《渺小一生》:之后，杰比的心情似乎好些了

　 “JB!”

“杰比！”

　 After that, JB’s mood seemed to improve. Even his final salvos were somewhat listless, as if he were delivering them out of obligation rather than true depth of feeling. “In ten years, I’ll bet you two will have made the full transition to lesbiandom. I predict cats,” was one, and “Watching you two in the kitchen is like watching a slightly more racially ambiguous version of that John Currin painting. Do you know what I’m talking about? Look it up,” was another.

之后，杰比的心情似乎好些了。就连他最后的开炮都有点无精打采，好像他只是出于义务，而不是真有这种感觉。“十年内，我敢说你们两个就会完全转到女同性恋的领域去了。走着瞧好了。”这是一个。还有，“看你们两个在厨房，就像看着约翰·柯林[3]的画作，只是人种稍微暧昧一点的版本。你们知道我在说什么吗？自己去查。”这是另一个。

　 “Are you going to come out or keep it quiet?” JB asked over dinner.

“你打算出柜，还是要保密？”晚餐时杰比问。

　 “I’m not sending out a press release, if that’s what you mean,” Willem said. “But I’m not going to hide it, either.”

“我不会发新闻稿，如果你的意思是这个，”威廉说，“可是我也不打算隐瞒。”

　 “I think it’s a mistake,” Jude added, quickly. Willem didn’t bother answering; they had been having this argument for a month.

“我想这是个错误。”裘德立刻补充。威廉懒得回答；这件事他们已经争执了一个月。

　 After dinner, he and JB lounged on the sofa and drank tea and Jude loaded the dishwasher. By this time, JB seemed almost appeased, and he recalled that this was the arc of most dinners with JB, even back at Lispenard Street: he began the evening as something sharp and tart, and ended it as something soothed and gentled.

晚餐后，他和杰比坐在沙发上喝茶，裘德则在厨房整理脏碗盘，放进洗碗机。此时，杰比看起来几乎已经被成功地安抚了，而他想起杰比大部分晚餐前后的心情变化就是这样，即使早在利斯本纳街时期：傍晚一开始，他锐利又尖酸，结束时则是平静又温和。

　 “How’s the sex?” JB asked him.

“你们的性生活如何？”杰比问。

　 “Amazing,” he said, immediately.

“很棒。”他立刻说。

　 JB looked glum. “Dammit,” he said.

杰比看起来很不高兴。“该死。”他说。

　 But of course, this was a lie. He had no idea if the sex was amazing, because they hadn’t had sex. The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they’d told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude’s father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged. Willem had walked him to the door, and as they were waiting for the elevator, Andy said to him, quietly, “How’s it going?”

但是这自然是谎话。他不知道他们的性生活是否很棒，因为他们还没有过。上个星期五，安迪过来，他们告诉了他，安迪站起来郑重地拥抱两人，好像他是裘德的父亲，而他们刚跟他说他们订婚了。离开时，威廉送他到门口。两人等电梯时，安迪低声跟他说：“进行得还顺利吗？”

　 He paused. “Okay,” he said at last, and Andy, as if he could discern everything he wasn’t saying, squeezed his shoulder. “I know it’s not easy, Willem,” he said. “But you must be doing something right—I’ve never seen him more relaxed or happier, not ever.” He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but what could he say? He couldn’t say, Call me if you want to talk about him, or Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, and so instead he left, giving Willem a little salute as the elevator sank out of sight.

他顿了一下。“还好。”他终于说。安迪好像察觉出他没说的一切，捏了一下他的肩膀。“我知道不容易，威廉，”他说，“但你一定做对了什么事，我从来没见过他这么轻松、这么愉快，真的从来没有。”他的表情似乎想再说些什么，但还能说什么？他不能说，“如果你想谈谈他，就打电话给我”，或“需要任何帮助就跟我说一声”，然后他离开了，电梯下降时他朝威廉敬了个礼。

　 That night, after JB had gone home, he thought of the conversation he and Andy had had in the café that day, and how even as Andy had been warning him how difficult it would be, he hadn’t fully believed him. In retrospect, he was glad he hadn’t: because believing Andy might have intimidated him, because he might have been too scared to try.

