《渺小一生》:我不認(rèn)為快樂適合我

　 Back in his apartment, he shuffled quickly through his mail—he rarely got anything of any interest: everything business-related went to his agent or lawyer; anything personal went to Jude’s—found the copy of the script he’d forgotten there the week before when he stopped by the apartment after the gym, and left again; he didn’t even take off his coat.

這會兒回到公寓，他迅速檢查了一下郵件（他很少收到什么有趣的，所有工作相關(guān)的信件都會寄給經(jīng)紀(jì)人或律師；個人郵件則會寄到裘德的公寓），找到他上星期去完健身房回公寓時落下的劇本，然后連大衣都沒脫，又匆匆離開。

　 Since he’d bought the apartment a year ago, he’d spent a total of six weeks there. There was a futon in the bedroom, and the coffee table from Lispenard Street in the living room, and the scuffed Eames fiberglass chair that JB had found in the street, and his boxes of books. But that was it. In theory, Malcolm was meant to be renovating the space, converting the airless little study near the kitchen into a dining alcove and addressing a list of other issues as well, but Malcolm, as if sensing Willem’s lack of interest, had made the apartment his last priority. He complained about this sometimes, but he knew it wasn’t Malcolm’s fault: after all, he hadn’t answered Malcolm’s e-mails about finishes or tiles or the dimensions of the built-in bookcase or banquette that Malcolm needed him to approve before he ordered the millwork. It was only recently that he’d had his lawyer’s office send Malcolm the final paperwork he needed to begin construction, and the following week, they were finally going to sit down and he was going to make some decisions, and when he returned home in mid-January, the apartment would be, Malcolm promised him, if not totally transformed, then at least greatly improved.

自從一年前買下這間公寓以來，他總共只在里面待過六星期。臥室里有張日式床墊，客廳里放著利斯本納街搬來的茶幾，還有杰比在街上撿來的那把埃姆斯玻璃纖維椅子，以及他的幾箱書，就這樣。理論上，馬爾科姆打算幫他重新裝修，把廚房邊沒窗子的小書房改為用餐空間，同時處理其他問題。但馬爾科姆好像感覺到威廉缺乏興趣，就一直沒把整修這間公寓列入優(yōu)先待辦事項。他有時會抱怨一下，但他知道這不是馬爾科姆的錯。畢竟，是他自己一直沒回復(fù)馬爾科姆的電子郵件，包括收尾、瓷磚、嵌入式書柜的尺寸，還有馬爾科姆訂制前要他同意的長沙發(fā)。直到最近，他才請律師把動工前必須簽訂的文件寄給馬爾科姆。下星期，他和馬爾科姆要碰面做一些決定，等到他一月中拍完戲回來，公寓應(yīng)該就會像馬爾科姆保證過的，就算不是改頭換面，也大有改善。

　 In the meantime, he still more or less lived with Jude, into whose apartment on Greene Street he’d moved directly after he and Philippa had broken up. He used his unfinished apartment, and the promise he’d made to Andy, as the reasons for his apparently interminable occupancy of Jude’s extra bedroom, but the fact was that he needed Jude’s company and the constancy of his presence. When he was away in England, in Ireland, in California, in France, in Tangiers, in Algeria, in India, in the Philippines, in Canada, he needed to have an image of what was waiting for him back home in New York, and that image never included Perry Street. Home for him was Greene Street, and when he was far away and lonely, he thought of Greene Street, and his room there, and how on weekends, after Jude finished working, they would stay up late, talking, and he would feel time slow and expand, letting him believe the night might stretch out forever.

同時，他多多少少還是跟裘德一起住。當(dāng)初跟菲莉帕一分手，他就直接搬進了裘德格林街的公寓。他的理由是，自己的公寓還沒裝修，而且基于他對安迪的承諾，他一直霸占裘德家多出來的臥室不走。但其實是他需要裘德的陪伴，需要裘德穩(wěn)定不變的存在感。當(dāng)他去英格蘭、愛爾蘭、加州、法國、摩洛哥的丹吉爾、阿爾及利亞、印度、菲律賓、加拿大時，他需要有個家的形象在紐約等著他，而那個形象從來不包括佩里街。對他來說，家就是格林街。當(dāng)他遠(yuǎn)離紐約且寂寞時，他就會想到格林街的公寓，他在那里的房間，周末裘德結(jié)束工作后，他們會熬夜聊到很晚，覺得時光緩慢而悠長，相信這一夜會持續(xù)到永遠(yuǎn)。

　 And now he was finally going home. He ran down the stairs and out the front door and onto Perry Street. The evening had turned cold, and he walked quickly, almost trotting, enjoying as he always did the pleasure of walking by himself, of feeling alone in a city of so many. It was one of the things he missed the most. On film sets, you were never alone. An assistant director walked you to your trailer and back to the set, even if the trailer and the set were fifty yards away. When he was getting used to sets, he was first startled, then amused, and then, finally, annoyed by the culture of actor infantilization that moviemaking seemed to encourage. He sometimes felt that he had been strapped, upright, to a dolly and was being wheeled from place to place: he was walked to the makeup department and then to the costume department. Then he was walked to the set, and then he was walked back to his trailer, and then, an hour or two later, he would be collected from the trailer and escorted to the set once again.

