PRIAPUS ON THE PROWL

It’s raining tonight and my penis feels amazing, so I’m heading out early.

This is the sentence with which Zaretsky begins his latest story. It came to him after much consideration regarding both syntax and connotation, understanding as he does how great stories—or at least the ones which find anthologization, earn esteem, stir envy—typically open with an audacious, declarative claim. Stories that exhibit masterful authority. And these are the kinds of stories he desires to write.

■

Here’s what’s supposed to be happening: Priapus, the ithyphallic dreamer, now adrift in our material realm, is presented as a metaphoric representation of virility, in all its assumptions and self-contradictions. Priapus, inheritor of Dionysus, is archetypally portrayed as wielding a permanent, abhorrent erection, his raging engorgement a beacon of virility for generations of Lampsacenes and Bithynians, the high-striking foot-long fascinum a pivot of vitality for Persians and Cairenes. Acts of sexual aggression toward donkeys, also a favoured pastime.

Zaretsky’s story reimagines this myth amid the dreariness of contemporary Toronto. In situating such phallocentric deification in so banal a setting, Zaretsky aims to portray male sexuality in a manner, he contends, which is rarely seen: neither as a critique of some inherent aggression nor as an outright spoof. By plundering the symbolism of the ancients, he thus accesses a near-endless well of ironic allusion—one an ambitious author, he knows, might reap gainfully in exploring.

But it remains a risky gambit; as François Méliès quipped in Le Sens et La Solitude (1953), “le savant qui habite en allusion comprendre seulement pitances et entre parentheses,” or something along those lines: Zaretsky, with most of his belongings still cartoned away in a storage space on Dupont, is only able to locate a tertiary reference via Google Books.

He hasn’t thought about Méliès, or any critical theory at all, since grad school, and considers calling Melinda to solicit her take—Méliès of course being one anchor of Melinda’s own thesis, way back when. But engaging Melinda demands a great deal of energy, which Zaretsky finds in short supply these days; stuffing tortillas at Jack Astor’s four nights a week is not a livelihood that nurtures productive contemplation. Drunk-dialing his ex is not, he knows, something he should be doing. But these are the challenges he faces.

■

Descriptive passages have never been Zaretsky’s strong suit; pastiche and germane intertextuality, often by way of apropos epigraphs drawn from opaque sources, are more his thing. In his own reading, he tends to glaze at Steinbeck’s mottled sycamores or Cather’s appearance of permanence. Yet he can concede that a degree of scene-setting is necessary to be convincing. Great fiction must, above all else, convince.

So, the question now confronts him: how to interestingly, and most importantly sexily, describe an subterranean financial district brasserie on a slow night? How to harness such a thing within his thematic zone of masculine power? For it is power, after all, which propels the sexual adventures of restless men, and from where this shapeless thing is to find its fuel.

Here goes.

The place is a bit dead tonight, which bodes well. Priapus shakes rain from his collar, scanning his vicinity. Here hums an honest room, lights muted and the atmosphere cool. Booths of analysts with ties loosened, their leather-cased Androids pushed around in pilsner spillage. Young men, too loud in their tirades and barbs, their high-pitched giggles.

The bar feels snug, but uncozy, like a condom.

Priapus generally keeps his alcohol levels to a minimum, though he is inspired by the ecstatic effects distilled beverages produce in others. There is timeless humanity, rare grace, in the glowing evening cheeks of those beleaguered by daytime. And such relief is clearly needed statim, for a sour mood shrouds Bay Street tonight. A looming government shutdown weighs on equities. The Nikkei 225 has plummeted amid rumours of a trembling fault line and proximate petroleum interests. To boot, the FDIC chairman’s pronouncement of a dire winter has prompted stochastic, resonant ripples.

Tension reigns, a palpable sense of longing. In the parkades, in the subways: a horniness for waste, as intimately familiar as a father’s disappointment in his brood.

Priapus moves through the bar with caution. His job is to inflame and nourish, not to peacock. Cycles and patterns, seasons and solstices—these are his parameters, celestially endowed. Priapus’s love for such fools is his love for the harvest.

Typing this, his love for the harvest, Zaretsky scowls. He is fairly certain none of this works.