那天夜里，杰比离开后，他想着当初和安迪在小餐馆里的对话，连安迪都警告过他这会有多困难，当时他没完全相信。回顾起来，他很高兴自己当时没相信。要是相信了安迪，他可能会畏缩，可能就害怕得不敢试了。

　 He turned and looked at Jude, who was asleep. This was one of the nights he’d taken off his clothes, and he was lying on his back, one of his arms crooked near his head, and Willem, as he often did, ran his fingers down the inside of this arm, its scars rendering it into a miserable terrain, a place of mountains and valleys singed by fire. Sometimes, when he was certain Jude was very deeply asleep, he would switch on the light near his side of the bed and study his body more closely, because Jude refused to let himself be examined in daylight. He would uncover him and move his palms over his arms, his legs, his back, feeling the texture of the skin change from rough to glossy, marveling at all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways the body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it. He had once shot a film on the Big Island of Hawaii, and on their day off, he and the rest of the cast had trekked across the lava fields, watching the land change from rock as porous and dry as petrified bone into a gleaming black landscape, the lava frozen into exuberant swirls of frosting. Jude’s skin was as diverse, as wondrous, and in places so unlike skin as he had felt or understood it that it too seemed something otherworldly and futuristic, a prototype of what flesh might look like ten thousand years from now.

他翻身看着睡着的裘德。今天晚上他脱了衣服，此刻正仰天躺着，一边手臂弯曲放在头旁边，而威廉一如他常做的那样，手指沿着他的手臂内侧往下拂过，上头的疤痕形成一片悲惨的地形，像是一片被大火烧过的高山和谷地。有时，确定裘德熟睡后，他会打开自己那一侧的床头灯，更仔细地审视他的身体，因为裘德拒绝在大白天让人看到。他会掀开他身上的被子，手掌抚过他的手臂、双腿、背部，感觉那皮肤的质地在他手掌下从粗糙变为光滑，惊叹着皮肉能形成的各种排列组合，惊叹着身体即使碰到刻意摧毁它的企图，也有种种自愈的方式。他曾去夏威夷大岛拍过一部电影。某个休息日，他和其他演员就到熔岩区徒步旅行，看着地表从多孔且干燥如石化骨头的岩石，转为一片微微发亮的黑色地景，那些熔岩凝结为一道道结霜的奔流漩涡。裘德的皮肤也同样变化多端、同样不可思议，有些地方看起来或感觉起来一点也不像皮肤，简直是超越尘世的未来幻想，好像是一万年后皮肉的样貌。

　 “You’re repulsed,” Jude had said, quietly, the second time he had taken his clothes off, and he had shaken his head. And he hadn’t been: Jude had always been so secretive, so protective of his body that to see it for real was somehow anticlimactic; it was so normal, finally, so less dramatic than what he had imagined. But the scars were difficult for him to see not because they were aesthetically offensive, but because each one was evidence of something withstood or inflicted. Jude’s arms were for that reason the part of his body that upset him the most. At nights, as Jude slept, he would turn them over in his hands, counting the cuts, trying to imagine himself in a state in which he would willingly inflict pain on himself, in which he would actively try to erode his own being. Sometimes there were new cuts—he always knew when Jude had cut himself, because he slept in his shirt on those nights, and he would have to push up his sleeves as he slept and feel for the bandages—and he would wonder when Jude had made them, and why he hadn’t noticed. When he had moved in with Jude after the suicide attempt, Harold had told him where Jude hid his bag of razors, and he, like Harold, had begun throwing them away. But then they had disappeared entirely, and he couldn’t figure out where Jude was keeping them.

“你很反感吧。”裘德第二次脱掉衣服时曾低声说，他听了摇摇头。是真的：裘德总是隐藏、保护他的身体，因而亲眼看到时，不知怎的还有点扫兴；比起他曾想象的，实在太普通、太缺乏戏剧性了。但看到那些疤让他很难受，不是因为审美上的不舒服，而是每道疤都是承受痛苦或遭受凌虐的证据。因为这个原因，裘德的手臂是最令他难过的部分。好几个夜里，当裘德睡着时，他会抬起他的手臂，数着那些割痕，设法想象自己处在一种故意让自己疼痛、主动想伤害自己的情境里。有时那手臂上有新的割痕（他总是知道裘德什么时候割自己，因为那些夜晚裘德会穿着衬衫睡觉，他得趁他熟睡时推高他的袖子，摸着那些绷带），他想不通裘德是什么时候割的，为什么自己都没注意到。裘德自杀未遂后他搬进来住时，哈罗德曾告诉他裘德把装有刮胡刀片的袋子藏在哪里，于是他就像哈罗德那样，开始把那些袋子丢掉。但后来那些袋子就完全消失了，他猜不到裘德藏在哪里。

　 Other times, he would feel not curiosity, but awe: he was so much more damaged than Willem had comprehended. How could I have not known this? he would ask himself. How could I not have seen this?

