《渺小一生》:金錢先放在一邊。

　 This fight about taxis was one of many he’d had with JB over the years about blackness, and more specifically, his insufficient blackness. A different fight about taxis had begun when Malcolm (stupidly; he’d recognized his mistake even as he heard himself saying the words) had observed that he’d never had trouble getting a cab in New York and maybe people who complained about it were exaggerating. This was his junior year, during his and JB’s first and last visit to the weekly Black Students’ Union meeting. JB’s eyes had practically engorged, so appalled and gleeful was he, but when it was another guy, a self-righteous prick from Atlanta, who informed Malcolm that he was, number one, barely black, number two, an oreo, and number three, because of his white mother, unable to wholly understand the challenges of being truly black, it had been JB who had defended him—JB was always harassing him about his relative blackness, but he didn’t like it when other people did it, and he certainly didn’t like it when it was done in mixed company, which JB considered everyone except Jude and Willem, or, more specifically, other black people.

多年來，他和杰比為了黑人身份吵過很多架，這是其中之一，或者更精確地說，為了他不夠黑而吵。另一次為了出租車吵架，起因是馬爾科姆說（很蠢，他一說出口，就知道自己犯了錯），他在紐約叫出租車從來沒有困難，所以或許是那些抱怨的人太夸張了。那是大三那年，他和杰比第一次、也是最后一次去參加黑人學(xué)生聯(lián)盟每周一次的聚會。杰比聽了他的出租車感想，當(dāng)場瞪大眼睛，厭惡又覺得可笑。不過，當(dāng)另一個來自亞特蘭大、自以為是的混蛋男生告訴馬爾科姆說，第一，他幾乎不算是黑人；第二，他只是外黑內(nèi)白的奧利奧餅干；第三，因為他母親是白人，所以他無法完全了解身為真正黑人所面臨的挑戰(zhàn)，此時杰比跳出來捍衛(wèi)他——杰比總是嫌他不夠黑，但他可不喜歡別人這么說，尤其不喜歡外人在他們面前說三道四。杰比所謂的外人，就是除了他們四個之外的人，更精確地說，就是其他黑人。

　 Back in his parents’ house on Seventy-first Street (closer to Park), he endured the nightly parental interrogation, shouted down from the second floor (“Malcolm, is that you?” “Yes!” “Did you eat?” “Yes!” “Are you still hungry?” “No!”), and trudged upstairs to his lair to review once again the central quandaries of his life.

馬爾科姆回到他父母位于71街（比較靠近公園大道）的房子，忍受著父母親從二樓吼出的夜間盤問（“馬爾科姆，是你嗎？”“是！”“你吃了沒？”“吃了！”“你還餓嗎？”“不餓！”），然后上樓回到他的小窩，再度檢討他人生的幾個主要困境。

　 Although JB hadn’t been around to overhear that night’s exchange with the taxicab driver, Malcolm’s guilt and self-hatred over it moved race to the top of tonight’s list. Race had always been a challenge for Malcolm, but their sophomore year, he had hit upon what he considered a brilliant cop-out: he wasn’t black; he was post-black. (Postmodernism had entered Malcolm’s frame of consciousness much later than everyone else’s, as he tried to avoid taking literature classes in a sort of passive rebellion against his mother.) Unfortunately, no one was convinced by this explanation, least of all JB, whom Malcolm had begun to think of as not so much black but pre-black, as if blackness, like nirvana, was an idealized state that he was constantly striving to erupt into.

雖然杰比這一晚沒能聽到他和出租車司機的交談，但馬爾科姆因為這場談話所產(chǎn)生的愧疚和自我厭惡把種族提升到了今夜清單上的第一名。對馬爾科姆來說，種族一直是個挑戰(zhàn)，但在他們大二那年，他忽然靈光一閃，想到一個他自認絕妙的逃避方式：他不是黑人，他是后黑人（后現(xiàn)代主義進入馬爾科姆意識的時間，比其他任何人都晚，因為他一直避免選擇文學(xué)方面的課程，算是對他母親的一種消極反抗）。不幸的是，他的解釋說服不了任何人，最不能接受的就是杰比，而馬爾科姆已經(jīng)開始認為杰比不太算是黑人，而是前黑人，仿佛黑人身份就像涅槃一樣，是一種他不斷努力要進入的理想狀態(tài)。

