The Artist makes ceramic tea pots, but he drinks coffee. He makes espresso mugs and a soap dish for his new apartment. He makes an ashtray and then quits smoking before he’s fired it in the kiln. She asks once, drunk, why it’s art. Insistent, she says, “Are you sure it isn’t craft?”
艺术家制作陶瓷茶壶，但他喝咖啡。 他为他的新公寓制作浓缩咖啡杯和肥皂盒。 他做了一个烟灰缸，然后在窑中烧制之前戒烟。 她醉醺醺地问过一次，为什么这是艺术品。 她坚持说：“你确定这不是工艺吗？”
He is silent.
他沉默不语。
“But I just don’t see, how it’s art if you’re not doing anything new?”
“但我就是不明白，如果你不做任何新的事情，这怎么会是艺术？”
And he says, tersely, “It’s not”.
他矺娑地说：“不是的。”
He is only the second man she has known this intimately, whose hair has curled. And with the first, she spent hours gripping it dark against her white fingers while running a thumb over his eyebrow to trace the scar, and once, when it was just long enough, painstakingly French-braiding his bangs high along his forehead, taking a photo for him, because their bodies were too languid and tangled for him to get up and see it in the mirror.
他只是她非常熟悉的第二个男人，他的头发卷曲了。 第一次，她花了几个小时用她白皙的手指紧紧抓住它，同时用拇指划过他的眉毛来追踪疤痕，有一次，当它足够长时，她费尽地沿着额头高高地法式地将刘海缠住，为他拍了一张照片，因为他们的身体太惺惺過和纠结了，他无法起身在镜子里看到它。
In their fifth and final month together, he gets it cut so short that it no longer curls, and then leaves ten days later. She learns to count, to keep score. It’s easiest to avenge your losses when you’ve kept a manifest.
在他们在一起的第五个月也是最后一个月，他把它剪得很短，不再卷曲，十天后离开。 她学会了计数，记分。 当你保留一份清单时，最容易为你的损失报仇。
With this second head, she pretends that she does not notice how the waves are grown long at the front, swept to one side and groomed immobile against the forehead. She swallows back, guiltily, the phrase, comb over. She wonders if she would want him without this false hairline, and whether he would offer it to her, to be tended to like a deformed child. Does she have it in her to be its custodian? The shudder she feels when she cradles that truth is the fragile fault line between love and desire: the crack in a mug that does not survive the heat of the kiln. She knows this, although that clarity wanes like the moon.
用这个第二个头，她假装没有注意到波浪是如何在前面变长，被扫到一边，靠在额头上一动不动。 她内疚地咽了回去，这句话，梳了梳。 她想知道她是否希望他没有这个假发际线，以及他是否会把它献给她，让她像一个畸形的孩子一样。 她有做它的保管人吗？ 当她拥有真相时，她感到的颤抖是爱和欲望之间的脆弱断层线：一个无法在窑炉的热量下存活的杯子上的裂缝。 她知道这一点，尽管这种清晰度像月亮一样减弱。
She grows familiar with how his fingers move in their unconscious, reflexive smoothing of his hair back in place, saying nothing on windy days when the curls slip and the pale skin beneath betrays him by showing through. She imagines his shame when he finally sees this mauled fringe in his reflection. She still worries that he doesn’t find her attractive, despite her collusion in his own artifice.
她越来越熟悉他的手指在无意识中如何移动，反射性地抚平他的头发，在刮风的日子里，当卷发滑落，下面苍白的皮肤通过露出来背叛他时，她什么也没说。 当他终于在他的倒影中看到这个被跺跚的边缘时，她想象着他的羞耻。 她仍然担心他不觉得她有吸引力，尽管她勾结在他自己的巧妙中。
She wonders if she could fall in love without her knuckles deep in his curls.
她想知道，如果没有她的指关节深深地插进他的卷发，她是否能坠入爱河。
*****
The second time they speak, he begins his attempt in French, perhaps because their first conversation in English had ended so abruptly. After nine months of her contemptuous silence, he tries, once again in the faculty lounge, this time in his mother tongue.
他们第二次交谈时，他开始用法语尝试，也许是因为他们的第一次英语对话如此突然地结束。 在她蔑视沉默了九个月后，他再次在教师休息室尝试，这次是用他的母语。
“Ça va?”, he asks.
“Ça va？”，他问道。
“Oui. Ça va?”. She is not sure why she acknowledges this man whose studied, cynical nonchalance bored her within moments of their first meeting.
“Oui。 Ça va？”。 她不知道为什么她承认这个男人，在他们第一次见面的那一刻，他有学究、愤世嫉俗的冷漠让她感到厌烦。
“Comme ci, comme ça”. Mellifluous. He sounds like every Anglophone child’s first language lesson.
“Comme ci，comme ça”。 令人上心的。 他听起来像是每个讲英语的孩子的第一门语言课。
“Do French people really say that?”.
“法国人真的这么说吗？”。
“Only when they want to make English girls blush.”