■

The Priapus figure suggests bounty, territorial possession—gain, in all respects. Zaretsky himself turned his back on financial services after completing three years of a business degree at York, ennobling himself instead with the unrewarding work of writing fiction. But his acquaintance with assets and liabilities and other industry-related specifics now sufficiently empowers him to develop a convoluted, ironic passage about Carol, Priapus’s soon sexual companion/conquest and in some respects the true hero of this story. Carol, signifying some version of what could be called—though Zaretsky would never put it so starkly—conventional society, sits jammed between two analysts with linebackers’ physiques and matching pinstripes, the umbrella on their table dripping onto an expended plate of chili nachos.

For Priapus, such ghastliness is just another source of arousal.

When Carol skootches out from her booth, Priapus swivels on his barstool to gleam coyly in her direction. Conversation comes briskly; they aren’t children, after all. She works in credit ratings; specifically, commercial mortgage-backed securities. In Carol’s eyes, contact-lensed green, one can ascertain a dismal vision of her near future: a weeks-long internal audit, late-night teleconferencing with London, alprazolam, and her clenched feeling of powerlessness against the immensity of it all.

Onto such arid arroyos, sympathetic tears must surely fall.

Risk analysis, Priapus growls in a highly sexual manner. Full wrap liquidity.   

Carol, moving the plot forward, takes this cue of seduction, and after hastily downing another rye and ginger allows herself to be swept out into the soppy night and a waiting taxi. The rain, as always, is a blessing. In the cab, Priapus fires off a text to himself, a reminder for tomorrow to breathe deeply of Zephyr’s gentleness, never taking such fructifying grace for granted.

Tomorrow, all honour. But tonight, the bounty of the rigid god.

■

A humid evening. Zaretsky types without passion. He calls Melinda.

            ‘I’m borny,’ he says. ‘By which I mean bored and…’

‘Yeah, I get it. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

            Yes is also the name of the band he can hear playing on Melinda’s stereo in the background: 1973’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, one of his favourite LPs.

            ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘and what do you need me to do about it?’

            Zaretsky can’t tell whether this is a remark of derision or, as he hopes, playfulness. What does he need her to do? A thousand despicable actions come to mind. But he bites his tongue.

            ‘Will you read my story?’

            ‘What’s that? You sound strange.’

            ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I bit my tongue. I was wondering if you’d read my story. I feel it’s conceptually strong, but pulling it all together is proving a drag.’

            Melinda seems to not hear him. ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ she says, ‘I’m just getting into the place now.’

            Before Zaretsky can ask what place she means exactly, she’s gone.

■

Zaretsky attends the launch of a well-regarded novelist’s latest book. Though he’d met her once previously at some terrible party, he has little interest in the writer or her work. He knows, however, it will be well-attended, offering the possibility of running into people worth running into—though he hastily reminds himself of his own ambivalence toward such careerist manoeuvres. Such ugliness.  

The bar is respectably full when he arrives, with the proceedings underway. Onstage, the author stands demurely as she is introduced by a representative of her publisher. To rousing applause, the author—highly admired both for her craft and for her contributions to the city’s literary culture, the publisher’s rep reads from a card—begins with a brief anecdote that Zaretsky, vying for a bartender’s attention, misses. There is laughter. The author then begins to read from the book. She is slight and dark and, like most literary types, has no understanding of effective microphone technique; Zaretsky, unable to hear anything, finds his attentions drifting. He wonders what the author’s vagina might be like. Given her diminutive stature, he imagines her vagina as being small, cute, concealed in thick hair perhaps. Though, he considers, most women these days tend to barber or strip their pubic regions, so the wild fluff he imagines is likely tamer. He imagines her lacking any timidity at exposing her vagina, much as she seems enlivened by the attention now gushing her way. The author’s vagina, as imagined by Zaretsky, would certainly make up for any potential haughtiness: a vagina of inspiration, floaty with dreams—genitalia befitting a well-reviewed conjuror of evocative prose. He drinks his beer quickly, enjoying this thought. It makes him more interested in the author and even, possibly, her work, though he still can’t hear a word she says.

Zaretsky considers reworking his story from the perspective of Priapus’s penis. Or: alternately, the penis and the vagina that anticipates it.

Post-reading, attendees mill about the bar—most, he assumes, aspiring writers. Detached from this churn, Zaretsky laments all these dopey-faced piteous hopefuls, these unjaded souls with their thrift store scarves and phones in gaudy rubber cases.

