《渺小一生》:现在这样，就是我想要的。
“Right,” he says, and bends down, takes Jude’s sunglasses off him, kisses him on his eyelids, and replaces his glasses. Summer, JB has always said, is Jude’s season: his skin darkens and his hair lightens to almost the same shade, making his eyes turn an unnatural green, and Willem has to keep himself from touching him too much. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
“好。”他说，然后弯腰，把裘德的太阳眼镜摘下来，吻了他两边的眼皮，再帮他把眼镜戴回去。杰比总是说夏天是裘德的季节：他的皮肤变黑，发色晒得几乎和皮肤一个颜色，眼睛颜色也转成一种不大自然的绿，而威廉必须避免太常碰触他。“我马上回来。”
He trudges up the hill to the house, yawning, places his glass of half-melted ice and tea in the sink, and crunches down the pebbled driveway to the car. It is one of those summer days when the air is so hot, so dry, so still, the sun overhead so white, that one doesn’t so much see one’s surroundings as hear and smell and taste them: the lawn-mower buzz of the bees and locusts, the faint peppery scent of the sunflowers, the oddly mineral flavor the heat leaves on the tongue, as if he’s just sucked on stones. The heat is enervating, but not in an oppressive way, only in a way that makes them both sleepy and defenseless, in a way that makes torpor not just acceptable but necessary. When it is hot like this they lie by the pool for hours, not eating but drinking—pitchers of iced mint tea for breakfast, liters of lemonade for lunch, bottles of Aligoté for dinner—and they leave the house’s every window, every door open, the ceiling fans spinning, so that at night, when they finally seal it shut, they trap within it the fragrance of meadows and trees.
他缓缓爬上坡回到屋里，一边打呵欠，一边把手上那杯冰块半融化的红茶放进水槽里，然后踩着碎石车道走向车子。今天是最炎热的夏日，空气很热、很干、很沉滞，头上的太阳很白，周遭的事物其实能被看到的并不多，主要是被听到、闻到、尝到：蜜蜂和蝗虫发出割草机般的嗡嗡声，向日葵散发出微微的胡椒气味，舌头上有树叶晒干那种奇怪的矿石味，好像刚刚吸吮过石头。那热气令人乏力，但并不难受，只是困倦欲眠又无法抵抗，这时懒散不光可以接受，也是必要的。像这样的大热天，他们会躺在户外游泳池畔好几个小时，不吃只喝——一壶壶的薄荷冰红茶当早餐，一升升的柠檬水当午餐，一瓶瓶的阿里高特[4]气泡白葡萄酒当晚餐——而且他们把房子的每扇窗户、每扇门都打开，天花板的风扇旋转着，这样入夜时，等他们终于把门窗关上，屋里就会充满草地和树木的香气。
It is the Saturday before Labor Day, and they would normally be in Truro, but this year they have rented Harold and Julia a house outside Aix-en-Provence for the entire summer, and the two of them are spending the holiday in Garrison instead. Harold and Julia will arrive—maybe with Laurence and Gillian, maybe not—tomorrow, but today Willem is picking up Malcolm and Sophie and JB and his on-again, off-again boyfriend Fredrik from the train station. They’ve seen very little of their friends for months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months, and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in April, in Paris—he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London, where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.
这是九月初劳动节假期前的星期六，通常他们会去特鲁罗，但今年他们在法国普罗旺斯租下一栋房子，让哈罗德和朱丽娅在那过一整个夏天，于是这个长假，他们两个就待在加里森村的这栋房子里。哈罗德和朱丽娅明天会过来，或许加上劳伦斯和吉莉安夫妇，或许不会。但今天威廉要去火车站接马尔科姆和苏菲，还有杰比和他反复分手又复合的男朋友弗雷德里克。他们好几个月没碰面了：杰比拿到了一笔研究基金，过去六个月都待在意大利；马尔科姆和苏菲则一直忙着上海一座新的陶瓷博物馆的建造事宜。因此，他们四个上一次全员到齐是四月在巴黎——他在那拍戏，在伦敦工作的裘德赶来，杰比从罗马过来，马尔科姆和苏菲则是回纽约的途中在巴黎停留两天。
Almost every summer he thinks: This is the best summer. But this summer, he knows, really is the best. And not just the summer: the spring, the winter, the fall. As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.