而現(xiàn)在，他終于要回家了。他跑下樓梯，出了前門，來到佩里街上。傍晚天氣轉(zhuǎn)冷了，他走得很快，幾乎是在小跑，如往常一般享受著獨自走路的愉悅，享受在一個這么多人的城市里落單的感覺。這是他最想念的事情之一。在拍片現(xiàn)場，你從來不會落單。會有一名副導(dǎo)演陪你走回休息的房車，再陪你走回拍片現(xiàn)場，即使房車和現(xiàn)場距離只有五十碼。當(dāng)初他逐漸熟悉拍片現(xiàn)場的狀況時，對于拍電影時似乎鼓勵把演員當(dāng)小孩看的文化，首先覺得震驚，繼而覺得好笑，最后覺得厭煩。他有時覺得自己像是被直立綁在一個玩偶身上，被用輪子推著移動，有人陪他走到化妝部門，然后到服裝部門。又有人陪他走到現(xiàn)場，再走回房車。一兩個小時后，又會有人來房車?yán)锝铀o送他到拍片現(xiàn)場去。

　 “Don’t let me ever get used to this,” he’d instruct Jude, begging him, almost. It was the concluding line to all his stories: about the lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste—actors and the director at one table, cameramen at another, electricians at a third, the grips at a fourth, the costume department at a fifth—and you made small talk about your workouts, and restaurants you wanted to try, and diets you were on, and trainers, and cigarettes (how much you wanted one), and facials (how much you needed one); about the crew, who both hated the actors and yet were embarrassingly susceptible to even the slightest attention from them; about the cattiness of the hair and makeup team, who knew an almost bewildering amount of information about all the actors’ lives, having learned to keep perfectly quiet and make themselves perfectly invisible as they adjusted hairpieces and dabbed on foundation and listened to actresses screaming at their boyfriends and actors whisperingly arranging late-night hookups on their phones, all while sitting in their chairs. It was on these sets that he realized he was more guarded than he’d always imagined himself, and also how easy, how tempting, it was to begin to believe that the life of the set—where everything was fetched for you, and where the sun could literally be made to shine on you—was actual life.

“絕對不要讓我習(xí)慣這種事?！彼谢馗玫抡f，幾乎是懇求。這是他所有拍片故事的收尾臺詞：有關(guān)午餐時每個人照職位和階級自動分開——演員和導(dǎo)演一桌，攝影組另一桌，器械組第三桌，服裝組第四桌，道具組第五桌——大家都只聊一些小事，比如你的健身房、你想去的餐廳、你正進行的特殊飲食計劃、健身教練，還有香煙（你有多想抽一根），以及做臉（你有多么需要）；有關(guān)劇組人員，他們痛恨演員的同時，碰到演員對他們最細(xì)微的關(guān)注卻又在意得不得了，實在令人羞愧；化妝組愛搬弄是非，關(guān)于所有演員的生活，他們的信息量簡直多到嚇人，他們早就學(xué)會在幫演員調(diào)整假發(fā)和撲粉時保持絕對的安靜，讓自己完全隱形，同時傾聽椅子上的演員們打電話，無論是女演員大吼男朋友，還是男演員低聲安排深夜的一夜情對象。就是在這些拍片現(xiàn)場，他才明白自己被監(jiān)視的程度比想象中更嚴(yán)重，而且自己很容易就相信，拍片現(xiàn)場的生活就是實際的生活——一切都有人幫你準(zhǔn)備好，而且真的可以制造出太陽照耀你的效果。

　 Once he had been standing on his mark as the cinematographer made a last adjustment, before coming over and cupping his head gently—“His hair!” barked the first assistant director, warningly—and tilting it an inch to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left again, as if he was positioning a vase on a mantel.

有回他站在自己的標(biāo)記上，等著攝影師做最后的調(diào)整。這時第一副導(dǎo)大聲警告：“他的頭發(fā)！”攝影師只得走過來輕輕捧著他的頭，往左傾斜一英寸，再往右，又往左，好像在壁爐臺上放一個花瓶一般。

　 “Don’t move, Willem,” he’d cautioned, and he’d promised he wouldn’t, barely breathing, but really he had wanted to break into giggles. He suddenly thought of his parents—whom, disconcertingly, he thought of more and more as he grew older—and of Hemming, and for half a second, he saw them standing just off the set to his left, just far enough out of range so he couldn’t see their faces, whose expressions he wouldn’t have been able to imagine anyway.

