Cable Harbor (1981)

Donald Bowie's 1981 comic novel spends one summer in a Maine resort town among its divorcees, caterers and old money, with Arthur and Herbert, the town's resident gay couple, as its happiest marriage. Arthur dresses to spite the straight world, and his watch is part of the costume. (Open Library)

Watches

Corum Coin Watch: Greeting his first party guests, Arthur wears a blazer with eighteen-karat buttons, a cabochon emerald and a Corum fashioned from a twenty-dollar gold piece, on the principle that the clothes on his back should cost what a New York policeman earns in two months. Late in the book he looks at the coin that is its dial and decides it, like everything else he owns, is irrelevant. The text names Corum and describes the coin watch without using a model name.

Source text: On his wrist was a Corum watch fashioned from a twenty-dollar gold piece, and on a finger he wore a cabochon emerald the size of an olive. (Donald Bowie, Cable Harbor, scan cataloged as M. Evans, 1981, p. 37; the watch returns on p. 207; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Rolex (unidentified model): Herbert disapproves of Arthur's spiteful materialism, so the gold Rolex Arthur gave him spends most of its time in a drawer. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Herbert disapproved of Arthur's spiteful materialism, his abiding faith in the transcendence of greed, so he kept the gold Rolex Arthur had given him in a drawer most of the time, and winced when his lover appeared in a getup that made him look like a fey bookie. (Donald Bowie, Cable Harbor, scan cataloged as M. Evans, 1981, p. 37; Internet Archive scan OCR)