《渺小一生》:“就這么說定了?！?/h1>
“That’s nice of you to say. But they won’t if I don’t move out, and soon.”
“謝謝你的好意?？墒侨绻也悔s快搬出去，他們就不會喜歡我了。”
Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcolm’s home, he would live at home too. It wasn’t as if Malcolm’s house was particularly grand—it was, in fact, creaky and ill-kept, and Willem had once gotten a splinter simply by running his hand up its banister—but it was large: a real Upper East Side town house. Malcolm’s sister, Flora, who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartment recently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution: Eventually, Malcolm’s parents would want to reclaim the unit to convert it into offices for his mother’s literary agency, which meant Jude (who was finding the flight of stairs that led down to it too difficult to navigate anyway) had to look for his own apartment.
馬爾科姆是他們四個人里頭唯一還住在家里的，而且一如杰比老愛說的，如果他家像馬爾科姆家那樣，他也會住家里。馬爾科姆家的房子并不是多么豪華（其實很老舊，又維護得很差，威廉有回只是扶著欄桿上樓，手就被碎木片刺傷了），但很寬敞：真正的上東城獨棟房。大馬爾科姆三歲的姐姐弗洛拉最近搬出了地下室公寓，于是裘德就住進了這個讓他暫時落腳的地方：總有一天，馬爾科姆的父母會想收回這個空間。他母親是文學經紀人，想把這里改裝成自己的辦公室，到時候裘德就得找新的住處（反正他覺得那段下樓的樓梯實在太吃力了）。
And it was natural that he would live with Willem; they had been roommates throughout college. In their first year, the four of them had shared a space that consisted of a cinder-blocked common room, where sat their desks and chairs and a couch that JB’s aunts had driven up in a U-Haul, and a second, far tinier room, in which two sets of bunk beds had been placed. This room had been so narrow that Malcolm and Jude, lying in the bottom bunks, could reach out and grab each other’s hands. Malcolm and JB had shared one of the units; Jude and Willem had shared the other.
而他打算跟威廉同住，也是很自然的事，他們大學時代當了四年室友。第一年，他們四個人合住宿舍里的一間套房，包括一個煤渣磚砌的起居室，放著他們的書桌椅和一張杰比的阿姨們租了U-Haul搬家卡車運來的沙發(fā)，以及另一間小很多的寢室，里頭放著兩張雙層床。這寢室太小了，小到睡下鋪的馬爾科姆和裘德伸手就能夠到，甚至握住對方的手。馬爾科姆的上鋪睡的是杰比，裘德的上鋪則是威廉。
“It’s blacks versus whites,” JB would say.
“這是黑人對抗白人。”杰比會說。
“Jude’s not white,” Willem would respond.
“裘德不是白人。”威廉會回答。
“And I’m not black,” Malcolm would add, more to annoy JB than because he believed it.
“我也不是黑人。”馬爾科姆會補上一句，主要是為了逗杰比，而不是因為他真這么想。
“Well,” JB said now, pulling the plate of mushrooms toward him with the tines of his fork, “I’d say you could both stay with me, but I think you’d fucking hate it.” JB lived in a massive, filthy loft in Little Italy, full of strange hallways that led to unused, oddly shaped cul-de-sacs and unfinished half rooms, the Sheetrock abandoned mid-construction, which belonged to another person they knew from college. Ezra was an artist, a bad one, but he didn’t need to be good because, as JB liked to remind them, he would never have to work in his entire life. And not only would he never have to work, but his children’s children’s children would never have to work: They could make bad, unsalable, worthless art for generations and they would still be able to buy at whim the best oils they wanted, and impractically large lofts in downtown Manhattan that they could trash with their bad architectural decisions, and when they got sick of the artist’s life—as JB was convinced Ezra someday would—all they would need to do is call their trust officers and be awarded an enormous lump sum of cash of an amount that the four of them (well, maybe not Malcolm) could never dream of seeing in their lifetimes. In the meantime, though, Ezra was a useful person to know, not only because he let JB and a few of his other friends from school stay in his apartment—at any time, there were four or five people burrowing in various corners of the loft—but because he was a good-natured and basically generous person, and liked to throw excessive parties in which copious amounts of food and drugs and alcohol were available for free.