“別動，威廉。”攝影師警告，他保證他不會動，連呼吸都放到最輕，但其實他很想傻笑。他忽然想到他的父母（令他不安的是，隨著年紀(jì)漸長，他越來越少想到他們），還有亨明。有半秒鐘，他看到他們就站在左邊，在拍片現(xiàn)場外頭，正好遠(yuǎn)得讓他無法看清他們的臉，反正他再也想象不出他們的表情了。

　 He liked telling Jude all of these things, making his days on set something funny and bright. This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be? He was always prepared, he was always on time, he was polite to everyone, he did what the cinematographer told him to do and argued with the director only when absolutely necessary. But even all these films later—twelve in the past five years, eight of them in the past two—and through all of their absurdities, he finds most surreal the minute before the camera begins rolling. He stands at his first mark; he stands at his second mark; the cameraman announces he’s ready.“Vanities!” shouts the first assistant director, and the vanities—hair, makeup, costume—hurry over to descend upon him as if he is carrion, plucking at his hair and straightening his shirt and tickling his eyelids with their soft brushes. It takes only thirty seconds or so, but in those thirty seconds, his lashes lowered so stray powder doesn’t float into his eyes, other people’s hands moving possessively over his body and head as if they’re no longer his own, he has the strange sensation that he is gone, that he is suspended, and that his very life is an imagining. In those seconds, a whirl of images whips through his mind, too quickly and jumblingly to effectively identify each as it occurs to him: there is the scene he’s about to shoot, of course, and the scene he’d shot earlier, but also all the things that occupy him, always, the things he sees and hears and remembers before he falls asleep at night—Hemming and JB and Malcolm and Harold and Julia. Jude.

他喜歡告訴裘德這些事，把自己在拍片現(xiàn)場的日子講得好笑又歡樂。他原先沒想到演戲會是這樣，但他以前哪里懂得演戲會是什么樣？他總是做好準(zhǔn)備，總是準(zhǔn)時，對每個人都很有禮貌，乖乖聽攝影師的指示，除非有絕對的必要，否則從不跟導(dǎo)演爭執(zhí)。但即使拍過這么多電影（過去五年拍了十二部，其中八部是最近兩年拍的），經(jīng)歷了種種荒謬，他發(fā)現(xiàn)最超現(xiàn)實的時刻，就是在攝影機開拍之前。當(dāng)他站在第一個標(biāo)記處、第二個標(biāo)記處，或是攝影師宣布準(zhǔn)備好了，“化妝服裝組！”第一副導(dǎo)喊道，然后化妝和服裝人員就匆忙朝他俯沖過來，好像他是一塊腐肉，那些人撥弄他的頭發(fā)，拉直他的襯衫，用軟刷子搔過他的眼皮。這個過程通常只有三十秒左右，但在這三十秒的時間里，他垂下眼皮免得粉粒飄進眼睛，其他人的手霸道地在他的身體和頭上觸摸，好像身體不再是他的。此時他會有種奇怪的感覺，覺得自己死了，飄在半空中，他的生命不過是一段想象。在那些時刻，一串旋風(fēng)似的影像掠過他的心頭，太快又太混亂，無法實際看清每一個畫面：其中當(dāng)然有他正要拍攝的場景，以及他稍早拍過的場景，但也有總是盤踞在他心頭的場景，那些他夜里睡著前會看到、聽到、記得的事情——亨明、杰比、馬爾科姆、哈羅德、朱麗婭、裘德。

　 Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).

你快樂嗎？他有回問裘德（當(dāng)時他們一定是喝醉了）。

　 I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.

我不認(rèn)為快樂適合我，裘德最后終于說，好像威廉給了他一盤他不想吃的東西。但是適合你，威廉。

　 As Vanities tug and yank at him, it occurs to him that he should have asked Jude what he meant by that: why it was for him and not for Jude. But by the time he’s finished shooting the scene, he won’t remember the question, or the conversation that inspired it.

當(dāng)化妝和服裝人員對著他又拉又抓，他想到他當(dāng)時應(yīng)該問裘德這句話是什么意思：為什么適合他，但不適合裘德。等到他拍完那場戲，他就忘了這個問題，也忘了之前的那段對話。

　 “Roll sound!” yells the first A.D., and Vanities scatter.

“音效開動！”第一副導(dǎo)喊道，化妝和服裝人員趕緊散開。

　 “Speed,” the sound person answers, which means he’s rolling.

“開了?！币粜藛T回答。

　 “Roll camera,” calls the cameraman, and then there’s the announcement of the scene, and the clap.And then he opens his eyes.

