Watch Repair and Other Sources of Inspiration

Esther Cohen teaches Good Stories at Manhattanville College. She’s the author of 5 books, including Book Doctor, Don’t Mind Me And Other Jewish Lies, and God is a Tree. In previous columns, Esther has written about what makes a writer and how to get the words out.


The story of our life is not our life. It is our story. --JOHN BARTH

Great to read about you on WEbook. I’m interested to know as much as I can about all of you, your stories, and your writing. Here’s mine:

I was late (I am rarely late. I don’t like to keep anyone waiting. But sometimes it’s inevitable. Subways, buses who knows what). It happened one day when I was to meet two women I’m doing some freelance writing for. I earn my living in many ways. Some of them involve words – not words that evoke necessarily (although evocation is something I’m always trying to do). Sometimes I just write Words for Hire. I was late, walking quickly, but not all that quickly, because I was wearing high heels for my appointment.

 
I was thinking about what I was handing in. Was it good enough? Would I have to rewrite it? How would the women – my clients – respond? They are young and unpredictable.
 
I was walking down Broadway, from my apartment in the 70’s, to 65th Street, where we’d planned our meeting. The women lived out of town. I was behind two friends, a woman and man, in their late twenties or early thirties. They were both very thin – a little too thin, actually. Too thin makes me nervous. I have never been too thin. And never will be, either. I’m just not a thin type.
 
The woman said to her friend (they were both dressed in black. Not just any black, but black trendy – tight and new and asymmetrical in a way I knew meant Now). “I can’t believe he’s another married man with a wife named Sandra. There must be hundreds. Maybe even thousands. Who knows. Maybe there are a million married men with Sandra wives.”
 
When she said that, I immediately started thinking of a story to write. One woman, her lovers, and all their Sandra wives.
 
Someone else said to me, years ago at a party – I was in the Village, and the host was a man I did not know well, a playwright type, although he could have been an actor or a scenery painter. He had that theater-y personality. Why do so many of us look like what we do? I’ve wondered that for years.  An attractive woman, my age more or less, introduced herself to me. She had the ease of someone who introduced herself often and well to all those around her. I imagined her walking through the bus, shaking hands with strangers. Her first sentence was a memorable one: I’ve been with seven Sams. I saved this sentence in my forever folder, thinking: What a title. What a Story. What an art exhibit: Pictures of All My Sams.
 
Maybe Sams and Sandras is the title I’ll use, one day.
 
Later in the week, I went to 47th Street to have the crystal on my husband’s watch replaced. I’d borrowed his vintage watch one day, in order to look more official (why the vintage watch looks more official than my Swatch I’m not sure. But it does.) The crystal broke the day I wore it. I’m not sure how. It just did.
 
My friend Marion used to sell jewelry on 47th street. She told me that the watch makers there are masters, although she didn’t have a specific recommendation. I looked online to find out where to go, and wrote out a list of half a dozen. (Imagine a block anywhere in the world with half a dozen watch repairmen. They were all men. It seems to be a man’s job, even now.)
 
The block itself is from another time, another place. It’s all jewelry – diamonds, watches, earrings, rings. Immigrant men from all around the world are standing in the street, entreating every single passerby to sell their gold, or buy it. It’s like being in a foreign country somewhere – Hong Kong or Marrekesh, maybe – and not New York City in 2009. I visited many watchmakers, just to see them. They were born all over the world. In the end, I settled on Rafael, from Tajikistan. He made his own tools – beautiful wooden knobs of all shapes and sizes, with long metal points of every possible width and length. There’s not a watch that exists, he said, that he couldn’t fix. It so happens that I had a drawer full of broken watches. Don’t ask me why. I buy them at flea markets for their beautiful faces, intending one day to find someone like Rafael. Now all the watches in my drawer work. And Rafael’s story (famous rabbi father, seven brothers, his curved path to learning about watches, and life) reminded me of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. One of my favorite authors. Now maybe I’m the one who’ll write Rafael’s story…
 
Tell me about your week. I wait to hear.

