“Not then,” Jude reminded him. “Not actively, at least.”
“当时还没有，”裘德提醒他，“至少还没发病。”
“No, maybe not,” he said. “But he was dying.”
“是啊，或许吧，”他说，“可是他快死了。”
Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. “We’re all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”
裘德对他微笑。“啊，死。”他轻蔑地说，“我们全都会死。他只是知道他的死亡会比他计划的早一些。但那不表示那不是快乐年代，不是快乐的一生。”
He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.
然后他看着裘德，有时，包括现在，当他真正思索裘德和他的人生时，总会产生一种感觉。或许可以称之为一种悲伤，但不是怜悯的，而是更大的悲伤。那种悲伤似乎是为了所有努力奋斗的可怜人，那几十亿他不认识、过着各自生活的人；那是一种混合了惊奇与敬畏的悲伤。看到世界各地的人这么奋力求生，即使他们每天都过得非常辛苦，即使环境这么恶劣。人生如此悲伤，在那些时刻，他会这样想。太悲伤了，然而我们都在继续活，我们都紧抓着不放，我们都在寻求某种慰藉。
But he didn’t say this, of course, just sat up and grabbed Jude’s face and kissed him and then fell back against the pillows. “How’d you get so smart?” he asked Jude, and Jude grinned at him.
但他当然没说这些，只是坐起来捧住裘德的脸吻他一记，然后又往后倒在枕头上。“你怎么会这么聪明？”他问裘德。裘德对他咧嘴笑了。
“Too hard?” he asked in response, still kneading Willem’s foot.
“太用力了吗？”裘德只是问，手还按着他的双脚。
“Not hard enough.”
“还不够用力。”
Now he turned Jude around to face him in bed. “I think we have to stick with The Happy Years,” he told him. “We’ll just have to risk your arms falling off,” and Jude laughed.
这会儿他把裘德转过来面对自己。“我想我们还是用’快乐年代’吧。”他告诉他，“我们得冒着你两只手臂掉下来的危险。”裘德大笑。
The next week, he left for Paris. It was one of the most difficult shoots he’d ever done; he had a double, an actual dancer, for the more elaborate sequences, but he did some of his own dancing as well, and there were days—days spent lifting real ballerinas into the air, marveling at how dense, how ropy with muscle they were—that were so exhausting that by the evening he had only the energy to drop himself into the bathtub and then lift himself out of it. In the past few years, he had found himself subconsciously drawn to ever-more physical roles, and he was always astonished by, and appreciative of, how heroically his body met its every demand. He had been given a new awareness of it, and now, as he stretched his arms behind him as he leaped, he could feel how every sore muscle came alive for him, how it allowed him to do whatever he wanted, how nothing within him ever broke, how it indulged him every time. He knew he wasn’t alone in feeling this, this gratitude: when they visited Cambridge, he and Harold would play tennis every day, and he knew without them ever discussing it how grateful they had both become for their own bodies, how much the act of smacking heavily, unthinkingly across the court to lunge for a ball had come to mean to them both.
下一个星期，他出发去巴黎。那是他拍过最辛苦的电影之一；他有个舞者替身，可以负责舞步比较复杂的镜头，但有些他还是要自己跳才行。有些日子，他一整天都在把真正的芭蕾女伶举到空中，惊叹她们身上的肌肉有多结实、多强壮，晚上他累得只剩进入浴缸和爬出来的力气。过去几年，他发现自己下意识地会想接一些挑战身体难度的角色，而且他总是很惊讶、也很感激自己的身体像超人一般，总是能达到每一个要求。他对自己的身体有了新的认识，而现在，当他跃起，向后伸展双臂时，他可以感到每块酸痛的肌肉都为他活了过来，让他做任何他想要的动作，而且他的身体从来没有损伤，每回都纵容了他。他知道自己不是唯一为这感到庆幸的人：每次他们去剑桥市，他和哈罗德天天都会打网球，虽然他们不曾谈过，但他知道两人现在都很感激自己的身体，知道用力击球、毫不思索就冲到球场另一头救球，对他们的意义是什么。
Jude came to visit him in Paris at the end of April, and although Willem had promised him that he wouldn’t do anything elaborate for his fiftieth birthday, he had arranged a surprise dinner anyway, and in addition to JB and Malcolm and Sophie, Richard and Elijah and Rhodes and Andy and Black Henry Young and Harold and Julia had all come over, along with Phaedra and Citizen, who had helped him with the planning. The next day Jude had come to watch him on set, one of the very few times he had ever done so. The scene they were working on that morning was one in which Nureyev was trying to correct a young dancer’s cabriole, and after instructing him again and again, finally demonstrates how to do it; but in an earlier scene, one they hadn’t yet shot but that would directly precede this one, he has just been diagnosed with HIV, and as he jumps, scissoring his legs, he falls, and the studio goes quiet around him. The scene ended on his face, a moment in which he had to convey Nureyev’s sudden recognition that he understood how he would die and then, just a second later, his decision to ignore that understanding.
