On Lying in Bed and Not Masturbating

I'm in bed for four days straight, miserable, with ice packs and pills and a swollen face; sleeping and watching tv and trying to decide whether I want to be the official "girlfriend" of either The Italian Stallion or The Long Distance Man. I've been getting a little pressure for a commitment from each of them. Incredible, since only two months ago I was convinced that I'd never get fucked again.

I sleep for 14 hours at a stretch, which is pretty amazing, but it doesn't help me. I am sleeping on it, but to no avail. I feel as if I'm in another dimension, one where General Hospital really matters. I love my painkillers, I want to be their girlfriend.

I'm staying in bed longer than I have to, being self-indulgent. I could have functioned after a day and a half if I'd had anything to do. I mean anything. But I don't have a day job right now, nobody to answer to, so I sank into my down comforter and five pillows and borrowed a black-and-white tv. Sleeping. Dozing. Barely swallowing enormous yellow pills. Moaning in pain occasionally. Thinking about Vince and Mac. Mostly feeling sorry for myself. Poor me.

"Christen, Christen, Christen," Vince, my Italian Stallion, repeats annoyingly into my machine in his sexy voice. "Are you asleep? Do you look like a chipmunk? I've got some nuts for you, sweetness. Do you want me to come over? I'll bring over whatever you want. I'll hold the ice pack on your cheek. I could get you some magazines and movies... C'mon, pick up the phone!"

I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to choose between my lovers. For now, I just want to take my big yellow Dilaudid and watch Oprah talk about teenage girls being sexually harassed in high school.

Is this news? I thought everyone was sexually harassed in high school. That's what high school is about. At my fancy-pants prep school, where I was a scholarship student and never allowed to forget it, the boys in their navy blazers had a favorite routine of pushing me down on the school bus to look under my skirt. So I started wearing gym shorts under my skirts. I felt like shit when they did it, but there was something titillating too. The flutter of a seventh-grade boy possibly seeing my new trim. I was particularly mortified being shoved down by Darren Wilkens while wearing cheap blue polyester panties with weird colored lightning bolts on them. The girls favored "Bloomies": cotton underwear from their twice-yearly shopping trips to Bloomingdale's. They were striped or polka-dotted and I coveted them. My humiliation was more about my panties not being good enough; the harassment seemed normal. When one of my brothers moved to New York, I made him go to Bloomingdale's to buy me some of the coveted underwear. I wore them until they were shredded.

My days in bed are spent without any Bloomies or Maidenform or Victoria's Secret or Carter's or Hanro. Naked and nauseous I do what I know I'm not supposed to: compare and contrast. There is something terrible about comparing men, it's just not really fair. But we all do it. I dislike myself for it, then I feel better knowing how awful I am, then I roll in my misanthropic pigpen for awhile, then I write my obituary and fantasize about my funeral that no one will come to. My teeth hurt.

Mac, my Long Distance Man, leaves a message while I'm sleeping. I would have picked up. I can't hear the phone through the drugs. He says, "Hello, it's me. Feel better." Somehow I hear birds sing and the sun is shining and it's like the beginning of Blue Velvet. And I don't mind his message being so brief?what else can he say? He can't swing by and minister to my needs; Australia is a world away.

I keep imagining him in bed with me. I dream that his long arms hold me and he rubs my back and brings me salt water and peroxide to rinse my mouth out with and makes me chicken soup from scratch with my favorite saltines and goes down on me four times a day. When I wake up I hold on to the little dead teddy bear he gave me; it has X's for eyes and looks like it got run over by a truck.

He calls a lot during this recovery of mine; in fact, he's called me almost every other day since I returned from seeing him in London. I guess all the bitching I did about him not paying me enough attention got through. I am all too aware that my domestic fantasies of him are all the sweeter for his being halfway around the Earth.

I wonder if I am so terribly insecure that I need to have two men competing for me. That's a bit sick. The comparing starts again.

And the comparing always starts with dick size. Gotta start somewhere. They are both big, so that's not a deciding factor. I'm not a total size queen anyway. One is a grower, the other a shower. Other differences: the Stallion is circumcised, Long Distance Man is not. He's very clean, though.

The sex is good in different ways: very "I man, you woman" with the Stallion, much more nuanced and changeable with Long Distance Man. They complement each other in a way. I get immediate sex and fun dinners out with Vince, and emotional sustenance and love and expensive AT&T bills from Mac. The problem is that I'm in love with my Long Distance Man and I'm not ever going to be in love with The Italian Stallion, but he lives here and Long Distance man, well, he's not called Long Distance Man because of his big cock.

The Italian Stallion calls again; this time I pick up. I feel guilty for not caring about him enough, so I'm very nice on the phone. He knows he's fallen behind in the polls since my trip to London. This makes him insecure and he says all the things he shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. I know he knows because I've done the same thing, said all those reckless things when it's obvious a relationship is on its last legs. My worst was at a wedding my then-boyfriend, Dave the Nurse, brought me to. I didn't know a soul and drank too much champagne and spent the entire evening desperately slurring to all of his friends how happy we were together. We broke up a week later. I was spitefully happy that the newlyweds didn't last much longer.

The things the Stallion shouldn't say are about an apartment in Brooklyn together and my cat and his dog and weekends at his beach house. He even thinks I'd "be a good mother." Whoa, boy.

I ring off depressed and drained. My mouth is throbbing and I'm woozy and my garbage can is full of gauze pads soaked in my blood. I touch my clit with my fingers. Don't have the energy even to reach over for the vibrator. Don't have the energy to move my fingers either. Wish I had my Long Distance Man to use his fingers on me. Or just to hold my sex to comfort me.

I think about how he'll be here in 10 days and how he tried to fist me once at my request but it hurt too much and how I can't wait to try again. His whole small hand inside me. I love the idea of that. A man's hand on my sex makes me feel as if I belong to him. In Krapp's Last Tape there's a sexy line when he is reminiscing about lying in a boat with a woman and he says, "...with my hand on her." Simple. I imagine the hand being able to reach inside me and grab my stomach or my heart or my guts. I'm going to have to do a little research before he gets here. I think I saw a book on fisting at the bookstore.