Here's a second poem for inspiration:

You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand—
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water...

--FROM "GROUND SWELL" BY MARK JARMAN

Yours,

Esther

Comments

[Andrew Barthelmess]

I once hung out with a woman who -- in that period of her life -- would only sleep with men named "Doug" "I dig Dougs," she might have said. It was depressing for me because I would have liked to have slept with her, but I couldn't even pretend, because her predilection -- and my name -- was well known. There were a lot of men named "Doug" who appeared on the scene. For a long time I knew more "Dougs" than any other name. Now I know way too many "Dans."

I have been reading Nicholas Baker's latest novel. His central character is a poet full of opinions and poetic ponderings. He suggests that a good way to approach a poem -- "I want to write a poem but what shall be its reference?" -- is to think, at what point, today, have I been most happy?

[SPMount]

Thanks for coming back Esther and inviting our stories. Here is my week and what was inspired from it.

My friendship with Vanessa has endured time and distance. It is the kind of relationship that people are envious of - one that no matter how long it has been, we can pick up where we left off - albeit as slightly different entities, but nonetheless - as if time has stood still; making it seem that only we alone have aged and nothing else. That is until this year; 2009.

With my newfound policy (established five years ago when I returned to Canada after a year off for good behaviour, living in an 11th century village in Italy, and a country where Vanessa only coincidentally now lives) of not allowing fair-weather, old habit or self-centered people into my life in any capacity whatsoever anymore (such as those that were in it before I left for Italy) sticking to my guns that it is high time I stopped living their lives for them in order to concentrate on my own, I have gained a spanking new respect for myself. I concentrated on a long lost love - my writing career (that is, when the business I have since built up, allows). I have written much since, in many genres, and Vanessa is included many times in one of my real life short story books about warped, but true, travel tales. We’ve been all over the world together.

Inseparable, joined at the hip, the kind of people that can communicate without words, and in her case, the kind of friend that knows the sorts of things I enjoy better than even I do, we both knew that nothing could ever separate us. Nothing could interfere with that soul-mate connection we discovered from day one when we met when we were working in Corfu, Greece over twenty years ago. Having been all over the world together and surviving the oft predictable consequences of two people spending so much time together on planes and in hotel rooms (and which in fact only drew the two of us closer; strengthening an already strong and unique bond) things started to wane after a while of being separated for so long. It looked like it might be happening finally; the slight lack of interest; out of sight out of mind thing. Still young, but I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the enthusiasm of our youthful youth was becoming less enamouring. Or so it has seemed to me this year.

Her emails were less informative. Even the ‘forwards’ started to slack off. I have always written to her in great detail. Always asked a great deal of questions, trying to maintain our ability at being able to beat anyone at a game of Taboo at which we could give each other the most obscure clues to any given word the card demanded and actually get the answer (amidst fed up looks from other less connected friends at our ability for telepathy).

Bearing in mind that I don’t do one sided friendships anymore, my own attempts at trying to keep her and I fully informed with every aspect of our daily lives in separate countries (and a policy which I thought would never be applied to her) I often decided to take out the photograph of us from the gorgeous wooden frame that she gave to me one year at Christmas when I spent it in Italy prior to me living there. This has been my way of trying to accept that people move on. No malice, no bitterness, just simply time to live separate lives. But every time, before I could do so, an email came from her apologizing for the delay in writing. It contained all the important news and the same old enthusiasm for our special, if not unlikely, connection. The photo remained untouched.

In these last few years, we have met only once due to well intended plans that were changed on both sides. That was in the Mexican Riviera. We picked up as usual where we left off, but in a more mature way this time than ever before. Her passion for other culture seemed less exuberant than it always was, but then she spends her time travelling the world through her work, as I once did, and we had both already explored the Mexican culture together in the year 2000. She had just returned from Bali where there had been no sunshine - only beauty and exotic interesting architecture, and so Playa del Carmen didn’t really ever stand a chance. She just wanted to lie on the beach. Fair enough. It was unspoken, but obvious that we had been evolving nicely alongside each other even through time and across oceans, as we no longer looked for the hot spots to go party and went to bed early in the evenings instead of the mornings in order to enjoy the following day with no hangover, and meaning that we actually made it for breakfast - something we didn’t know how to do in our silly youth. But still we could get ridiculous; playing silly card games, the loser being at the winners will for the rest of the day and crowned with the title; ‘Bonehead.’