裘德四月底来巴黎探望他。尽管威廉已经答应不会为他的50岁生日大费周章，但他还是安排了一个惊喜晚餐，参加的人除了杰比、马尔科姆和苏菲之外，理查德、伊利亚、罗兹、安迪、黑人亨利·杨、哈罗德和朱丽娅也都赶到巴黎，外加住在当地、帮他策划的菲德拉和西提任。次日，裘德难得来拍摄现场探班。他们那天早上拍的戏，是努里耶夫想纠正一个年轻舞者的羚跃动作，教了一回又一回之后，终于自己亲身示范；但在更早的一场戏里（他们还没拍，但剧情顺序正好就是前一场），他才刚被诊断出有艾滋病。于是当他跳起，两脚像剪刀般在空中互碰时，他摔倒了，整个工作室都安静下来。这场戏最后终止在他的脸部特写，那一刻他必须表达出努里耶夫忽然意识到他知道自己将怎么死，然后才一秒钟，他就决定不予理会。
They shot take after take of this scene, and after each take, Willem would have to step away and wait until he could breathe normally again, and hair and makeup would flutter around him, blotting the sweat from his face and neck, and when he was ready, back to his mark he would step. By the time the director was satisfied, he was panting but satisfied as well.
这场戏他们拍了一个又一个镜头，每拍完一个，威廉就必须退到一旁，等自己恢复正常呼吸，同时服化人员会手忙脚乱地围着他，吸掉他脸上、脖子上的汗水。等他准备好重来，就回到刚刚开始的记号位置。最后导演满意了，他喘着气，自己也很满意。
“Sorry,” he apologized, going over to Jude at last. “The tedium of filmmaking.”
“对不起。”他道歉，走向裘德。“拍电影真的很无聊。”
“No, Willem,” Jude said. “It was amazing. You were so beautiful out there.” He looked tentative for a moment. “I almost couldn’t believe it was you.”
“不会，威廉。”裘德说，“太了不起了。你在那里太完美了。”他看起来犹豫了片刻，“我简直不敢相信那是你。”
He took Jude’s hand and clasped it in his, which he knew was the most affection Jude would tolerate in public. But he never knew how Jude felt about witnessing such displays of physicality. The previous spring, during one of his breakups with Fredrik, JB had dated a principal in a well-known modern dance company, and they had all gone to see his performance. During Josiah’s solo, he had glanced over at Jude and had seen that he was leaning forward slightly, resting his chin in his hand, and watching the stage so intently that when Willem put his hand on his back, he startled. “Sorry,” Willem had whispered. Later, in bed, Jude had been very quiet, and he had wondered what he was thinking: Was he upset? Wistful? Sorrowful? But it had seemed unkind to ask Jude to say aloud what he might not have been able to articulate to himself, and so he hadn’t.