　 And anyway, JB had found yet another way to trump Malcolm, for just as Malcolm was discovering postmodern identity, JB was discovering performance art (the class he was in, Identity as Art: Performative Transformations and the Contemporary Body, was favored by a certain kind of mustachioed lesbian who terrified Malcolm but for some reason flocked to JB). So moved was he by the work of Lee Lozano that for his midterm project, he decided to perform an homage to her entitled Decide to Boycott White People (After Lee Lozano), in which he stopped talking to all white people. He semi-apologetically, but mostly proudly, explained his plan to them one Saturday—as of midnight that night, he would stop talking to Willem altogether, and would reduce his conversational output with Malcolm by a half. Because Jude’s race was undetermined, he would continue speaking to him, but would only do so in riddles or Zen koans, in recognition of the unknowability of his ethnic origins.

但無論如何，杰比又找到一個方式贏過馬爾科姆，因為就如同馬爾科姆發(fā)現(xiàn)了后現(xiàn)代身份，杰比也發(fā)現(xiàn)了行為藝術(shù)（他修的那門課“身份認同即藝術(shù)：實現(xiàn)的轉(zhuǎn)化和當(dāng)代身體”，尤其是某些留小胡子的女同性戀的菜。她們會把馬爾科姆嚇壞，但出于某些原因，卻特別吸引杰比）。李·洛薩諾（Lee Lozano）太讓他感動了，因此他決定用他的期中作業(yè)執(zhí)行一個向她致敬的計劃，標(biāo)題為《決定抵制白人（仿李·洛薩諾）》，在這個計劃中，他不能跟任何白人說話。一個星期六，他半帶歉意、但主要是很自豪地向三位好友解釋這個計劃——因為當(dāng)天半夜12點開始，他就完全不跟威廉講話了，然后他把跟馬爾科姆講的話減少到一半。而裘德的種族不明，他繼續(xù)跟他講話，但只用謎語或禪宗公案的方式，以呼應(yīng)他族裔的未知性。

　 Malcolm could see by the look that Jude and Willem exchanged with each other, brief and unsmiling though, he observed irritatedly, full of meaning (he always suspected the two of them of conducting an extracurricular friendship from which he was excluded), that they were amused by this and were prepared to humor JB. For his part, he supposed he should be grateful for what might amount to a period of respite from JB, but he wasn’t grateful and he wasn’t amused: he was annoyed, both by JB’s easy playfulness with race and by his using this stupid, gimmicky project (for which he would probably get an A) to make a commentary on Malcolm’s identity, which was really none of JB’s business.

光是從裘德和威廉彼此交換的表情，短暫又沒有絲毫笑容，但其中充滿含義（他總是懷疑他們兩個背著他暗中經(jīng)營友誼，把他排除在外），馬爾科姆看得出他們被這個事情逗得很樂，也準(zhǔn)備好要迎合杰比。至于馬爾科姆自己，他猜想這么一來，杰比有一陣子不大會煩他，他應(yīng)該感到慶幸，但他既不慶幸也沒被逗樂。他很不高興，因為杰比對種族這么輕佻、不當(dāng)回事，而且他利用這么一個愚蠢、?；ㄕ械挠媱潱ù蟾胚€會拿個A）去論斷馬爾科姆的身份認同。這明明不關(guān)杰比的事，他沒有資格批評的。

　 Living with JB under the terms of his project (and really, when were they not negotiating their lives around JB’s whims and whimsies?) was actually very much like living with JB under normal circumstances. Minimizing his conversations with Malcolm did not reduce the number of times JB asked Malcolm if he could pick up something for him at the store, or refill his laundry card since Malcolm was going anyway, or if he could borrow Malcolm’s copy of Don Quixote for Spanish class because he’d left his in the basement men’s room in the library. His not speaking to Willem didn’t also mean that there wasn’t plenty of nonverbal communication, including lots of texts and notes that he’d scribble down (“Scrning of Godfather at Rex’s—coming?”) and hand him, which Malcolm was positive was not what Lozano had intended. And his poor-man’s Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini, especially after Ionesco realized that there was a whole other problem set he hadn’t even begun because he had been busy in the men’s room in the library, and class began in forty-three minutes (“But that’s enough time for you, right, Judy?”).