几乎每年夏天，他都会想：这是最棒的夏天。但他非常确定，今年夏天才是最棒的。而且不光是夏天，还有春天、冬天、秋天。他年纪越大，就越发倾向把自己的一生视为一连串回顾画面，评估过去的每个季节，仿佛那是不同年份的葡萄酒，把他刚活过的几年划入不同的历史年代：雄心勃勃的年代。没有安全感的年代。辉煌年代。妄想年代。希望年代。
Jude had smiled when he told him this. “And what era are we in now?” he asked, and Willem had smiled back at him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t come up with a name for it yet.”
他把这个想法告诉裘德时，裘德露出微笑。“那我们现在是什么年代？”他问。威廉也朝他微笑。“不知道，”他说，“我还没想出名字。”
But they both agreed that they had at least exited The Awful Years. Two years ago, he had spent this very weekend—Labor Day weekend—in a hospital on the Upper East Side, staring out the window with a hatred so intense it nauseated him at the orderlies and nurses and doctors in their jade-green pajamas congregating outside the building, eating and smoking and talking on their phones as if nothing were wrong, as if above them weren’t people in various stages of dying, including his own person, who was at that moment in a medically induced coma, his skin prickling with fever, who had last opened his eyes four days ago, the day after he had gotten out of surgery.
但他们都同意，他们至少脱离了“糟糕年代”。两年前的这个周末（劳动节长假），他在上东城的医院里度过。当时他望着窗外，心中的怨恨强烈到让他想吐，大楼外聚集着工友、护士和医生，穿着浅绿色的服装，各自在吃东西、抽烟或讲电话，仿佛没有什么不对劲，仿佛他们上方的人并非处于各种阶段的垂死状态，包括他最爱的人，此刻仍在药物造成的昏迷状态中，皮肤发热，上回张开眼睛已经是四天前刚动完手术的时候。
“He’s going to be fine, Willem,” Harold kept babbling at him, Harold who was in general even more of a worrier than Willem himself had become. “He’s going to be fine. Andy said so.” On and on Harold went, parroting back to Willem everything that he had already heard Andy say, until finally he had snapped at him, “Jesus, Harold, give it a fucking break. Do you believe everything Andy says? Does he look like he’s getting better? Does he look like he’s going to be fine?” And then he had seen Harold’s face change, his expression of pleading, frantic desperation, the face of an old, hopeful man, and he had been punched with remorse and had gone over and held him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Harold, Harold who had already lost one son, who was trying to reassure himself that he wouldn’t lose another. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m being an asshole.”
“他会好起来的，威廉。”当时哈罗德不断跟他念叨着，哈罗德大致上比威廉更容易担心。“他会好起来的。安迪是这么说的。”哈罗德说个不停，把他听安迪说过的话又重新讲了一遍，直到最后威廉厉声说：“天啊，哈罗德，你他妈的别再啰唆了。安迪说什么你都相信吗？他看起来像是好转了吗？他看起来像是会好起来吗？”然后他看到哈罗德的脸色变了，那恳求、狂乱的表情，那抱着希望、苍老的脸，他忽然很后悔，走过去抱住他。“对不起。”他对哈罗德说，哈罗德已经失去一个儿子了，正在安慰自己不会再失去一个。“对不起，哈罗德，真的很对不起。原谅我，我是混蛋。”
“You’re not an asshole, Willem,” Harold had said. “But you can’t tell me he’s not going to get better. You can’t tell me that.”
