《渺小一生》:“這個樂團(tuán)叫什么？”

　 On the way out, he walked with Jude. “Jude,” he said quietly, so that the others couldn’t hear him. “Anything that involves you—I’ll let you see in advance. You veto it, and I’ll never show it.”

離開餐廳時，他跟裘德一起走?！棒玫?，”他低聲說，免得另外兩個人聽到，“任何作品里只要有你，我會事先讓你看。若是你否決了，我就永遠(yuǎn)不展出?！?

　 Jude looked at him. “Promise?”

裘德看著他：“你保證？”

　 “Swear to god.”

“我向上帝發(fā)誓。”

　 He regretted his offer the instant he made it, for the truth was that Jude was his favorite of the three of them to paint: He was the most beautiful of them, with the most interesting face and the most unusual coloring, and he was the shyest, and so pictures of him always felt more precious than ones of the others.

他一說出口就后悔了，因為三個人之中，他最喜歡畫裘德：他是三個人里頭最俊美的，他的臉也最有趣，膚色最特別，而且他最害羞，所以他的照片總是比其他人的珍貴。

　 The following Sunday when he was back at his mother’s, he went through some of his boxes from college that he’d stored in his old bedroom, looking for a photograph he knew he had. Finally he found it: a picture of Jude from their first year that someone had taken and printed and which had somehow ended up in his possession. In it, Jude was standing in the living room of their suite, turned partway to the camera. His left arm was wrapped around his chest, so you could see the satiny starburst-shaped scar on the back of his hand, and in his right he was unconvincingly holding an unlit cigarette. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped long-sleeved T-shirt that must not have been his, it was so big (although maybe it really was his; in those days, all of Jude’s clothes were too big because, as it later emerged, he intentionally bought them oversized so he could wear them for the next few years, as he grew), and his hair, which he wore longish back then so he could hide behind it, fizzled off at his jawline. But the thing that JB had always remembered most about this photograph was the expression on Jude’s face: a wariness that in those days he was never without. He hadn’t looked at this picture in years, but doing so made him feel empty, for reasons he wasn’t quite able to articulate.

下個星期天，杰比一回母親家就去翻他以前在臥室里存放的幾個大學(xué)時代的紙箱，想找一張他知道自己有的照片。最后終于找到了：是他們大一時某人幫裘德拍的照片，不知怎的最后落到他手上。在照片里，裘德站在他們套房的起居室里，身子斜對著照相機(jī)。他的左臂環(huán)抱在胸前，所以看得到他手背上那個綢緞般光滑的星芒狀疤痕，他的右手則很沒說服力地夾著一根沒點燃的香煙。他穿著一件藍(lán)白條紋的長袖T恤，一定不是他自己的，因為太大了（雖然說不定還真的是他的，那幾年裘德的衣服都太大了，后來他們才知道，他還在長個子，故意買較大號的衣服，以便來年可以繼續(xù)穿）。當(dāng)時他的頭發(fā)留得頗長，垂過下頜，這樣他就可以躲在后頭。但這張照片讓杰比印象最深刻的是裘德臉上的表情：那些日子里，他永遠(yuǎn)帶著一種警惕的神色。杰比已經(jīng)好幾年沒看這張照片了，現(xiàn)在看到，他覺得好空虛，但原因是什么，他也說不太上來。

　 This was the painting he was working on now, and for it he had broken form and changed to a forty-inch-square canvas. He had experimented for days to get right that precise shade of tricky, serpenty green for Jude’s irises, and had redone the colors of his hair again and again before he was satisfied. It was a great painting, and he knew it, knew it absolutely the way you sometimes did, and he had no intention of ever showing it to Jude until it was hanging on a gallery wall somewhere and Jude would be powerless to do anything about it. He knew Jude would hate how fragile, how feminine, how vulnerable, how young it made him look, and knew too he would find lots of other imaginary things to hate about it as well, things JB couldn’t even begin to anticipate because he wasn’t a self-loathing nut job like Jude. But to him, it expressed everything about what he hoped this series would be: it was a love letter, it was a documentation, it was a saga, it was his. When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.