在這個計劃的條件下跟杰比一起生活（說實話，他們的生活什么時候不必配合杰比的怪念頭或異想天開？），其實就跟平常的狀況差不多。盡管談話次數(shù)減到最少，但杰比可沒減少要馬爾科姆幫些小忙的次數(shù)。有時要馬爾科姆去商店買個東西，馬爾科姆去洗衣服時也要順道幫他的洗衣卡儲值，或說他要去上西班牙課，得向馬爾科姆借《堂吉訶德》，因為他自己的掉在圖書館地下室的男廁里了。他不跟威廉說話，但還有很多非口語的溝通方式，包括發(fā)一大堆手機短信和寫紙條（“雷克斯那邊要播放《教父》，一起去？”）遞給他，馬爾科姆很確定這可不是洛薩諾的本意。而且杰比跟裘德那種二流尤內(nèi)斯庫式的溝通法，碰到需要裘德幫他做微積分作業(yè)時，就全部取消了。此時，荒謬劇大師尤內(nèi)斯庫忽然變成意大利獨裁者墨索里尼，尤其是尤內(nèi)斯庫發(fā)現(xiàn)他還有另一批習(xí)題根本沒開始做，因為他一直在圖書館的男廁里忙，而再過四十三分鐘就要上課了（“可是這些時間你做得完，對吧，小裘？”）。

　 Naturally, JB being JB and their peers easy prey for anything that was glib and glittery, JB’s little experiment was written up in the school paper, and then in a new black literary magazine, There Is Contrition, and became, for a short tedious period, the talk of the campus. The attention had revived JB’s already flagging enthusiasm for the project—he was only eight days into it, and Malcolm could see him at times almost wanting to explode into talk with Willem—and he was able to last another two days before grandly concluding the experiment a success and announcing that his point had been made.

當(dāng)然了，杰比還是維持一貫的作風(fēng)，而他們的同齡人很容易就會被這類油滑的東西所吸引，杰比的小小實驗登上了?？?，接著一個新的黑人文學(xué)雜志《真誠悔改》也報道了，而且有一小段時間成為校園話題。這種矚目重新燃起杰比對這個計劃逐漸失去的熱情——他才進行了八天而已，馬爾科姆看得出他有時幾乎憋不住要跟威廉講話了——于是他又撐了兩天，才得意地宣布這個實驗很成功，他的觀點已經(jīng)得到充分表達了。

　 “What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”

“什么觀點？”馬爾科姆問，“你不講話照樣也可以搞得白人很煩啊，就跟你講話的時候沒兩樣。”

　 “Oh, fuck you, Mal,” said JB, but lazily, too triumphant to even engage with him. “You wouldn’t understand.” And then he headed off to see his boyfriend, a white guy with a face like a praying mantis’s who was always regarding JB with a fervent and worshipful expression that made Malcolm feel slightly sick.

“啊，去你的，馬爾科姆。”杰比說，但口氣并不強烈，因為他得意得根本懶得跟他吵，“你不會懂的?！比缓笏团苋フ宜杏蚜耍杏咽莻€有張螳螂臉的白人，總是用一臉熱情和崇拜的表情看著杰比，讓馬爾科姆覺得有點想吐。