Just as he considers bolting, Zaretsky sights the author approaching, hand in hand with a woman he believes works for the provincial NDP. Once she’s within earshot, Zaretsky calls to the author by name, uncertain whether she’ll remember him. She cocks her head in his direction.

‘Your vagina fires my imagination,’ Zaretsky says.

The author seems to not hear, and leans closer. He raises his volume.

‘Is it just as I imagine?’

The author looks at him oddly, saying nothing, then continues on her way.

I knew it, Zaretsky thinks.

■

Through the exaltation of Priapus, Zaretsky seeks fanciful turns and frolics, even in the snow-stopped city.

I have soared over wheatfields that pout with peasants’ dreams, Priapus-via-Zaretsky sings. I have poured my viscous weight into bayous born from cockfighters’ nightmares.

This is typed, then deleted, then restored, then cut and pasted aside for later consideration.

François Méliès, the eternally dissatisfied critic whose takedown of the transhistoric metanarrative mode post-Lyotard still haunts many industrious critics of the twenty-first century, committed suicide in the summer of 1998. This was also the season in which Zaretsky, pubescent and pimply, first successfully masturbated to orgasm.

He scribbles a note to himself: convergences?

Despite his many exasperations, Zaretsky often laughs himself awake. In half-consciousness, he writhes with merriment, alone in his futon. But in his waking hours, he is generally a humourless person.

Zaretsky writes, or thinks, or thinks about writing: Prosperity, that sardonic scimitar, suckles us all ex voto suscepto. This phrase is also set aside for later consideration, then is almost immediately forgotten.

■

Carol’s loft is described as expansive and odourless; it is, in the words of Méliès, “a setting that can not be set” (1958). Zaretsky types with envy at detailing the unscuffed hardwood and direct drive turntable, the bar stocked with organic agave extra añejo and expensive frizzante. As Priapus and Carol clink champagne flutes like conquerors in repose, the deity’s heart grows as plump with joy as his member is with blood. With eyelids fluttering, Carol states she is a Christian, with fond memories of lively community shamings. Hearing of this, Priapus’s dedication momentarily, almost imperceptibly, wavers.

But then Carol places a disc on the turntable, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, and Priapus’s harmonic energy, his spiritus, is lifted anew. The creamy synthesizers of Rick Wakeman skim over the intractable toppling of Alan White’s tom-toms. Priapus and Carol revel in the moment, this complex, paralytic bliss.

            Zaretsky pauses mid-paragraph. The erotic component of the story, the introduction of actual copulation, will considerably change the mood. Will Carol feign misconstrual of the consequences of what is about to occur? Can she? Perhaps. But this purest of male bravado will persuade her.

Again: it is the author’s job, as it is the lover’s, to convince, to summon imaginings in which to luxuriate.

In describing Priapus’s penetration of Carol, Zaretsky calls upon memories of his own sexual experiences with Melinda, during their relationship’s enjoyable first season: hastily stripping one another; generously dolloping non-irritating lubricant; then lively, exhausting coition on the living room carpet. Zaretsky is unsure how, precisely, these scenarios deviate: the veracious historical Melinda-driven memory and the reconditioned Carol-driven version. One detail he recalls with confidence: Melinda’s vagina was, and presumably remains, very tight—she is/was altogether a flabless person, both in physique and demeanour—which often caused his penis’s corona considerable discomfort upon entry. He’d never admitted this to her, fearing it would make him appear effete.

Side one of Tales, “The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn),” swirls in a fitting, if not perfectly synchronized, meter with Carol’s gyrations, facilitating her enjoyment of two unabashed, hiccuping orgasms in quick sequence. These climaxes recall battlefields in smoulder; for this, Priapus is, now and always, heavy-hearted. His is a task-oriented melancholy.

Carol is a woman foremost, but also possessor of the cervix of civilization.

That’s good, Zaretsky thinks as he types. Cervix of civilization. Italicized, for emphasis.

            He searches the well-regarded local author on the internet, finding little of interest: a publisher’s bio, a long-neglected photo diary of travels in Eastern Europe, a few reviews trickling in of her new book. This prompts further speculation regarding her vagina, and vaginas generally—forever elusive, a source of perpetual vexation, and yet, behind high-waisted Wranglers or a tasteful evening frock, never too far from man’s reach. Though reach is perhaps not the best word.

