《渺小一生》:“我带你去看。”

　 “It’s not real,” said Richard, watching him look at the honeycomb. “I made it from wax.”

“那不是真的，”理查德说，看到他在观察那个蜂巢，“是蜡做的。”

　 “It’s spectacular,” he said, and Richard nodded his thanks.

“太了不起了。”他说。理查德点头表示谢意。

　 “Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the tour.”

“来吧，”他说，“我带你逛一下。”

　 He handed him a beer and then unbolted a door next to the refrigerator. “Emergency stairs,” he said. “I love them. They’re so—descent-into-hell looking, you know?”

他递了一瓶啤酒给他，然后打开冰箱旁的一扇门。“逃生楼梯。”他说，“我超喜欢的，看起来简直是——直通地狱，你懂吧？”

　 “They are,” he agreed, looking into the doorway, where the stairs seemed to vanish into the gloom. And then he stepped back, suddenly uneasy and yet feeling foolish for being so, and Richard, who hadn’t seemed to notice, shut the door and bolted it.

“没错。”他同意，看着门内的楼梯消失在黑暗中，他忍不住后退，忽然间觉得很不安，同时又觉得自己这样很蠢。理查德似乎没注意到，把门关起来上锁。

　 They went down in the elevator to the second floor and into Richard’s studio, and Richard showed him what he was working on. “I call them misrepresentations,” he said, and let him hold what he had assumed was a white birch branch but was actually made from fired clay, and then a stone, round and smooth and lightweight, that had been whittled from ash and lathe-turned but that gave the suggestion of solidity and heft, and a bird skeleton made of hundreds of small porcelain pieces. Bisecting the space lengthwise was a row of seven glass boxes, smaller than the one upstairs with the wax honeycomb but each still as large as one of the casement windows, and each containing a jagged, crumbling mountain of a sickly dark yellow substance that appeared to be half rubber, half flesh. “These are real honeycombs, or they were,” Richard explained. “I let the bees work on them for a while, and then I released them. Each one is named for how long they were occupied, for how long they were actually a home and a sanctuary.”

他们乘电梯下到二楼，进入理查德的工作室，理查德带他参观正在进行的作品。“我把这些称为虚假陈述。”理查德说，让他握住一根他以为是白色桦木枝、其实是黏土烧制的作品；然后是一块浑圆光滑、重量很轻的石头，其实是白蜡树木材被车床削成的，但看起来沉重而结实；还有一副用几百根小瓷骨拼成的鸟类骨骼。工作室的正中央放着一排七个玻璃箱，把整个空间一分为二，它们比楼上那个装着蜡蜂巢的玻璃箱要小，但还是大得像商店橱窗，每个箱子里都装着一大块锯齿状、有如崩塌小山的暗黄色物质，看起来半似橡皮半似肉。“这些是真的蜂巢，或者曾经是。”理查德解释，“我让蜜蜂进去待了一阵子，然后放掉蜜蜂。每一件的标题就是蜜蜂在里头住的时间，也就是这些物质实际作为一个家与庇护所的时间。”

　 They sat on the rolling leather desk chairs that Richard worked from and drank their beers and talked: about Richard’s work, and about his next show, his second, that would open in six months, and about JB’s new paintings.

他们坐在理查德平常工作时坐的、带有滚轮的皮革办公椅上喝啤酒聊天，聊理查德的工作，还有他将在六个月后开幕的下一次、也就是第二次展览，还聊到杰比的新画作。

　 “You haven’t seen them, right?” Richard asked. “I stopped by his studio two weeks ago, and they’re really beautiful, the best he’s ever done.” He smiled at him. “There’re going to be a lot of you, you know.”

“你还没看过，对吧？”理查德问，“我两周前去过他工作室，那些画真的很美，是他有史以来画得最好的。”他露出微笑，“里头有很多画你，你知道。”

　 “I know,” he said, trying not to grimace. “So, Richard,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you find this space? It’s incredible.”

“我知道。”他说，设法不要皱起脸，“那么，理查德，”他说，改变话题，“你是怎么找到这个工作室的？这里真是太棒了。”

　 “It’s mine.”

“是我的。”

　 “Really? You own it? I’m impressed; that’s so adult of you.”

“真的？是你买的？太厉害了，没想到你有这么成人的一面。”

　 Richard laughed. “No, the building—it’s mine.” He explained: his grandparents had an import business, and when his father and his aunt were young, they had bought sixteen buildings downtown, all former factories, to store their wares: six in SoHo, six in TriBeCa, and four in Chinatown. When each of their four grandchildren turned thirty, they got one of the buildings. When they turned thirty-five—as Richard had the previous year—they got another. When they turned forty, they got a third. They would get the last when they turned fifty.