　 At the time, Malcolm had been convinced that this racial discomfort he felt was a temporary thing, a purely contextual sensation that was awakened in everyone in college but then evaporated the further from it you moved. He had never felt any particular agita about or pride in being black, except in the most remote ways: he knew he was supposed to have certain feelings about certain things in life (taxicab drivers, for one), but somehow that knowledge was only theoretical, not anything he had experienced himself. And yet blackness was an essential part of his family’s narrative, which had been told and retold until it was worn to a shine: how his father had been the third black managing director at his investment firm, the third black trustee at the very white boys’ preparatory school that Malcolm had attended, the second black CFO of a major commercial bank. (Malcolm’s father had been born too late to be the first black anything, but in the corridor in which he moved—south of Ninety-sixth Street and north of Fifty-seventh; east of Fifth and west of Lexington—he was still as rare as the red-tailed hawk that sometimes nested in the crenellations of one of the buildings opposite theirs on Park Avenue.) Growing up, the fact of his father’s blackness (and, he supposed, his own), had been trumped by other, more significant matters, factors that counted for more in their slice of New York City than his father’s race: his wife’s prominence in the Manhattan literary scene, for example, and, most important, his wealth. The New York that Malcolm and his family occupied was one divided not along racial lines but rather tax brackets, and Malcolm had grown up insulated from everything that money could protect him from, including bigotry itself—or so it in retrospect seemed. In fact, it wasn’t until college that he was made to truly confront the different ways in which blackness had been experienced by other people, and, perhaps more stunningly, how apart his family’s money had set him from the rest of the country (although this assumed you could consider his classmates representative of the rest of the country, which you of course couldn’t). Even today, almost a decade after meeting him, he still had trouble comprehending the sort of poverty that Jude had been raised in—his disbelief when he finally realized that the backpack Jude had arrived to college with had contained, literally, everything on earth in his possession had been so intense that it had been almost physical, so profound that he had mentioned it to his father, and he was not in the habit of revealing to his father evidence of his na?veté, for fear of provoking a lecture about his na?veté. But even his father, who had grown up poor in Queens—albeit with two working parents and a new set of clothes every year—had been shocked, Malcolm sensed, although he had endeavored to conceal it by sharing a story of his own childhood deprivation (something about a Christmas tree that had to be bought the day after Christmas), as if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still determined to win, even in the face of another’s clear and inarguable triumph.

當(dāng)時，馬爾科姆相信自己對種族的不安之感只是暫時的，每個人上大學(xué)都會經(jīng)歷，等到畢業(yè)，不安就會逐漸消失。他從來不覺得身為黑人會特別焦慮或特別光榮，頂多只有一些隱約的感受。他知道自己應(yīng)該對生活中的某些事情有某些感覺（比如出租車司機），但不知怎的那只是理論上的，他自己并沒有親身體驗過。但是黑人身份是他們家庭故事的基本要素，這故事他們講了又講，到最后都磨得發(fā)亮：他父親是他服務(wù)的那家投資公司有史以來的第三位黑人董事兼總經(jīng)理，是馬爾科姆所就讀的那所以白人為主的預(yù)備學(xué)校的第三位黑人校董，還是一家大型商業(yè)銀行的第二位黑人財務(wù)長（馬爾科姆的父親生得太晚，做什么都不可能是第一個黑人，但是在他晉升的這塊街區(qū)——96街以南、57街以北，以及第五大道以東、列克星敦大道以西——他還是像偶爾棲息在他們家對面公園大道某棟大樓頂端的紅尾鵟鷹一樣稀少）。在成長的過程中，他父親是黑人的事實（以及他自己是黑人的事實），總是被其他更重大、在他們的紐約生活里更有分量的事情蓋過。比方說，太太在曼哈頓文學(xué)圈的杰出地位，以及最重要的，就是他的財富。馬爾科姆一家人所居住的紐約市，不是根據(jù)種族界限劃分，而是以納稅等級劃分的，而且馬爾科姆從小就被金錢所能買到的一切保護得太好，不受外界任何事物侵擾，包括偏執(zhí)心態(tài)——回顧起來似乎是如此。事實上，直到上了大學(xué)，他才有機會真正面對其他黑人所經(jīng)歷的遭遇，或許更令人震驚的是，他意識到家里的錢是如何讓他跟這個國家的其他人格格不入的（雖然這是假設(shè)他的同學(xué)足以代表這個國家的其他人，但實際上當(dāng)然不是）。即使到了今天，跟裘德認識快十年了，他還是難以理解裘德成長的環(huán)境有多么貧困——當(dāng)他終于明白裘德帶來上大學(xué)的那個背包里頭裝的東西確實就是他所有的財產(chǎn)時，他根本不敢相信。那種感覺強烈到簡直像是有形的，深刻得讓他忍不住告訴父親，他平常并不習(xí)慣讓父親看到自己天真的證據(jù)，很怕引來父親的一頓教訓(xùn)。馬爾科姆感覺到，就連他皇后區(qū)貧苦人家出身的父親（祖父母都得工作，每年只能買一套新衣服）聽了都很震驚，只不過他極力掩飾，還說了童年的一個故事（有關(guān)他們必須等圣誕節(jié)過了的次日才去買圣誕樹），仿佛沒有特權(quán)是一種比賽，即使另一個人已經(jīng)毫無疑問地勝利了，他還是決心要贏。

　 However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications. At his age, the only truly important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional accomplishments; and money. And in all three of these aspects, Malcolm was also failing.