他現(xiàn)在正在畫的就是這張照片，而且他為此打破了原來的形式，改用一張40英寸見方的畫布。他試了好幾天，才把裘德那對機(jī)警、蛇一般的綠色眼珠畫得恰到好處，而且一次又一次重畫他的頭發(fā)，才終于滿意。他知道這是一幅很棒的作品（有時候你就是有絕對的把握），而且他根本不打算在展出前給裘德看，反正等到掛在畫廊的墻上時，裘德也無力阻止了。他知道裘德一定會痛恨這件作品把他畫得很脆弱、很女性化、很弱不禁風(fēng)，而且很年輕。他也知道裘德還會想象出一大堆痛恨這幅畫的理由，而杰比根本無從猜測，因為他不像裘德是個自我厭惡的神經(jīng)病。對杰比而言，這幅畫表達(dá)了他希望這個系列所表達(dá)的一切：這是一封情書、一篇文獻(xiàn)、一個長篇故事，是他的。他在畫這件作品時，有時會覺得自己在飛，仿佛畫廊、派對、其他藝術(shù)家和野心的世界都在他身子底下縮得好小好小，小到可以把這個世界像足球般一腳踢開，看著它滾到某個遙遠(yuǎn)的軌道，跟他再也無關(guān)。

　 It was almost six. The light would change soon. For now, the space was still quiet around him, although distantly, he could hear the train rumbling by on its tracks. Before him, his canvas waited. And so he picked up his brush and began.

快6點了。陽光很快就會黯淡下來。但眼前，整個工作室依然安靜，雖然在遠(yuǎn)處，他聽得到列車在軌道上轟隆駛過。在他眼前，畫布等待著。于是他拿起畫筆，開始工作。

　 There was poetry on the subway. Above the rows of scooped-plastic seats, filling the empty display space between ads for dermatologists and companies that promised college degrees by mail, were long laminated sheets printed with poems: second-rate Stevens and third-rate Roethke and fourth-rate Lowell, verse meant to agitate no one, anger and beauty reduced to empty aphorisms.

地鐵上有詩。就在一排排塑料椅上方，夾在皮膚科診所和函授學(xué)院的廣告之間，一塊塊長形薄板，上頭印著詩：二流的史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens），三流的羅特克（Theodore Roethke）和四流的洛厄爾（Robert Lowell），那些詩不打算鼓動任何人，憤怒和優(yōu)美都消退了，只?？斩吹木?。

　 Or so JB always said. He was against the poems. They had appeared when he was in junior high, and for the past fifteen years he had been complaining about them. “Instead of funding real art and real artists, they’re giving money to a bunch of spinster librarians and cardigan fags to pick out this shit,” he shouted at Willem over the screech of the F train’s brakes. “And it’s all this Edna St. Vincent Millay–type shit. Or it’s actually good people they’ve neutered. And they’re all white, have you noticed that? What the fuck is up with that?”

杰比總是這么說。他反對那些詩。這些詩從他初中時代開始就出現(xiàn)在地鐵車廂里，過去十五年他一直在抱怨。“他們不去找真正的藝術(shù)和真正的藝術(shù)家，卻花錢去找一堆老小姐圖書館員和穿開襟毛衣的同性戀，選出了這些狗屎?！彼贔線火車尖銳的剎車聲中朝威廉吼著，“結(jié)果選出來都是這些埃德娜·圣文森特·米萊（Edna St.Vincent Millay）型的狗屎，或是一些被閹割的好詩人，而且全是白人，你注意到了嗎？這他媽的到底是怎么回事？”

　 The following week, Willem saw a Langston Hughes poster and called JB to tell him. “Langston Hughes?!” JB groaned. “Let me guess—‘A Dream Deferred,’ right? I knew it! That shit doesn’t count. And anyway, if something really did explode, that shit’d be down in two seconds flat.”