“好吧。”杰比這會兒說，用叉尖把那盤蘑菇拉近，“其實你們倆都可以來跟我住，但我想你們他媽的一定不肯。”杰比住在小意大利那一帶一個巨大又骯臟的LOFT，里頭充滿了怪異的走道，通向廢棄的、歪來扭去的死巷和沒完工的房間，隔間的石膏板裝到一半就被棄置不管。這層樓是他們大學時代另一個朋友埃茲拉的。埃茲拉是藝術家，很差的那種，不過他也不必很好，因為就像杰比總提醒他們的，埃茲拉這輩子都不必工作。而且不光是他，他小孩的小孩的小孩也永遠不必工作：他們可以一代接一代做那些很爛、賣不掉、毫無價值的藝術作品，但照樣有財力，一時興起就去買他們想要的頂級油彩，或是在曼哈頓鬧市區(qū)買下大而無用的LOFT，胡亂改裝到一半就放著爛掉。而且等到他們厭煩了藝術家生活（杰比相信，埃茲拉總有一天會這樣），只要打電話給他們的信托基金管理人，就可以拿到一大筆現金；那個金額是他們四個人（好吧，或許馬爾科姆除外）這輩子連做夢都不會夢到的。不過同時，認識埃茲拉好處不少，不光因為他讓杰比和其他幾個老同學住在他的公寓（任何時候去那里，總有四五個人窩在LOFT的各個角落），也是因為他是個脾氣很好、基本上很大方的人，而且他喜歡開狂歡派對，免費供應大量食物、迷幻藥物和酒。
“Hold up,” JB said, putting his chopsticks down. “I just realized—there’s someone at the magazine renting some place for her aunt. Like, just on the verge of Chinatown.”
“慢著，”杰比說，放下筷子，“我剛剛才想到——我們雜志社里有個人在幫她阿姨找房客。好像就在唐人街這附近。”
“How much is it?” asked Willem.
“房租是多少？”威廉問。
“Probably nothing—she didn’t even know what to ask for it. And she wants someone in there that she knows.”
“大概很低——她根本不曉得該開價多少，而且她想找認識的人當房客。”
“Do you think you could put in a good word?”
“你可以幫我們說點好話嗎？”
“Better—I’ll introduce you. Can you come by the office tomorrow?”
“不止——我來介紹你們認識。你們明天可以來我辦公室嗎？”
Jude sighed. “I won’t be able to get away.” He looked at Willem.
裘德嘆了口氣。“我明天走不開。”他看著威廉。
“Don’t worry—I can. What time?”
“沒關系，我可以去。幾點？”
“Lunchtime, I guess. One?”
“午餐時間吧。1點？”
“I’ll be there.”
“就這么說定了。”
Willem was still hungry, but he let JB eat the rest of the mushrooms. Then they all waited around for a bit; sometimes Malcolm ordered jackfruit ice cream, the one consistently good thing on the menu, ate two bites, and then stopped, and he and JB would finish the rest. But this time he didn’t order the ice cream, and so they asked for the bill so they could study it and divide it to the dollar.
威廉還是餓，不過他讓杰比吃了剩下的蘑菇。然后他們又等了一會兒——有時馬爾科姆會點餐館常年的招牌甜點菠蘿蜜冰淇淋，吃兩口就不吃了，讓他和杰比解決剩下的。但這回他沒點冰淇淋，于是他們跟服務生要了賬單，好拆賬付錢。
The next day, Willem met JB at his office. JB worked as a receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the downtown art scene. This was a strategic job for him; his plan, as he’d explained to Willem one night, was that he’d try to befriend one of the editors there and then convince him to feature him in the magazine. He estimated this taking about six months, which meant he had three more to go.