總之，在你大學(xué)畢業(yè)六年后，種族似乎越來越不是決定性的特征，而那些還在死守著種族，將它視為自己身份核心的人，看起來就會顯得幼稚，甚至有點可悲，好像緊抓著年輕時對國際特赦組織或低音號的強烈興趣不放：這種過時又令人難為情的事情，在申請大學(xué)時被強調(diào)到神化的地步。但以他現(xiàn)在這個年紀，一個人身份中真正重要的，就是性能力、專業(yè)成就，以及金錢。而在這三個方面，馬爾科姆也都失敗了。

　 Money he set aside. He would someday inherit a huge amount. He didn’t know how huge, and he had never felt the need to ask, and no one had ever felt the need to tell him, which is how he knew it was huge indeed. Not Ezra huge, of course, but—well, maybe it was Ezra huge. Malcolm’s parents lived much more modestly than they might, thanks to his mother’s aversions to garish displays of wealth, so he never knew if they lived between Lexington and Park because they couldn’t afford to live between Madison and Fifth, or whether they lived between Lexington and Park because his mother would find it too ostentatious to live between Madison and Fifth. He would like to make his own money, he would. But he wasn’t one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it. He would try to earn his way, but it wasn’t wholly up to him.

金錢先放在一邊。有一天，他將繼承巨額財產(chǎn)。他不知道到底有多少，因為他從不覺得有必要問，也沒人覺得有必要告訴他，所以他知道一定相當(dāng)可觀。當(dāng)然，不像埃茲拉那么多，可是——好吧，或許真有埃茲拉那么多。多虧他母親對炫富的反感，馬爾科姆的父母刻意過得比較簡樸，所以他從不知道他們住在列克星敦大道和公園大道之間，是因為他們住不起麥迪遜大道和第五大道之間，還是因為他父母覺得住在麥迪遜大道和第五大道之間太招搖了。他很愿意自己賺錢，真的，但他可不會拿這種事情折磨自己。他會試著自己奮斗，但這不見得能完全由他自己做主。

　 Sex, and sexual fulfillment, however, was something he did have to take responsibility for. He couldn’t blame his lack of a sex life on the fact that he’d chosen a low-paying field, or on his parents for not properly motivating him. (Or could he? As a child, Malcolm had had to endure his parents’ long groping sessions—often conducted in front of him and Flora—and he now wondered whether their show-offy competence had dulled some competitive spirit within him.) His last real relationship had been more than three years ago, with a woman named Imogene who dumped him to become a lesbian. It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow. Recently, he had seen Imogene (also an architect, although at a public interest group that built experimental low-income housing—exactly the sort of job Malcolm felt he should want to have, even if he secretly didn’t) and had teasingly told her—he had been joking!—that he couldn’t help but feel that he had driven her to lesbianism. But Imogene had bristled and told him that she had always been a lesbian and had stayed with him because he had seemed so sexually confused that she thought she might be able to help educate him.

但是性，或是性成就，則是他必須負起責(zé)任的。他不能把缺乏性生活歸咎于自己選擇了一個薪水低的行業(yè)，或歸咎于他父母沒有適度地激勵他（或者他可以歸咎給父母？馬爾科姆從小就得忍受父母漫長的愛撫，還常常當(dāng)著他和弗洛拉的面?，F(xiàn)在他很好奇，他們那樣炫耀自己的本領(lǐng)，是否讓他心中的好勝精神減低了）。他上一次認真談戀愛，是三年多前的事了，跟一個名叫伊莫金的女人，后來她甩了他，變成了女同志。即使到現(xiàn)在，他還是不清楚自己真的是身體上受伊莫金吸引，或只是很放心有個人做決定，而他樂意聽從。最近碰到伊莫金時（她也是建筑師，不過是在一個專門蓋實驗性低收入住宅的公益團體服務(wù)——正是馬爾科姆覺得自己會想做的那種工作，盡管他心底并不想），馬爾科姆開玩笑說，他忍不住覺得是自己把她逼成女同志的（他真的是在開玩笑），但伊莫金忽然發(fā)起火來，說她一直是女同志，之前跟他在一起，是因為他似乎對性很困惑，她覺得自己或許可以幫忙開示他。