“你不是混蛋，威廉。”哈罗德说，“但是你不可以跟我说他不会好起来。你不可以。”
“I know,” he said. “Of course he’s going to get better,” he said, sounding like Harold, Harold echoing Harold to Harold. “Of course he is.” But inside of him, he felt the beetley scrabble of fear: of course there was no of course. There never had been. Of course had vanished eighteen months ago. Of course had left their lives forever.
“我知道。”他说，“他当然会好起来。”那口气听起来就像哈罗德，哈罗德向哈罗德呼应着哈罗德。“他当然会的。”但在心底，他感觉到恐惧像甲虫乱爬似的：当然没有什么当然，从来没有。当然在十八个月前就消失了。当然已经永远离开他们的人生了。
He had always been an optimist, and yet in those months, his optimism deserted him. He had canceled all of his projects for the rest of the year, but as the fall dragged on, he wished he had them; he wished he had something to distract himself. By the end of September, Jude was out of the hospital, and yet he was so thin, so frail, that Willem had been scared to touch him, scared to even look at him, scared to see the way that his cheekbones were now so pronounced that they cast permanent shadows around his mouth, scared to see the way he could watch Jude’s pulse beating in the scooped-out hollow of his throat, as if there was something living inside of him that was trying to kick its way out. He could feel Jude trying to comfort him, trying to make jokes, and that made him even more scared. On the few occasions he left the apartment—“You have to,” Richard had told him, flatly, “you’re going to go crazy otherwise, Willem”—he was tempted to turn his phone off, because every time it chirped and he saw it was Richard (or Malcolm, or Harold, or Julia, or JB, or Andy, or the Henry Youngs, or Rhodes, or Elijah, or India, or Sophie, or Lucien, or whoever was sitting with Jude for the hour or so that he was distractedly wandering the streets or working out downstairs or, a few times, trying to lie still through a massage or sit through lunch with Roman or Miguel), he would tell himself, This is it. He’s dying. He’s dead, and he would wait a second, another second, before answering the phone and hearing that the call was only a status report: That Jude had eaten a meal. That he hadn’t. That he was sleeping. That he seemed nauseated. Finally he had to tell them: Don’t call me unless it’s serious. I don’t care if you have questions and calling’s faster; you have to text me. If you call me, I’ll think the worst. For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.
他向来乐观，然而在过去的这十八个月中，他的乐观却弃他而去。他取消了那年接下来的所有工作，但秋天缓缓过去，他恨不得回去工作，恨不得有别的事情转移自己的注意力。到了九月底，裘德出院了，可是整个人很瘦、很虚弱，连威廉都很怕碰他，甚至很怕看他，怕看到他的颧骨现在那么明显，阴影常年笼罩在嘴巴周围；怕自己可以看到裘德瘦巴巴的喉咙上脉搏跳动，好像里头有个活物踹着踢着想冲出来。他可以感觉到裘德试图安慰他，试图开玩笑，这让他更害怕。少数几回他离开公寓时（“威廉，你一定要离开，否则你会疯掉。”理查德冷静地告诉他），他都很想冒险关掉手机，因为每回手机响起，他看到来电者是理查德（或马尔科姆、哈罗德、朱丽娅、杰比，也可能是安迪、两个亨利·杨、罗兹、伊利亚、印蒂亚、苏菲、吕西安，任何暂时陪着裘德的人，好让他心不在焉地出去走走，去楼下健身，还有几次他设法去按摩，或是跟罗蒙或米盖尔吃午餐），就会告诉自己，就是这回。他快死了。他死了。他会等一秒钟，再一秒钟，才接起电话，听到别人只是打来跟他报告情况：说裘德吃了饭。说他没吃饭。说他正在睡觉。说他好像想吐。最后他不得不告诉他们：不要打电话给我，除非有严重的情况。我不在乎你是不是有问题，也不在乎打电话比较快；有事就发短信给我。如果你们打来，我会以为发生了最糟糕的状况。有生以来头一回，他发自内心地明白有人说自己的心脏跳到喉咙口是什么意思，不过他感觉到的不光是心脏，而是所有器官都往上冲着想跳出嘴巴，他的内脏焦虑得乱成一团。
People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right. But Hemming’s healing—which hadn’t ended with his healing at all—hadn’t been like that, and Jude’s hadn’t either: theirs were a mountain range of peaks and trenches, and in the middle of October, after Jude had gone back to work (still scarily thin, still scarily weak), there had been a night when he had woken with a fever so high that he had started seizing, and Willem had been certain that this was the moment, that this was the end. He had realized then that despite his fear, he had never really prepared himself, that he had never really thought of what it would mean, and although he wasn’t a bargainer by nature, he bargained now, with someone or something he didn’t even know he believed in. He promised more patience, more gratitude, less swearing, less vanity, less sex, less indulgence, less complaining, less self-absorption, less selfishness, less fearfulness. When Jude had lived, Willem’s relief had been so total, so punishing, that he had collapsed, and Andy had prescribed him an antianxiety pill and sent him up to Garrison for the weekend with JB for company, leaving Jude in his and Richard’s care. He had always thought that unlike Jude, he had known how to accept help when it was offered, but he had forgotten this skill at the most crucial time, and he was glad and grateful that his friends had made the effort to remind him.