第二個星期，威廉看到一張?zhí)m斯頓·休斯（Langston Hughes）的海報，打電話告訴杰比?！疤m斯頓·休斯？！”杰比抱怨，“我猜猜看——《延遲的夢》什么的，對不對？我就知道！那首爛詩不算數(shù)。總之，如果真有什么爆炸，那首詩會在兩秒鐘后被毀掉?！?

　 Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: “Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.” Underneath, someone has written in black marker, “Dont worry man I cant get no pussy either.” He closes his eyes.

那天下午，威廉對面是一首湯姆·岡恩（Thom Gunn）的詩：“他們的戀愛／只存在于討論中。”在詩底下，有人用黑色馬克筆寫著：“老兄，別擔(dān)心，我也找不到女人跟我上床?！彼]上眼睛。

　 It’s not promising that he’s this tired and it’s only four, his shift not even begun. He shouldn’t have gone with JB to Brooklyn the previous night, but no one else would go with him, and JB claimed he owed him, because hadn’t he accompanied Willem to his friend’s horrible one-man show just last month?

他這么累真是不太妙，而且現(xiàn)在才4點，他的值班時間都還沒到。他前一夜不該跟杰比去布魯克林的，但其他人都不跟他去，而杰比又說他欠他的，因為他上個月不是才陪威廉去看他朋友可怕的獨角戲嗎？

　 So he’d gone, of course. “Whose band is this?” he’d asked as they waited on the platform. Willem’s coat was too thin, and he’d lost one of his gloves, and as a result he had begun assuming a heat-conserving posture—arms wrapped around his chest, hands folded into his armpits, rocking back on his heels—whenever he was forced to stand still in the cold.

于是他去了，當(dāng)然了?！斑@回是誰的樂團(tuán)？”他在地鐵站臺上等車時問杰比。威廉的大衣太薄了，而且他掉了一只手套，所以每回必須在冷風(fēng)中站立不動時，他就選取一個保暖的姿勢：雙臂環(huán)抱胸前，雙手夾在腋下，挺直身子。

　 “Joseph’s,” said JB.

“約瑟夫的?！苯鼙日f。

　 “Oh,” he said. He had no idea who Joseph was. He admired JB’s Felliniesque command of his vast social circle, in which everyone was a colorfully costumed extra, and he and Malcolm and Jude were crucial but still lowly accessories to his vision—key grips or second art directors—whom he regarded as tacitly responsible for keeping the entire endeavor grinding along.

“喔。”他說。他不知道約瑟夫是誰。他欣賞杰比有如電影導(dǎo)演費利尼斯克一般指揮他交游廣闊的社交圈，在其中，每個人都是身穿鮮艷制服的臨時演員。他和馬爾科姆及裘德的任務(wù)很重要，但在杰比眼中照樣是地位低下的附屬品，比如燈光道具組長或副藝術(shù)總監(jiān)，他心照不宣地認(rèn)為他們?nèi)齻€有責(zé)任讓整個劇組持續(xù)運作下去。

　 “It’s hard core,” said JB pleasantly, as if that would help him place Joseph.

“那是硬核舞曲。”杰比愉快地說，好像認(rèn)為這樣有助于他想起約瑟夫是誰。

　 “What’s this band called?”

“這個樂團(tuán)叫什么？”

　 “Okay, here’s the thing,” JB said, grinning. “It’s called Smegma Cake 2.”

“好吧，你聽好了?！苯鼙日f，咧嘴笑了，“叫包皮垢二號。”

　 “What?” he asked, laughing. “Smegma Cake 2? Why? What happened to Smegma Cake 1?”

“什么？”他大笑著問，“包皮垢二號？為什么？那包皮垢一號怎么了？”

　 “It got a staph infection,” JB shouted over the noise of the train clattering into the station. An older woman standing near them scowled in their direction.

“感染葡萄球菌了。”杰比在火車進(jìn)站的噪音中大聲喊道。一個站在附近的老婦人朝他們皺起眉頭。