他抓住裘德的手，紧紧握住，他知道这是裘德在公共场合所能忍受的最亲昵的举动。但他从来不知道裘德亲眼看到这样身体动作的展示，会有什么感想。前一年春天，在杰比跟弗雷德里克多次分手中的其中一次期间，杰比跟一个知名现代舞团的首席舞者约西亚交往，于是他们四个都去看那个舞团的表演。约西亚独舞时，他偷偷看了裘德一眼，发现他身体微微前倾，一手托着下巴，非常专注地看着舞台，当威廉把手放在他的背上时，裘德惊跳起来。“对不起。”威廉当时低声说。回家后，夜里躺在床上，裘德一直很安静。他很好奇他在想什么：他心烦吗？渴望吗？悲伤吗？但是要裘德说出他可能无法清楚表达的事情，好像太残忍了，于是他没再问。
It was the middle of June by the time he returned to New York, and in bed Jude had looked at him, closely. “You have a ballet dancer’s body now,” he said, and the next day, he’d examined himself in the mirror and realized that Jude was correct. Later that week, they had dinner on the roof, which they and Richard and India had finally renovated, and which Richard and Jude had planted with grasses and fruit trees, and he had shown them some of what he’d learned, feeling his self-consciousness change to giddiness as he jetéed across the decked surface, his friends applauding behind him, the sun bleeding into nighttime above them.
等他回到纽约，已经是六月中了。某天夜里在床上，裘德仔细地看着他说：“你现在有芭蕾舞者的身体了。”次日，他在镜中打量自己，才明白裘德说得没错。那星期稍晚，他们在屋顶吃晚餐（他们和理查德、印蒂亚终于整修了屋顶，理查德和裘德在那里种了一些草和果树），他秀了一些学到的舞步给他们看。当他在屋顶的平台上跳跃时，觉得自己的难为情变成了一股晕眩。他的朋友在后面鼓掌，天空中血红的太阳正要沉入黑夜。
“Another hidden talent,” Richard had said afterward, and had smiled at him.
“又一项隐藏的才华。”理查德看完后说，露出微笑。
“I know,” Jude had said, smiling at him, too. “Willem is full of surprises, even all these years later.”
“我知道。”裘德说，也朝他微笑，“威廉真是充满惊奇，即使认识他那么多年了。”
But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Willem,” JB would occasionally accuse him, and, “Are you keeping secrets from me? Don’t you trust me? I thought we were close.”
但他逐渐明白，他们全都充满惊奇。年轻时，他们能给彼此的只有秘密：告解就是他们的通行货币，透露是一种亲密的形式。对好友隐瞒你人生的细节，一开始会让人觉得很神秘，然后会被视为某种吝啬，还会阻碍真正的友谊。“威廉，有些事你没告诉我喔。”杰比偶尔会指控他，又说，“你有秘密瞒着我吗？你不信任我吗？我还以为我们很要好呢。”
“We are, JB,” he’d said. “And I’m not keeping anything from you.” And he hadn’t been: there was nothing to keep. Of all of them, only Jude had secrets, real secrets, and while Willem had in the past been frustrated by what had seemed his unwillingness to reveal them, he had never felt that they weren’t close because of that; it had never impaired his ability to love him. It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.
“我们是很要好啊，杰比。”他会说，“我没有瞒着什么不说啊。”是真的，他没有什么好隐瞒的。他们四个之中，只有裘德有秘密，真正的秘密。尽管威廉以前也对裘德不肯透露秘密觉得不满，但他从不觉得他们因此不要好；这件事从来不曾减损自己爱他的能力。这对他是艰难的一课，要去接受他永远无法完全了解裘德，接受他会爱上一个从根本上不可知、难以触及的人。
And yet Jude was still being discovered by him, even thirty-four years after they had met, and he was still fascinated by what he saw. That July, for the first time, he invited him to Rosen Pritchard’s annual summer barbeque. “You don’t have to come, Willem,” Jude had added immediately after asking him. “It’s going to be really, really boring.”
即使认识了三十四年，他依然能从裘德身上发现新的东西，而且一直对这些新的认知深感着迷。那个七月，生平第一次，他受邀去参加罗森·普理查德律师事务所的夏日烤肉会。“你不是非去不可，威廉，”裘德问过他之后，立刻补充，“那一定会非常、非常无聊。”