每次大家谈起痊愈，好像那是可预测的，而且一路都会有进展，像一条明确的对角线，从图表的左下角画向右上角。但亨明的痊愈（最后的结果根本不是痊愈）就不像这样，裘德的也不像：他们的痊愈像山区，有山峰也有沟渠。到了十月中，裘德回去上班后（还是瘦得可怕，虚弱得可怕），某天晚上发烧着醒来，烧得癫痫发作。威廉确定那一刻就是终点了。这时他才明白，尽管害怕，他却从来没有真正做好心理准备，从来没真正想过这样代表什么意思。尽管他生来不会讨价还价，但他现在开始跟一个他根本不相信的信仰对象讨价还价。他保证自己会更有耐心、更感恩、减少说粗话、减少虚荣、减少性交、减少放纵、减少抱怨、减少自我中心、减少自私、减少害怕。当裘德情势稳定后，威廉完全如释重负，筋疲力尽得差点要晕倒了，于是安迪开了抗焦虑药物给他，叫杰比陪着他去加里森村度周末，把裘德留给安迪和理查德照顾。他一直以为自己不像裘德，有人要帮忙时，他知道要如何接受，但在最关键的时刻，他忘了这个技巧，因而很高兴也很感激他的朋友们努力提醒他。
By Thanksgiving, things had become—if not good, then they had at least stopped being bad, which they accepted as the same thing. But it was only in retrospect that they had been able to recognize it as a sort of fulcrum, as the period in which there were first days, and then weeks, and then an entire month in which nothing got worse, in which they regained the trick of waking each day with not dread but with purpose, in which they were finally, cautiously, able to talk about the future, to worry not just about making it successfully through the day but into days they couldn’t yet imagine. It was only then that they were able to talk about what needed to be done, only then that Andy began making serious schedules—schedules with goals set one month, two months, six months away—that tracked how much weight he wanted Jude to gain, and when he would be fitted with his permanent prostheses, and when he wanted him to take his first steps, and when he wanted to see him walking again. Once again, they rejoined the slipstream of life; once again, they learned to obey the calendar. By February Willem was reading scripts again. By April, and his forty-ninth birthday, Jude was walking again—slowly, inelegantly, but walking—and looking once again like a normal person. By Willem’s birthday that August, almost a year after his surgery, his walk was, as Andy had predicted, better—silkier, more confident—than it had been with his own legs, and he looked, once again, better than a normal person: he looked like himself again.
