画作，毫无意义，除非他公然说出其中的含义。但是啊，看到这两幅画让他很难受，他忽然急切地希望旁边没有人，只有他自己。

　 He made it through the post-opening dinner, which was endless and at which he missed Willem intensely—but Willem had a show that night and hadn’t been able to come. At least he hadn’t had to speak to JB at all, who was busy holding court, and to the people who approached him—including JB’s gallerist—to tell him that the final two pictures, the ones of him, were the best in the show (as if he were somehow responsible for this), he was able to smile and agree with them that JB was an extraordinary talent.

他设法撑过开幕之后的例行晚宴，感觉时间漫长得永无止境，他好想念威廉，但威廉那天晚上有表演，没办法来参加。至少他完全不必跟杰比讲话，反正杰比一直忙着招呼大家。对那些走过来找他——包括代理杰比的画廊老板——跟他说最后那两幅以他为主角的画是全场最佳作品的人（不知怎的，好像他也有贡献），至少他还能微笑以对，说杰比的确是了不起的天才。

　 But later, at home, after regaining control of himself, he was at last free to articulate to Willem his sense of betrayal. And Willem had taken his side so unhesitatingly, had been so angry on his behalf, that he had been momentarily soothed—and had realized that JB’s duplicity had come as a surprise to Willem as well.

但稍后回到家，可以重新控制自己之后，他终于能够跟威廉清楚表达自己遭到背叛的感觉。威廉毫不犹豫地站在他那一边，替他抱不平。因此他暂时消了点气，然后才明白，连威廉都对杰比的欺骗行为感到讶异。

　 This had begun the second fight, which had started with a confrontation with JB at a café near JB’s apartment, during which JB had proven maddeningly incapable of apologizing: instead, he talked and talked, about how wonderful the pictures were, and how someday, once he had gotten over whatever issues he had with himself, he’d come to appreciate them, and how it wasn’t even that big a deal, and how he really needed to confront his insecurities, which were groundless anyway, and maybe this would prove helpful in that process, and how everyone except him knew how incredibly great-looking he was, and so shouldn’t that tell him something, that maybe—no, definitely—he was the one who was wrong about himself, and finally, how the pictures were already done, they were finished, and what did he expect should happen? Would he be happier if they were destroyed? Should he rip them off the wall and set them on fire? They had been seen and couldn’t be un-seen, so why couldn’t he just accept it and get over it?

这引发了第二次争执。他们在杰比公寓附近的一家小餐馆碰面，谈话证明杰比就是不肯道歉，顽固得令人火大。杰比只是说了又说，说那两幅画有多棒；说有一天等他克服了自己的那些问题，就会懂得欣赏这两件作品；还说这件事根本没什么大不了；说他真的得面对自己的不安全感，那种不安全感根本毫无根据，在这个过程中，说不定会证明这件事对他有所帮助；又说除了他之外，每个人都知道他长得有多好看，这一切难道不能让他明白，或许——不，铁定——他才是错估自己的那个人；最后，杰比还说那两幅画都画出来、完成了，他觉得应该怎么做？把画毁掉他会比较高兴吗？难道要把画从墙上拆下来，拿去烧掉吗？反正大家已经看过了，时间也不可能倒退，为什么他不能干脆接受，别再计较了呢？

　 “I’m not asking you to destroy them, JB,” he’d said, so furious and dizzied by JB’s bizarre logic and almost offensive intractability that he wanted to scream. “I’m asking you to apologize.”

“我没要求你毁掉它们，杰比。”他说，被杰比怪异的逻辑和简直就是冒犯人的诡辩气得脑袋发昏，想大叫，“我是要你道歉。”