“攝影機準(zhǔn)備?！睌z影師喊道，接著有人宣布第幾場戲，打板。然后他睜開眼睛。

　 2

2

　 ONE SATURDAY MORNING shortly after he turns thirty-six, he opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation he sometimes has, the one in which he realizes that his life is cloudless. He imagines Harold and Julia in Cambridge, the two of them moving dozily through the kitchen, pouring coffee into their stained and chipped mugs and shaking the dew off of the plastic newspaper bags, and, in the air, Willem flying toward him from Cape Town. He pictures Malcolm pressed against Sophie in bed in Brooklyn, and then, because he feels hopeful, JB safe and snoring in his bed on the Lower East Side. Here, on Greene Street, the radiator releases its sibilant sigh. The sheets smell like soap and sky. Above him is the tubular steel chandelier Malcolm installed a month ago. Beneath him is a gleaming black wood floor. The apartment—still impossible in its vastness and possibilities and potential—is silent, and his.

剛過36歲生日的一個星期六早晨，他睜開眼睛，體驗到那種偶爾會感受到的奇怪、美妙的感覺：發(fā)現(xiàn)自己的人生晴朗無云。他想象哈羅德和朱麗婭在劍橋市，兩個人困倦地在廚房里走動，將咖啡倒進他們有著缺角和咖啡漬的馬克杯里，把裝報紙的塑料袋外頭的露水甩掉。在空中，威廉正從南非開普敦飛向他。他想象馬爾科姆在布魯克林家里的床上緊靠著蘇菲，然后，因為他覺得充滿希望，便想象杰比安全地在下東城的床上打呼。在格林街這里，暖氣散發(fā)出輕微的嘶嘶聲。床單聞起來像肥皂和天空。他的上方是馬爾科姆一個月前裝的鋼管枝形吊燈。他的下方是一片發(fā)亮的黑色木地板。這間公寓一片寂靜，而且是他的（還是覺得它很大，充滿種種可能性和潛力）。

　 He points his toes toward the bottom of the bed and then flexes them toward his shins: nothing. He shifts his back against the mattress: nothing. He draws his knees toward his chest: nothing. Nothing hurts, nothing even threatens to hurt: his body is his again, something that will perform for him whatever he can imagine, without complaint or sabotage. He closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because it is a perfect moment, and he knows how to enjoy them.

他把腳趾伸向床尾，然后往回縮向小腿：沒事。他移動躺在床墊上的背部：沒事。他把兩邊膝蓋朝胸口縮起：沒事。沒有任何地方痛，連一點痛的跡象都沒有。他的身體又是他的了，可以幫他執(zhí)行他想象中的任何動作，不會抱怨或搞破壞。他閉上雙眼，不是因為累了，而是因為這是完美的一刻，他知道該如何享受。

　 These moments never last for long—sometimes, all he has to do is sit up, and he will be reminded, as if slapped across the face, that his body owns him, not the other way around—but in recent years, as things have gotten worse, he has worked very hard to give up the idea that he will ever improve, and has instead tried to concentrate on and be grateful for the minutes of reprieve, whenever and wherever his body chooses to bestow them. Finally he sits, slowly, and then stands, just as slowly. And still, he feels wonderful. A good day, he decides, and walks to the bathroom, past the wheelchair that sulks, a sullen ogre, in a corner of his bedroom.

這些時刻從來不會持續(xù)太久（有時候，只要坐起身，他就像臉上挨了一記耳光似的被提醒，是他的身體在控制他，不是他控制他的身體），但最近幾年狀況惡化后，他每天都很努力地放棄自己會再好轉(zhuǎn)的想法，試著專注于暫時擺脫痛苦的那些時刻，并且感激自己的身體饒過了他。最后他緩緩坐起身，同樣緩慢地站起來，一切還是很棒。他判定這是美好的一天，然后走到浴室，略過臥室角落里仿佛在生悶氣的輪椅。

　 He gets ready and then sits down with some papers from the office to wait. Generally, he spends most of Saturday at work—that at least hasn’t changed from the days he used to take his walks: oh, his walks! Was that once him, someone who could trip, goatlike, to the Upper East Side and home again, all eleven miles on his own?—but today he’s meeting Malcolm and taking him to his suitmaker’s, because Malcolm is going to get married and needs to buy a suit.

他準(zhǔn)備好，然后拿著辦公室?guī)Щ貋淼囊恍┪募聛淼?。通常碰到星期六，他的時間大都用在工作上——從他走遍紐約的時期以來，這個習(xí)慣沒有改變過。啊，他那些長途步行之旅！他真的一度可以像山羊似的走到上東城，然后走回來，靠自己就走上十一英里嗎？——但今天他要跟馬爾科姆碰面，帶他去找自己的西裝師傅，因為馬爾科姆要結(jié)婚了，需要買一套西裝。