到了感恩节，情势已经转变，即使不是变好，至少也是停止坏下去，而且他们都欣然接受。直到事后回顾起来，他们才有办法重新整理，把那段时间划为关键时期：一开始是头几天，接着是几个星期，然后是一整个月都没有恶化。于是他们又回到老习惯，每天早上醒来不是满心恐惧，而是怀着目标，两人终于能谨慎地谈论未来，担心的不光是熬过这一天，而是他们还无法想象的很多天。直到此时，他们才有办法讨论该做些什么事。直到此时，安迪才开始认真拟定时间表，设定一个月、两个月、六个月后要完成的目标，订出他希望裘德增加多少体重、什么时候要去安装永久性义肢，还有希望他什么时候迈出第一步、什么时候开始走路。再一次，他们重新加入了生命往前的滑流；再一次，他们学会照着日程表过日子。二月，威廉又开始读剧本了。到了四月的49岁生日，裘德又可以走路了——缓慢、不优雅，但的确是在走了，同时看起来再度像个正常人了。威廉那年八月的生日，就在裘德开刀将近一年后，一如安迪所预测的，裘德走得比用原先的两腿更好了，更流畅也更自信；而且再一次，他看起来比正常人更好，看起来又像他自己了。
“We still haven’t had your fiftieth birthday blowout,” Jude had reminded him over his fifty-first birthday dinner—his birthday dinner that Jude had made, standing by himself at the stove for hours, displaying no apparent signs of fatigue—and Willem had smiled.
“我们都还没有帮你办50岁的生日大派对。”裘德在他51岁的生日晚餐上说，威廉听了露出微笑。这顿晚餐是裘德下厨，他独自站在炉子前好几小时，看起来没有明显疲倦的迹象。
“This is all I want,” he’d said, and he meant it. It felt silly to compare his experience of such a depleting, brutal two years to Jude’s own experience, and yet he felt transformed by them. It was as if his despair had given rise to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core, indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.
“现在这样，就是我想要的。”他说，他是真心的。把他这耗损、残酷的两年跟裘德的经验相比，似乎很傻气，但是他觉得这两年改变了他。仿佛他的绝望带来一种所向无敌的感觉；他觉得身上所有不重要、柔软的部分都被烧掉了，只剩下一个暴露在外的钢铁核心，坚不可摧却又柔韧，禁得起一切。
They spent his birthday in Garrison, just the two of them, and that night, after dinner, they went down to the lake, and he took off his clothes and jumped off the dock into the water, which smelled and looked like a great pool of tea. “Come in,” he told Jude, and then, when he hesitated, “As the birthday boy, I command it.” And Jude had slowly undressed, and taken off his prostheses, and then had finally pushed off the edge of the dock with his hands, and Willem had caught him. As Jude had gotten physically healthier, he had also grown more and more self-conscious about his body, and Willem knew, from how withdrawn Jude would become at times, from how carefully he shielded himself when he was taking off or putting on his legs, how much he struggled with accepting how he now appeared. When he had been weaker, he had let Willem help undress him, but now that he was stronger, Willem saw him unclothed only in glimpses, only by accident. But he had decided to view Jude’s self-consciousness as a certain kind of healthiness, for it was at least proof of his physical strength, proof that he was able to get in and out of the shower by himself, to climb in and out of bed by himself—things he’d had to relearn how to do, things he once hadn’t had the energy to do on his own.
他们在加里森的房子过他的生日，只有他们两个。那天晚上吃过晚餐后，他们走到湖边，他脱掉衣服，从凸出的码头跳入水中，那湖水闻起来、看起来都像是一大池绿茶。“快来。”他告诉裘德，看裘德犹豫着，“我以生日寿星的身份命令你，快来。”裘德慢吞吞脱掉衣服，拆下义肢，坐在码头边缘，两手终于往后一推，下了水，威廉接住他。随着裘德身体越来越健康，对自己的身体也越来越在意。从裘德有时会变得多么退缩，装卸义肢时刻意遮掩，威廉知道他是多么难以接受自己现在的外表。裘德身体比较虚弱时，还会让威廉帮他脱衣服，但现在随着身体更健康，威廉只会偶尔不小心瞥到他的裸体。但他决定把裘德的害羞视为某种健康的征兆，这至少证明他有体力，可以自己进出淋浴间、上下床——这些事情他一度没有力气自己做，现在又重新学会了。
Now they drifted through the lake, swimming or clinging to each other in silence, and after Willem got out, Jude did as well, heaving himself onto the deck with his arms, and they sat there for a while in the soft summer air, both of them naked, both of them staring at the tapered ends of Jude’s legs. It was the first time he had seen Jude naked in months, and he hadn’t known what to say, and in the end had simply put his arm around him and pulled him close, and that had (he thought) been the right thing to say after all.
