The Bluelight Corner (1998)

Rosemarie Robotham's anthology of Black women writing on passion, sex and romantic love, compiled by the Essence editor-at-large and dated 1998 on its copyright page, collects fiction and memoir by writers including Edwidge Danticat, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid and June Jordan. Among its stories is Jennifer Jordan's "The Wife", first printed in Essence in 1990, in which Marta, a schoolteacher twenty-eight years into her marriage to Jonathan, a prominent Washington criminal lawyer, walks into a Capitol Hill café and finds him lunching with another woman. (Open Library)

Watches

Gucci (unidentified model): In "The Wife", Marta sees Jonathan in the American Cafe on Capitol Hill with a young woman, a youthful Diahann Carroll type dressed like a lawyer for success, leaning across the table to hear him. What tells Marta that they are already lovers is the confidential slant of his head and the absentminded way he toys with the band of the woman's Gucci watch. Marta walks up to the table, and Jonathan introduces the woman as Saundra Lawrence, counsel for the city council's zoning committee. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: That she had already slept with the prosperous, smug man who was the center of her gaze was clear in the confidential slant of his head and the absentminded way he toyed with the band of her Gucci watch. His touch had a proprietary air. (Rosemarie Robotham, ed., The Bluelight Corner, scan cataloged as Three Rivers Press, 1999, p. 145, in "The Wife" by Jennifer Jordan, which the contents page lists from p. 135; Saundra Lawrence is introduced by name on p. 146; Internet Archive scan OCR)