“只有当他们想让英国女孩脸红的时候。”
Their eyes meet as she decodes the homophone. She feels something like optimism. Loneliness bleeds away when you’re playing games with other people, even when you know they’re counting cards; the thrill of poker is in what can be lost.
当她解读同音字时，他们的目光相遇。 她感到有些乐观。 当你和别人玩游戏时，孤独感会消失，即使你知道他们在数牌；扑克的刺激在于可能失去的东西。
*****
All summer, the intensity of the game grows in jolting shivers, feeling at times so light that meaning bleeds out of it and diffuses into the atmosphere before the eye can fix upon it. At first, their meetings are conducted in daylight, nearly but not quite chaste, made electric by the times he runs a finger along her wrist to examine her watch, or when he sits next to her on the metro, his thigh, the muscle hot and tight, pressing against hers; it is the kind of flirtation she remembers from being fifteen, simultaneously innocent and intentional.
整個夏天，遊戲的強度在震耳的顫抖中成長，有時感覺如此輕盈，以至於意義從它身上滲出，在眼睛無法固定之前擴散到大氣中。 起初，他们的会议是在白天进行的，几乎但并不完全贞洁，当他用手指沿着她的手腕检查她的手表时，或者当他坐在地铁上她旁边时，他的大腿，肌肉又热又紧，压在她的肌肉上；这是她十五岁时记得的那种调情，同时天真又有意。
The first time he invites her for coffee, he lets her sit under the umbrella where she can watch the ocean, taking the view of the carpark for himself. She feels, as she always does when he chooses to spend time with her over one of his Tinder dates, special, different. She spoons the foam from her latte into her mouth with the straw and smiles at him.
他第一次邀请她喝咖啡时，他让她坐在伞下，在那里她可以看海，自己欣赏停车场的景色。 就像他选择在Tinder的一次约会中和她在一起时，她总是感到特别，与众不同。 她用吸管把拿铁的泡沫舀到嘴里，对他笑了笑。
“If I invited you to a wedding next weekend, would you have anything to wear?”.
“如果我邀请你参加下周末的婚礼，你会穿什么吗？”。
“Are you inviting me to a wedding?”.
“你要邀请我参加婚礼吗？”。
“No. No. I just mean. All your clothes are so…”, he laughs.
「不。 不。 我只是说。 你所有的衣服都是如此……”，他笑了。
Criticism can be met as either a challenge or an erosion, and this deep into the slow bake of summer vacation, she still thinks she is invincible. But when she goes home, she looks at her wardrobe with doubt.
批评可以是挑战，也可以是侵蚀，在暑假的缓慢烘烤中，她仍然认为自己是无敌的。 但当她回家时，她疑惑地看着自己的衣柜。
The first time they meet in the dark, they end the evening, sloppy drunk in a dive bar, drinking beer. He picks up her vape from the table and sucks on it, making a face. “You know, you are so lucky”.
他们第一次在黑暗中相遇，他们结束了夜晚，在潜水酒吧里喝着啤酒，醺醺醺的。 他从桌子上拿起她的电子烟，吮吸着，做了个鬼脸。 “你知道的，你真幸运。”
“Why?” She narrows her eyes. She has learned by now to only relax when he talks about himself.
“为什么？” 她眯起眼睛。 她现在已经学会了只有当他谈论自己时才要放松。
“To be, you know, thirty seven. Single. But to still have your beauty, your figure”.
“你知道的，三十七岁。 单身。 但仍然拥有你的美貌，你的身材。”
These are the moments she plays for. Hundreds of validating silver coins spilling out of a slot machine. She is beautiful. She is desirable. She will not die alone. And she’s drunk enough that night to forget that the House always wins.
这些是她为之演奏的时刻。 数百枚验证银币从老虎机中溢出来。 她很漂亮。 她令人向往。 她不会孤独地死去。 那天晚上，她喝得酩酊大醉，忘记了众议院总是赢。
*****
The bridge between meeting at night and waking next to each other in the morning is deliciously short, but the rules grow ever more complex, and playing for high stakes on campus, once the semester begins, shows her how publicly it is possible to lose.
晚上见面和早上挨着醒来之间的桥梁很短，但规则越来越复杂，一旦学期开始，在校园里玩高风险，向她展示了公开输球的可能性。
On the mornings when she is the first to reach the faculty lounge, she keeps her sunglasses on and her headphones in while she makes both of them coffee, feeling the shame of enacting this ritual in front of her silent colleagues and affecting either invisibility or insouciance, despite neither being true. The camouflage of leather sandals and floral dresses behind which she has lurked for so long seems useless now, and so she dresses the part: the don’t-give-a-damn blonde in fitted black pants who vapes in the wrong places and who surely does not care who talks, who sees.