此时他们在湖里漂浮、游泳或只是沉默地抓着彼此。威廉离水后，裘德也用两只手臂把自己撑上码头。两人在柔和的夏夜空气中坐了一会儿，都没有穿衣服，两人瞪着裘德双腿变细的末端。这是他好几个月以来第一次看到裘德裸体，也不知道该说什么，最后他只是用双臂拥住他，把他拉近，觉得什么都不说才是对的。
He was still frightened, intermittently. In September, a few weeks before he left for his first project in more than a year, Jude had woken again with a fever, and this time, he didn’t ask Willem not to call Andy, and Willem didn’t ask him for permission to do so. They had gone directly to Andy’s office, and Andy had ordered X-rays, blood work, everything, and they had waited there, each of them lying on the bed in a different examining room, until the radiologist had called and said that there was no sign of any bone infection, and the lab had called and said that there was nothing wrong.
他还是间歇地感到害怕。九月，就在他一年多来首度离家拍戏的几周前，裘德又半夜发烧醒来。这回他没要威廉别打电话给安迪，威廉也没请求他的允许。他们直接赶到安迪的诊疗间，安迪下令去拍X光片、做血液检验，全套都来。他们在那里等，躺在不同诊疗室的检查台上，直到放射科医生来电说没有任何骨头感染的迹象，检验室也回电说没有问题。
“Rhinopharyngitis,” Andy had said to them, smiling. “The common cold.” But he had rested his hand on the back of Jude’s head, and they had all been relieved. How fast, how distressingly fast, had their instinct for fear been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.
“鼻咽炎。”安迪对着他们微笑说，“就是一般的感冒。”威廉一手放在裘德的后脑，两个人都松了一口气。他们恐惧的本能重新苏醒得多快，快得令人痛苦；恐惧本身就像一种病毒，只是暂时休眠，但绝对无法永远摆脱。快乐和放纵他们都必须重新学习，必须重新努力赢得。但他们永远不必重新学习恐惧：因为恐惧就活在他们三个人心中，是一种共同的疾病，一股缠绕着他们DNA的发亮细线。
And so off he went to Spain, to Galicia, to film. For as long as he had known him, Jude had wanted to someday walk the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage route that ended in Galicia. “We’ll start at the Aspe Pass in the Pyrenees,” Jude had said (this was before either of them had ever even been to France), “and we’ll walk west. It’ll take weeks! Every night we’ll stay in these communal pilgrim hostels I’ve read about and we’ll survive on black bread with caraway seeds and yogurt and cucumbers.”
他要去西班牙的加利西亚拍片。从两人认识以来，裘德一直希望有一天能去走圣雅各布之路，这条中世纪的朝圣路线，终点就在加利西亚。“我们会从比利牛斯山的阿斯佩隘口出发，”裘德年轻时曾说（那时他们两个连法国都还没去过），“然后往西走。会走上好几个星期！每天晚上，我们住在我读到过的朝圣客共享旅舍里，天天只吃加了葛缕子籽的黑面包、酸奶和小黄瓜。”
“I don’t know,” he said, although back then he had thought less of Jude’s limitations—he was too young at the time, they both were, to truly believe that Jude might have limitations—and more of himself. “That sounds kind of exhausting, Judy.”
“不知道哎。”他说，当时他很少想到裘德的限制。当时他还太年轻，两人都很年轻，不相信裘德可能会有限制。他比较担心自己的限制。“那听起来好累，小裘。”