It has been since our birthdays this year that we have had any contact. We are only days apart, both Gemini’s, but different kinds, she being outgoing, me being introvert. But those were at the end of May and beginning of June. It is now November. At the beginning of this week late in the evening, I finally managed to remove the picture from the frame to expose a beautiful exotic butterfly behind it (a picture of one and not an unfortunate creature that got pressed there). The next morning I awoke to a very exuberant email inviting me to join her and her fiancée Gianluca (whom I approved for her seven years ago after a long line of bad decisions on her own part) to meet them in Las Vegas at the end of the month, after they have a stop in New York, and where she can’t wait to tell me ‘facia to facia’ all her exciting news (I guess her Italian is finally coming along).

Bear in mind that she has been all over the States - her and I both - and the fact that she travels to exotic countries constantly (and two more immediately after Vegas) when reading her email below. (The best part about this for me is the girlish excitement at the end of her email (which she would be mortified if she knew I had publicly displayed it.) Now here … is the travel partner and friend I have always known and loved. Despite the fact December is the busiest time of the year for my business, and Vegas is only a short hop for me and a place I have been to before, I don’t care; I’m going; it’s booked. I love acting on impulse and after this week of rain, and monotony and thinking my old bestest friend didn’t care about our relationship anymore. I have come into this wintry weekend full of the joys of spring.

In the first sentence she is referring to the satisfaction we get when we hit that confirm button on a holiday booking.

Email from Vanessa

‘Oh yes I do! It’s my next best feeling to the approach on the plane to a brand new place I have never been!

That's wicked that we will be going back to the airport together, what time do you arrive on the 30th? Will we meet you directly at the hotel?

Knobs (Gianluca) is booking the show today (I haven’t told him that you really didn't book in the name Stephan MOUNTAINOUS GOAT and can't wait for that conversation!) I am mean. So here is what I am thinking - lemme know what you think.

Monday 30th Nov - arrive evening
Mooch around the hotel.
Dinner in Diego or Wolfgang Puck (check them out on the website and let me know if OK). Drinks and casino!

Tuesday 1st Dec
Day exploring
KA Cirque du Soleil at 7pm
Dinner at Mandalay Bag (check China Grill/Shanghai Lilly or Red Square - Russian sounds fab but not sure you would like?)
Drinks in Minus 5 Ice Bar

Wednesday 2nd
Helicopter through the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam
Limo up the strip to the Palms
Dinner at Little Buddha
Drinks in Playboy

Thursday 3rd
Spa morning & strip exploring
Dinner at (Le Cirque or Circo - let me know what you like) at the Bellagio
Drinks in Studio 54

Friday 4th
Hangover

Have a look at the restaurants and let me know, I think its best to book of an evening - its easy for us to go where we want in the day but I don't want to drag Knobs around and places being full etc when he has worked all day. I have tried to be diverse and only choose recommended places. Le Cirque is posh but we deserve a swanky meal. I really like the sound of the Russian would be most fun doing vodka shots but not sure if you would like the menu?

Let me know

TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT - PS I am so excited I keep shaking! Foolish I know :-)

Vanessa XXXXXXX*

Oh … I forgot to mention she doesn’t come cheap … we never did do cheap … but our friendship is worth it.

The photo will remain out of the frame and I will look at the Papillion in there for a while before something else goes in - perhaps one of the three of us in Vegas. In the meantime, I will see my best friend in person at the end of the month.

[Jerriann Law]

congratulations...i hope this goes more wonderfully than you both expect and Knobs too...curious as to why he is called knobs.
cheers, wayahowl

[Nick Matyas]

So, nice your posting. It look's so good in your posting.

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