　 But since Imogene, there had been no one. Oh, what was wrong with him? Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged. In his early twenties, he had tried falling in and out of love with various people—friends of Flora’s, classmates, one of his mother’s clients, a debut novelist who had written a literary roman à clef about being a sexually confused firefighter—and yet still didn’t know to whom he might be attracted. He often thought that being gay (as much as he also couldn’t stand the thought of it; somehow it, like race, seemed the province of college, an identity to inhabit for a period before maturing to more proper and practical realms) was attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics. He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black, but he was certain he possessed the interests that would be required if he were gay.

但在伊莫金之后，他就沒再跟誰交往了。啊，他是怎么回事？性和性傾向，這兩件事都是他在大學(xué)時代就該搞清楚的，大學(xué)是最后一個容忍，甚至鼓勵這類困惑的地方。他二十出頭時，曾試過跟不同的人談戀愛——有的是弗洛拉的朋友，有的是同學(xué)，還有一個是他母親的客戶，剛寫了一本純文學(xué)紀實小說，主角是一個對性困惑的消防員——但還是不知道自己會被什么樣的人吸引。他常常想，身為同性戀者（盡管他也常常受不了自己這樣想，但不知怎的，同性戀者的身份就像種族一樣，都是大學(xué)的領(lǐng)土范圍，你可以用這個身份在大學(xué)里待一段時間，直到你更成熟，進入更適當(dāng)、更務(wù)實的領(lǐng)域），最大的吸引力，就是伴隨而來的附帶屬性，包括種種政治主張和理想，以及同性戀者信奉的美學(xué)。他似乎缺乏身為黑人那種受害和受傷的意識，以及永無休止的憤怒，但他很確定自己具備了同性戀者所應(yīng)有的興趣。

　 He fancied himself already half in love with Willem, and at various points in love with Jude too, and at work he would sometimes find himself staring at Eduard. Sometimes he noticed Dominick Cheung staring at Eduard as well, and then he would stop himself, because the last person he wanted to be was sad, forty-five-year-old Dominick, leering at an associate in a firm that he would never inherit. A few weekends ago, he had been at Willem and Jude’s, ostensibly to take some measurements so he could design them a bookcase, and Willem had leaned in front of him to grab the measuring tape from the sofa, and the very nearness of him had been suddenly unbearable, and he had made an excuse about needing to get into the office and had abruptly left, Willem calling after him.

馬爾科姆常會幻想自己有點愛上威廉，又有幾度想著自己愛上了裘德，上班時，他有時會不自覺盯著愛德華看。有時他注意到多米尼克·張也凝視著愛德華，然后他就會阻止自己再看，因為他最不想成為的人，就是凄慘、45歲的多米尼克，在一家他永遠不可能成為合伙人的事務(wù)所里，色瞇瞇地盯著一個同事看。幾星期前，他去威廉和裘德合租的公寓，表面上是去量尺寸，幫他們設(shè)計一個書柜。威廉在他面前傾身要去拿沙發(fā)上的卷尺，他整個人這么靠近，忽然令人難以負荷，于是馬爾科姆編了個借口說要趕回辦公室，就忽然離開了，惹得威廉在后頭直喊他。

　 He had in fact gone to the office, ignoring Willem’s texts, and had sat there at his computer, staring without seeing the file before him and wondering yet again why he had joined Ratstar. The worst thing was that the answer was so obvious that he didn’t even need to ask it: he had joined Ratstar to impress his parents. His last year of architecture school, Malcolm had had a choice—he could have chosen to work with two classmates, Jason Kim and Sonal Mars, who were starting their own firm with money from Sonal’s grandparents, or he could have joined Ratstar.

