Iris Gonzalvo turns partway toward Eric Yanel and looks at him with a slight frown. Yanel doesn't detect anything in her gaze that resembles sympathy. Which causes him certain confusion: Was there ever anything positive in the way his fiancée looked at him, or is he feeling nostalgia for something that only ever existed in his imagination? The truth is he can't remember.
“Eric,” she says to him, “This is Álex Jardí. He writes books. Those things people read. I was telling him about my problems, about you never being able to get it up anymore. And how no one wants to give you work anymore and we have no money and no one has called us in months.” She takes a sip on her drink without taking her eyes off of Yanel. Then she gestures with the half-empty cup to the guy with the unbelievably fat ass. “Álex published a best seller a few years ago. One of those books that help people find themselves and live happier lives. Called The Lost Rivers of London.”
“They're four independent stories,” explains Álex Jardí. “But interconnected. I consider it a sort of manual. To finding your own inner lost river. That's what I call that person we all have inside of us. The person we want to be. We all have one inside but we have to learn to let it out. To metamorphose.”
Yanel looks at the guy with the fat ass. His face is wide in a way that makes you think of cartoon characters that have been hit by a falling piano, making them more horizontal than vertical.
“I don't understand anything,” says Yanel. “I don't understand what these people are.” He points with his head toward the people around him. His facial expression makes one think of Muslim clerics at a summer foam party. Of Oxford graduates in the middle of a slum. Of Japanese people in any social event outside of Japan. “I also don't understand why we're here when we could be in some normal party. Who's throwing this party? I don't know anyone.”
“You don't know anyone because this is a literary party,” Iris tells him. “The people here are writers, editors and journalists. Which is to say not the kind of party that you're used to. There are no naked whores carrying around trays filled with lines of cocaine. And you're probably gonna have a hard time finding someone to suck you off in the bathroom.” She makes a vague gesture with the hand that holds her drink, toward Yanel's crotch. “Although it must not be very fun for you anyway. Considering you can't get it up anymore.”
Eric Yanel rubs the wings of his nose with a circular movement of his index finger and thumb, which is one of his traditional nervous gestures. One of Eric Yanel's Classic Nervous Gestures. One of those gestures that people who know him automatically associate with his idiosyncratic gesticular repertoire. The wings of Eric Yanel's nose seem to be always red. As the result of some kind of localized skin irritation. Eric Yanel's other Classic Nervous Gestures are (a) sniffling loudly and often while wrinkling up his entire face, and (b) abruptly tossing his head back to reconfigure his coiffed blond hair, the way hair models on television shampoo commercials toss their heads back to shake their long locks and the way regular people shake their long hair in parody of the shampoo ads. In Yanel's case, however, there doesn't seem to be any attempt at parody. Parody seems, in general, to be foreign to his expressive repertoire.
“Everything works fine when I masturbate.” Yanel looks at Iris with a frown. “I've told you many times. So it's not strictly true that I can't get it up. It's not the same thing that I can't get it up with someone else as if I can't ever get it up.” He pauses. Several of the guests located in groups meta-adjacent to where Yanel is talking to Iris are looking at him out of the corners of their eyes. “I could give you a thousand excuses. That's obvious. But I'd rather not. That's something that I think you should appreciate. As my fiancée and all.”
“Iris told me that she wants to become a famous actress,” says Álex Jardí. His ass is excessive, according to every known canon, yet its enormous size seems to give him a certain quality that's hard to explain. A certain moral solidity. Or a certain extraordinarily solid anchoring to the ground. “She also told me that you might try to thwart her success. Due to envy brought on by your own failure as an actor.”
Yanel makes a pained face and leans forward to massage his knee with his hands.
“Who is this guy?” he says. With his waist doubled forward and still stroking his knee. “And why are we here? I've never read a book, I don't think. Maybe when I was a kid.” He looks up at Iris Gonzalvo, who is now looking at him with her arms crossed and an impatient expression. “And what do you mean by all that? And why are you talking to me in that tone of voice?”
At this point it is difficult not to suspect that some of the members of the groups meta-adjacent to the group composed of Eric, Iris and the man named Álex Jardí have subtly moved closer in order to eavesdrop on the conversation. Some vectors and degrees of head leaning seem to corroborate this suspicion.
“I mean,” says Iris, “that I'm tired of deodorant ads where you can only see your armpit. What makes you think I want to marry someone who's in commercials where you can only see his armpit? Same goes for ads where my fiancé is running the marathon with two thousand other people. Not to mention the car commercials.” Now all the expressive elements of her face and body seem to be focused on transmitting fatigued repugnance: the crossed arms; the rolled eyes; the head slightly cocked to one side. “We are here because I've decided to start meeting interesting people. For the first time in my life. And I can't believe you're going to start that number with your knee. Do you really think it's going to work again?”
Eric Yanel leaves his drink on a passing waiter's tray and squats on the floor. With a look of intense pain. Grabbing his knee with that expression, like he'd just eaten something rotten, that athletes have as they grab their knees or other recently injured body parts.
“It's one of his tricks,” says Iris Gonzalvo to the man with the fattest ass Eric Yanel has seen in his life. “The knee thing. He does it to get pity. In situations like this. Shit.” She snorts in irritation. “I can't believe I used to fall for it.”
Now Eric Yanel is sitting on the floor. Hugging his leg, with an expression of intense pain on his face. Several of the party guests approach him and ask if he's okay. Yanel looks up from his knee and at where Iris Gonzalvo was just a moment before. And where she is no longer.
Yanel leaps up. He extends out his neck periscopically and searches the room with his gaze. Several guests continue to approach him with glasses of water, putting their hands on his arm and asking him if he needs anything. Solicitous men with bellies hanging like basketballs. Women with horribly cellulitic thighs. Bloated calves. Yanel pushes them away and finally manages to see Iris's svelte figure and long dark hair in the distance. In the section of the party closest to the exit. She seems to be getting her fur coat and her tall, furry Moscow-inspired hat from the coat check. She waits with a neutral expression for an employee to help her put her coat on and then leaves the nightclub with majestic strides. Yanel's face is as shaken as if someone had hit him over the head with a mallet.
“Something similar happened to me once,” says the guy with the fat ass and the comically wide face. While Yanel looks toward the exit, his face shaken. “I mean those erection problems you have. When it happened, my wife and I used all kinds of sex toys. Even vibrating objects and electronic thingamajigs. And once in a while, I didn't mind paying some guy to fill in on certain conjugal duties,” said the guy with the fat ass. His expression transmits a strange enthusiasm. An enthusiasm reminiscent of Oriental holy men. At the happy end of their chain of reincarnations. “We also enjoyed public places, or unlikely settings.”