Lio Edmund | Presentation!

    
   
Presentation! 



It’s silly, but I bought the pocket watch so I could feel like a real butch. I drove to the pawnshop wearing my brother’s Oxford shoes, my grandpa’s double-breasted blazer, and the half Windsor knot my mom had to tie, and then I paid with my cash. The watch didn’t have a chain. Lost over the years. I didn’t have to go looking for a replacement, once my dad gave me the chain from his second wedding tux. It matched exactly.

I can mostly decode the black Roman numerals stamped along the watch face perimeter. I can’t really tell time analog. I couldn’t figure out how the case was supposed to flip open when there was only a narrow seam between its halves—no gap to fit short fingernails. My girlfriend Tommy showed me how the latch worked two days later. There was a button on top the whole time, it turns out. Spring-loaded.

She didn’t tell me I was overdressed when I showed up to the auditorium with a vest and chain. I don’t think she questioned it anymore, since I also believed white suspenders and wingtips were appropriate for the botanical gardens, which was probably our first date. I never figured out when lesbians start counting dates. The spring musical might have been our third.

Our friend Emilio, the first boy I heard say the word “bisexual,” took his shirt off in the first act. I didn’t know you got to do that in high school drama club. Tommy slid the clip off my belt and twisted the chain around her knuckles, next to all her signet rings. That was when she had every right to everything I wore.

She told me to kiss her, point-blank, six times before I realized she was my girlfriend. Tommy seemed surprised or annoyed every time she had to ask me first. I think it’s something I was supposed to just know, before she decided everything about me was false advertising.

When my watch stopped ticking, I looked up how I could fix it. A man named Xavier typed out the steps on his gentlemen’s fashion blog: last update 2010. You take a little knife to pop the case and expose the battery. Every step came with a picture of mechanical insides, lined up in a row, so you don’t forget how to put it back together. I couldn’t decide if that seemed more like surgery or murder. Either way, I wasn’t qualified. Two years, I carried a watch frozen in my pocket. Sometimes I spin the hands, to midnight or 6:30, because what if they atrophy? Nothing can stand still for that long.

My father’s chain is polished to silver, built tight-linked. It’s long enough to wrap twice around my wrist. End-to-end, it can clip to itself around my neck and leave me room to breathe. That’s how I’ve been wearing it since I got too tired to do up all the buttons on a suit. I kept my best three-piece, steamed smooth and clean. Sometimes my boyfriend, Theo, slips inside our wardrobe. He’ll come out with his shoulders curved in, his frame small, before he smiles and opens up to show me my old suitcoat, all the buttons undone, over his favorite sundress.

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