《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter I》第9节
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. “I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore. “It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.” We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
注释摘要
这一段落在字面上完成了一个完整的空间转换：从阳光灿烂的门廊进入布坎南家明亮而脆弱的室内，在风的裹挟中初遇两位女性，最后以风的死亡收场。汤姆用他那种近乎粗暴的肢体语言控制着尼克的移动路线——先是用一只手把尼克转过去，让他看这片产业的“前景”，手掌横扫之处包括了沉陷式意大利花园、半英亩浓香扑鼻的玫瑰，还有一艘船头扁平、正在海湾里磕碰潮水的摩托艇。然后他又“礼貌…