Zaretsky never, or rarely, masturbates to pornography. He accepts the principle that it pollutes the imagination. But he’s making such great progress on his story that he feels compelled to do something uncharacteristic, even hintingly transgressive. He calls up a video streaming website and unzips with enthusiasm, but his motivation quickly wilts. The temptations of these lacquered models only makes him feel like a dupe, a patsy to some cynical capitalistic entity. For heroism in this late modern era thrives in defiance of such ruses, not in being another horny schmoe. Today, true glory premised on an envisioned future, rather than in triumphs of the past, as it was in, well, the past. The glory of the tax collector, the glory of the personal trainer, the glory of the risk assessor—so on and so forth. Such battles are to be fought in the executive washrooms, in the bated breath anticipating an email attachment, in Holman W. Jenkins Jr.’s opinion columns for the Wall Street Journal.

The true battle is to be fought in inspiration, in accessing that unseen ether of the muse, in bringing to voice endless clashes of the cosmic realm.

The battle is to be fought in the dinner rush, with aching arms laden with dishes like breastplates: the Blue Cheese Sirloin, the Chipotle-Mango Rubbed Salmon, Jack’s Ultimate Nachos with Fajita Beef Chili.

The battle is to be fought in in tumult, in the city’s slaps and seizures, in the markets’ plummets and crests, in those teasing bids and asks.

Waste not these precious days! Priapus/Zaretsky sings/silently swears as he ejaculates inside Carol/onto himself.

■

Zaretsky has so many questions. What is being surrendered here? Priapus’s last links to the foibles of the terrestrial realm? The demise of reliability? The evacuation of the phallic cult?

If Priapus is a lost icon, what happens next? How does it end?

He fears he might be in love with Melinda. And, more importantly, that any opportunities for his revenge against her are slipping away.

Thus, receiving an email from her with the subject RE: PRIAPUS ON THE PROWL, his pulse accelerates. The message itself is brief; as promised, in reading his story’s draft, she has refrained from offering any real depth of critique or marking up any specific passages.

This is all very you, is pretty much all it says.

Zaretsky plugs in his old Epson inkjet printer, unused in over a year, and sends Melinda’s email to be printed. This requires several software updates and a reboot, but finally the machine spits out a printed page. Zaretsky crumples it and tosses it into his sink, then lights it on fire. The satisfaction he feels in watching the page twist and crumble into ash is meagre, but it is real.

As Carol will thrive—or as much as a fictional entity, a figure of myth, can be said to thrive—so will the world.

            Zaretsky attends another literary event, a night of readings held at a quasi-Irish pub near the university. Once again he arrives late, and finds the already-thin crowd dwindling. He immediately regrets this whole enterprise. Several of the remaining attendees are gathered at a corner booth, engaged in spirited discourse. Most are familiar to him, humans in whom he has already invested significant effort toward loathing. He orders a beer and maintains his distance, hovering at the bar, waiting to be spoken to.

            Then, like the striking of some summoning bell clanging through the din, he hears his name. He turns with practiced poise to find the well-regarded author, speaking to him. Up close, her elfish stature is disarming, as are the revelations provided by her skimpy minidress, and he finds it difficult to concentrate on anything she says—a disconnectedness furthered by her being, it is clear, very drunk.

            She leans in, fragrant with chardonnay and Lipsyl, slurring.

‘Why don’t you meet me in the bathroom in, like, seven minutes.’

            As the author wobbles unsteadily back to the booth and the embrace of her crowd of sycophantic ghouls, Zaretsky sips his beer, feeling lousy. This morning he discovered a fresh crease on his forehead, the kind that doesn’t fade with unfurrowing. Soon he will be thirty; time is having its brutish way with him. There is a range of attitudinal leanings he might adopt toward the prospect of getting on in years, and he has yet to make up his mind as to which will prove most beneficial to his writing. Cripplingly alcoholic and thrice divorced, François Méliès was sixty-two when he parked his Citröen C3 on the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena and leaped to the Arroyo Seco riverbed below; he hadn’t published anything of note in twenty years. By that benchmark, Zaretsky has the equivalent of one-third of his already-passed life remaining with which to make a mark.   

Presumably, a path will make itself clear.

            As Zaretsky flees the bar, he finds solace in his hope for such a path. His seething is vast, galactic, everlasting—and that, at the least, is something, he tells himself. His loathing will nourish the world, and will launch forth bountiful generations in further loathing. This will be his ultimate gift to the world, to history and to myth and to all mankind, sprung from his loins.