他真的回到了辦公室，也不管威廉傳來的簡訊，就坐在電腦前，視而不見地盯著眼前的那些檔案，再一次想著自己為什么要加入瑞司塔建筑師事務(wù)所。最慘的是，答案實在太明顯了，問都不必問：他加入瑞司塔是為了討父母的歡心。在建筑研究所的最后一年，馬爾科姆有兩個選擇，他可以選擇跟兩個同學(xué)杰森·金和索納爾·馬爾斯一起工作（他們正要創(chuàng)業(yè)，金主是索納爾的祖父母），或是加入瑞司塔。

　 “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason had said when Malcolm had told him of his decision. “You realize what your life is going to be like as an associate at a place like that, don’t you?”

“你一定是在開玩笑。”當(dāng)馬爾科姆說出自己的決定時，杰森說，“你知道在那種地方當(dāng)建筑設(shè)計師，會是什么樣的狀況吧？”

　 “It’s a great firm,” he’d said, staunchly, sounding like his mother, and Jason had rolled his eyes. “I mean, it’s a great name to have on my résumé.” But even as he said it, he knew (and, worse, feared Jason knew as well) what he really meant: it was a great name for his parents to say at cocktail parties. And, indeed, his parents liked to say it. “Two kids,” Malcolm had overheard his father say to someone at a dinner party celebrating one of Malcolm’s mother’s clients. “My daughter’s an editor at FSG, and my son works for Ratstar Architects.” The woman had made an approving sound, and Malcolm, who had actually been trying to find a way to tell his father he wanted to quit, had felt something in him wilt. At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.

“那家事務(wù)所很棒?！彼麍远ǖ卣f，口氣像他母親，杰森翻了個白眼?！拔业囊馑际牵@家事務(wù)所的名字放在履歷表上會很好看?！钡瓦B他說這話的時候，也已經(jīng)明白自己真正的意思（更糟的是，他擔(dān)心杰森也心知肚明）：這間事務(wù)所的名字，他父母在雞尾酒會上說出來會很有面子，而且他父母的確很喜歡提?！皟蓚€小孩?！庇谢卦谀赣H某個客戶的慶功晚宴上，馬爾科姆無意間聽到他父親對某個女人說，“我女兒在FSG文學(xué)出版社當(dāng)編輯，我兒子在瑞司塔建筑師事務(wù)所工作?！蹦莻€女人發(fā)出贊嘆聲。馬爾科姆本來正打算找機會跟父親說他想辭職，一聽到這番話馬上畏縮了。在這樣的時候，他會很羨慕他的好友們，原因正是他一度憐憫他們的：沒有人對他們抱任何期望，他們的家人很平凡（或根本沒有家人），他們可以單憑自己的野心去開創(chuàng)自己的生活。

　 And now? Now Jason and Sonal had had two projects appear in New York and one in The New York Times, while he was still doing the sort of work he had done in his first year of architecture school, working for two pretentious men at a firm they had pretentiously named after a pretentious Anne Sexton poem, and getting paid almost nothing to do it.

現(xiàn)在呢？現(xiàn)在杰森和索諾爾有兩個案子登上《紐約》雜志、一個登上《紐約時報》，而馬爾科姆還在做他研究所第一年做的事情。他服務(wù)于一家建筑師事務(wù)所，老板是兩個做作的男人，事務(wù)所的名字很做作，是根據(jù)安妮·賽克斯頓（Anne Sexton）一首做作的詩命名的，而且領(lǐng)的薪水低得要命。

　 He had gone to architecture school for the worst reason of all, it seemed: because he loved buildings. It had been a respectable passion, and when he was a child, his parents had indulged him with tours of houses, of monuments wherever they had traveled. Even as a very young boy, he had always drawn imaginary buildings, built imaginary structures: they were a comfort and they were a repository—everything he was unable to articulate, everything he was unable to decide, he could, it seemed, resolve in a building.

看來當(dāng)初他讀建筑研究所是出于最糟糕的原因：因為他喜歡建筑物。這是個體面的愛好，而且從小只要跟著家人去旅行，他父母就會任由他去參觀各種大宅或歷史建筑物。年紀還很小時，他就總是在畫想象中的建筑物，建造想象中的結(jié)構(gòu)。那是一種撫慰，也是一種寄托——他無法清晰表達、無法決定的一切，似乎都可以用一棟建筑物解決。