理查德大笑：“不，这整栋楼——都是我的。”他解释他的祖父母是进口商，在他父亲和他阿姨小时候，祖父母就在下城闹市区买了十六栋楼房，全是旧时的厂房，用来储藏他们进口的货物：六栋在苏荷区，六栋在翠贝卡区，还有四栋在唐人街。他的四个孙子、孙女满30岁时，都会得到其中一栋。等到他们满35岁时（就像理查德前一年一样），就会得到第二栋。满40岁时，会再得到第三栋。最后一栋则是等他们满50岁之时获得。

　 “Did you get to choose?” he asked, feeling that particular mix of giddiness and disbelief he did whenever he heard these kinds of stories: both that such wealth existed and could be discussed so casually, and that someone he had known for such a long time was in possession of it. They were reminders of how naïve and unsophisticated he somehow still was—he could never imagine such riches, he could never imagine people he knew had such riches. Even all these years later, even though his years in New York and, especially, his job had taught him differently, he couldn’t help but imagine the rich not as Ezra or Richard or Malcolm but as they were depicted in cartoons, in satires: older men, stamping out of cars with dark-tinted windows and fat-fingered and plush and shinily bald, with skinny brittle wives and large, polished-floor houses.

“想要哪一栋，你们能挑吗？”他问，体会到他每回听到这类故事时特有的那种晕眩加上难以置信：不仅是因为有这样的财富存在，还因为它能被如此轻松地提及，而且是由他认识这么久的人所拥有的。这也让他想到，自己不知怎的还是那么天真又不谙世故，因为他永远无法想象这样的财富，永远无法想象他认识的人有这样的财富。即使这么多年之后，即使他在纽约待了这些年，尤其是他在工作上已有了这么多历练，每回讲到有钱人，他下意识想到的依然不是埃兹拉、理查德或马尔科姆，而是忍不住联想到讽刺漫画里的情景：一个老男人，从有深色玻璃的汽车里跨出来，手指肥肥的，一身豪华着装、秃顶光亮，拥有苗条娇小的太太和地板发亮的大房子。

　 “No,” Richard grinned, “they gave us the ones they thought would best suit our personalities. My grouchy cousin got a building on Franklin Street that was used to store vinegar.”

“不行，”理查德咧嘴笑了，“他们会把他们认为最适合我们个性的一栋给我们。我那个爱抱怨的表哥就分到了富兰克林街的一栋楼，以前是用来存放醋的。”

　 He laughed. “What was this one used for?”

他大笑：“那这一栋楼以前是放什么的？”

　 “I’ll show you.”

“我带你去看。”

　 And so back in the elevator they went, up to the fourth floor, where Richard opened the door and turned on the lights, and they were confronted with pallets and pallets stacked high, almost to the ceiling, with what he thought were bricks. “But not just bricks,” said Richard, “decorative terra-cotta bricks, imported from Umbria.” He picked one up from an incomplete pallet and gave it to him, and he turned the brick, which was glazed with a thin, bright green finish, in his hand, running his palm over its blisters. “The fifth and sixth floors are full of them, too,” said Richard, “they’re in the process of selling them to a wholesaler in Chicago, and then those floors’ll be clear.” He smiled. “Now you see why I have such a good elevator in here.”

于是他们回到电梯，往上到四楼，理查德开了门又按开灯，他们面对着一排排在栈板上堆得老高的货物，都快碰到天花板了，他觉得那是砖头。“但这不是普通的砖头，”理查德说，“是装饰用的陶瓦砖，从意大利的翁布里亚进口的。”理查德从一架没堆满的栈板上拿起一块递给他，他转动那块罩着一层鲜绿色薄釉的陶瓦砖，手掌抚过上头的气泡。“五楼和六楼也堆满了这些玩意儿。”理查德说，“他们正要把这些砖头卖给芝加哥的一个批发商，然后这两楼就会被清空了。”他微笑，“现在你知道为什么我这里有一台这么好的电梯了。”

　 They returned to Richard’s apartment, back through the hanging garden of chandeliers, and Richard gave him another beer. “Listen,” he said, “I need to talk to you about something important.”

他们回到理查德住的那层公寓，再度经过那堆枝状吊灯，理查德又给了他一瓶啤酒。“听我说，”他说，“我得跟你谈一件重要的事情。”

　 “Anything,” he said, placing the bottle on the table and leaning forward.

“没问题。”他说，把啤酒放在桌上，身子前倾。

　 “The tiles will probably be out of here by the end of the year,” said Richard. “The fifth and sixth floors are set up exactly like this one—wet walls in the same place, three bathrooms—and the question is whether you’d want one of them.”

“那些瓷砖大概年底前就会被从这里搬出去了。”理查德说，“五楼和六楼的格局跟这一楼完全一样，灰泥墙在同样的地方，都有三间浴室。我的问题是，你想不想要其中一层。”