在她第一个到达教师休息室的早晨，她戴着太阳镜和耳机，同时为两人煮咖啡，在沉默的同事面前颁布这个仪式感到羞耻，并影响了隐身或无动于心，尽管两者都不是真的。 她潜伏了这么久的皮凉鞋和花卉连衣裙的伪装现在似乎毫无用处，所以她打扮了这个角色：那个穿着合身黑色裤子的金发女郎在错误的地方吸电子烟，她肯定不在乎谁说话，谁看到。
Their first ritual: two cups, set before the coffee machine side by side, a pair. Each morning when she places them down, she puts as much distance between them as possible, because she knows that for those watching, the part stands for the whole, and they have become talked about, spoken of, as a couple.
他们的第一个仪式：两个杯子，并排放在咖啡机前，一对。 每天早上，当她放下它们时，她都会在它们之间保持尽可能多的距离，因为她知道，对于那些观看的人来说，部分代表着整体，他们已经成为了谈论，谈论，成为一对夫妇。
She knows there is no teamwork in this game they’re playing.
她知道他们正在玩的这个游戏中没有团队合作。
Because like any skilled gamer, the Artist wears a mask. He wears many, and if you do not know how exciting he finds it to hide, how perhaps his only act of creation is in fact deception, and how much of what he plays with concealing is known only to himself and rarely revealed, then you may find yourself trapped between the layers of his disguise, thinking him a truly a ceramicist when he is only a conjurer creating tension between two fears: his and your own.
因为像任何熟练的游戏玩家一样，艺术家都戴着面具。 他穿了很多，如果你不知道他觉得隐藏起来有多令人兴奋，也许他唯一的创造行为实际上是欺骗，以及他有多少隐藏的东西只有他自己知道，很少被揭示，那么你可能会发现自己被困在他的伪装层层之间，认为他是一个真正的陶瓷家，而他只是一个召唤师，在两种恐惧之间制造紧张关系：他的和你自己的。
*****
He makes a video for a competition so saturated with cliché that she looks out of the window of the taxi and tries not to cry.
他为一场充满陈词滥调的比赛制作了一段视频，以至于她看着出租车的窗户，试图不哭。
“After watching that, I like you two percent less.” She isn’t joking. She looks at him to gauge his reaction. He adjusts his mask.
“看完之后，我喜欢你少了百分之二。” 她不是在开玩笑。 她看着他，以衡量他的反应。 他调整了他的面具。
They exit the taxi silently.
他们默默地下了出租车。
Walking through the crowd to the marquees, he looks down at her, dropping the words casually, “You look good”.
穿过人群走向帐篷，他低頭看着她，随口说：“你看起来不错”。
She says nothing.
她什么也没说。
“Everyone is looking at you, the tall, skinny blonde girl, and wondering if you are one of the models.”
“每个人都在看着你，那个又高又瘦的金发女孩，想知道你是否是模特之一。”
Somehow, the compliments her gives her now always seem to shimmer with incredulity. They exist, underwritten, by all the times he told her, cocooned with laughter, that she was gauche. What he is willing to say, what he is willing to make, vibrates and echoes with emptiness.
不知何故，她现在给她的赞美似乎总是闪烁着难以置信的光。 他们存在，被承保，他每次都笑着告诉她，她很不知。 他愿意说的话，他愿意做出的，都在虚空中震动和回荡。
He works with materials, in various mediums. Digital. Physical. The video, the clay, but she knows suddenly that it’s facsimile, fabulation. He labours theatrically and midwifes his own stillbirths, insisting they’re alive. He invites you to be witness and forces you to be either murderer or fool. It’s checkmate both ways. Two routes to self-loathing and shame. The more she thinks about it, the surer she becomes that she is simply the material he manipulates.
他用各种媒介处理材料。 数字。 物理。 视频，粘土，但她突然知道这是传真，虚构。 他戏剧化地劳动，助产士自己的死胎，坚持认为他们还活着。 他邀请你成为证人，并强迫你要么成为杀人犯，要么成为傻瓜。 这是双向的将死。 通往自我厌恶和羞耻的两条路线。 她越想越觉得她只是他操纵的材料。
There is no game. There’s nothing to win. She is dancing blindly while he watches, and he does not hand out prizes.
没有游戏。 没有什么可赢的。 她盲目地跳舞，而他看着，他没有发奖品。
She feels exhausted when she imagines how much he’ll hate her when she sets fire to the whole thing to make sure it’s really dead, and how contemptuous he’ll be when he sees her write her name with the flames. It’s alien to him, who plants crisscrossing dynamite trails silently, a delicate lacework of clandestine intent made beautiful by the mystery of when it will catch, or whether it will burn all the way to the edge. The anticipated light of the explosion, the promise of the violent, guilty climax, leaves him twitching. The sensation of that is something she never quite gets used to.
当她想象当她放火确保整个东西真的死了时，他会多么恨她，当他看到她用火焰写下她的名字时，他会多么鄙视时，她感到疲惫不堪。 对他来说，这是陌生的，他默默地种植了纵横交错的炸药痕迹，一个微妙的秘密意图的花边，它什么时候会抓住，或者它是否会一直燃烧到边缘的谜团变得美丽。 爆炸的预期光线，暴力、有罪的高潮的承诺，让他抽搐。 这种感觉是她从未完全习惯的。