次日，威廉去杰比的辦公室和他會合。杰比在蘇荷區(qū)一家雜志社當前臺，雜志主要報道這一帶的藝術圈動態(tài)，規(guī)模雖小卻頗具影響力。對杰比來說，這是一份策略性的工作：有天晚上他跟威廉解釋，他計劃跟雜志社的某位編輯交上朋友，然后說服他報道自己。他估計這個任務要花六個月，這表示他還需要三個月。
JB wore a perpetual expression of mild disbelief while at his job, both that he should be working at all and that no one had yet thought to recognize his special genius. He was not a good receptionist. Although the phones rang more or less constantly, he rarely picked them up; when any of them wanted to get through to him (the cell phone reception in the building was inconsistent), they had to follow a special code of ringing twice, hanging up, and then ringing again. And even then he sometimes failed to answer—his hands were busy beneath his desk, combing and plaiting snarls of hair from a black plastic trash bag he kept at his feet.
杰比上班時，總是擺出一副略帶懷疑的表情，既不相信自己竟然在工作，也不相信居然還沒有人看出他的特殊天賦。他不是個稱職的前臺，電話鈴聲響個不停，但他很少接。要是任何人想找他（這棟大樓里面的手機信號不太穩(wěn)），就得遵循一套特殊的暗號：撥通電話后等鈴響兩聲，掛掉，再重打一次。但即使如此，他有時候還是不會接——因為他的雙手在辦公桌下頭，正忙著梳理、編織從腳邊一個黑色塑料袋里拿出來的一團團頭發(fā)。
JB was going through, as he put it, his hair phase. Recently he had decided to take a break from painting in favor of making sculptures from black hair. Each of them had spent an exhausting weekend following JB from barbershop to beauty shop in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan, waiting outside as JB went in to ask the owners for any sweepings or cuttings they might have, and then lugging an increasingly awkward bag of hair down the street after him. His early pieces had included The Mace, a tennis ball that he had de-fuzzed, sliced in half, and filled with sand before coating it in glue and rolling it around and around in a carpet of hair so that the bristles moved like seaweed underwater, and “The Kwotidien,” in which he covered various household items—a stapler; a spatula; a teacup—in pelts of hair. Now he was working on a large-scale project that he refused to discuss with them except in snatches, but it involved the combing out and braiding together of many pieces in order to make one apparently endless rope of frizzing black hair. The previous Friday he had lured them over with the promise of pizza and beer to help him braid, but after many hours of tedious work, it became clear that there was no pizza and beer forthcoming, and they had left, a little irritated but not terribly surprised.
以杰比自己的說法，他正在經歷他的“頭發(fā)時期”。最近他決定暫停畫畫，專心用黑色頭發(fā)做雕塑。他們每個人都曾花一個周末的時間，辛辛苦苦地跟著杰比去皇后區(qū)、布魯克林、布朗克斯，以及曼哈頓的理發(fā)店和美發(fā)店。他們在外頭等，杰比則進店里，問店主能不能把要丟掉的頭發(fā)給他，然后他們提著一大袋越來越重的頭發(fā)，跟在他后頭走。他早期的作品包括《令牌》，那是一個去掉絨毛的網球，剖開來填入沙子，外頭涂上黏膠，然后在一塊頭發(fā)地毯上滾了一圈又一圈，于是黏在上面的那些短短的頭發(fā)就像水里的海藻般晃動。還有一個“日常”系列，是用頭發(fā)包裹各種家用小工具——一個訂書機、一把奶油刀、一個茶杯?，F在他正在進行一項大計劃，他不肯跟他們討論，只零星透露過一點——他計劃將許多鬈曲的黑發(fā)梳理并編織起來，最后做出一條漫長無盡的繩子。上個星期五，他保證要請吃披薩加啤酒，哄騙他們去幫他編辮子，但辛苦編了幾小時之后，他們意識到顯然不會有披薩和啤酒，就離開了，有點不高興，倒也不是太意外。
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