但有时候，他完全没有好奇之感，只有敬畏：裘德身上的损伤比威廉原先理解的要更严重。我怎么可能都不晓得？他会问自己。我怎么可能都没看到？

　 And then there was the matter of sex. He knew Andy had warned him about sex, but Jude’s fear of and antipathy toward it disturbed and occasionally frightened him. One night toward the end of November, after they’d been together six months, he had reached his hands down Jude’s underwear and Jude had made a strange, strangled noise, the kind of noise an animal makes when it’s being caught in another animal’s jaws, and had jerked himself away with such violence that he had cracked his head against his nightstand. “I’m sorry,” they had apologized to each other, “I’m sorry.” And that was the first moment that Willem, too, had felt a certain fear. All along he had assumed that Jude was shy, profoundly so, but that eventually, he would abandon some of his self-consciousness, that he would feel comfortable enough to have sex. But in that moment, he realized that what he had thought was a reluctance to have sex was actually a terror of it: that Jude would perhaps never be comfortable, that if and when they did eventually have sex, it would be because Jude decided he had to or Willem decided he had to force him. Neither option appealed to him. People had always given themselves to him; he had never had to wait, never had to try to convince someone that he wasn’t dangerous, that he wasn’t going to hurt them. What am I going to do? he asked himself. He wasn’t smart enough to figure this out on his own—and yet there was no one else he could ask. And then there was the fact that with every week, his desire grew sharper and less ignorable, his determination greater. It had been a long time since he had wanted to have sex with anyone so keenly, and the fact that it was someone he loved made the waiting both more unbearable and more absurd.

然后是性爱的事情。安迪警告过他，但裘德对性爱的恐惧及反感还是让他很烦恼，偶尔还会被吓坏。接近十一月底，他们在一起六个月后，某天晚上他把双手探入裘德的内裤里，裘德发出一个奇怪、哽住的声音，就像一只动物被另一只动物咬住时发出的那种声音，同时猛地往后挣开，力道之大使他的脑袋撞到了床头柜。“对不起，”他们同时向对方道歉，“对不起。”头一回，威廉也感觉到某种恐惧。一直以来，他都假设裘德是极度害羞，但总有一天，他会把难为情抛开，自在得足以有性爱生活。但在那一刻，他明白自己原先以为是不好意思的部分，其实是一种恐惧，他明白裘德或许永远不会自在，也明白如果有一天他们终于有性行为，那是因为裘德决定自己非做不可，或威廉决定自己非逼他不可。这两种选项都不是他喜欢的。其他人对他总是主动投怀送抱；他从来不必等，从来不必试着说服某个人他不危险、不会伤害他们。我该怎么办？他问自己。他没聪明到可以自己想出办法，但又没有人可以问。随着每个星期过去，他的欲望越加强烈、越加无法忽视，他的决心也更强大。他已经好久没有这么想跟一个人做爱，而这又是他所深爱的人，让整个等待过程更难以忍受也更荒谬。

　 As Jude slept that night, he watched him. Maybe I made a mistake, he thought.

那天晚上裘德睡着后，他看着他。或许我犯了错，他心想。

　 Aloud, he said, “I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated.” Next to him, Jude breathed, ignorant of Willem’s treachery.

他说出声来：“我不知道事情会这么复杂。”在他旁边，裘德呼吸着，对威廉的背叛浑然不觉。

　 And then the morning arrived and he was reminded why he had decided to pursue this relationship to begin with, his own naïveté and arrogance aside. It was early, but he had woken anyway, and he watched as, through the half-open closet door, Jude got dressed. This had been a recent development, and Willem knew how difficult it was for him. He saw how hard Jude tried; he saw how everything he and everyone he knew took for granted—getting dressed in front of someone; getting undressed in front of someone—were things Jude had to practice again and again: he saw how determined he was, he saw how brave he was being. And this reminded him that he, too, had to keep trying. Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.

到了早晨醒来，他想起当初除了自己的天真和傲慢之外，他为什么想追求这段感情。当时还很早，但他已经醒了，他隔着衣帽间半开的门，观察裘德穿衣服。这是最近的新发展，他知道这对裘德来说有多不容易。他看到裘德多么努力尝试，看到他和他认识的人都视为理所当然的事情（在别人面前穿衣服；在别人面前脱衣服），都是裘德必须一再练习的。他看到他有多么坚决，有多么勇敢。这提醒了他，他也得继续尝试下去。他们两个人都不确定；两个人都在尽力尝试；两个人都会怀疑自己，都会前进与倒退。但他们都会持续尝试，因为他们信赖对方，也因为只有对方才值得这样的辛苦、这样的困难、这样的不安和暴露。

　 When he opened his eyes again, Jude was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling at him, and he was filled with affection for him: for how beautiful he was, for how dear he was, for how easy it was to love him. “Don’t go,” he said.

他再度睁开眼睛时，裘德坐在床沿对他微笑。他心中充满对他的深情：因为他这么美，这么宝贵，这么容易就让人爱上他。“不要走。”他说。