1998 black watch

The 1998 black watch is a handmade gift Kress gives Evan, designed less to measure time than to mark his changed relationship to it. Its carefully finished black band and jade compass-like face make it a striking object, but its lack of hands or movement prevents it from functioning as an ordinary watch. The inscription 1998, and Kress’s explanation that Evan is no longer captive to time, give the gift its meaning; when Evan later consults it at a Jan Vermeer painting, its green arms remain still, and he has to ask someone else for the hour.

Design and Presentation

Kress presents the watch in a playful, almost ceremonial manner. After Samas voices tentative support and Chance challenges her to show what she has made, she stands, bows to Chance in jest, and approaches Evan. She nearly stumbles twice before announcing the gift as a unique design made by her own hands. The moment places its craftsmanship and personal origin at the center: the watch is not introduced as a practical device but as something Kress has conceived and made for him.

She removes it from her wrist and hands it to Evan. The band consists of delicately linked, polished black rectangles. Its smooth surface appears to absorb as well as reflect light, giving the material an uncertain depth. The clasp is ingeniously concealed beneath the opaque surface when closed, so the mechanism that holds the band together disappears from view. On the face, the same polished black forms a ground for four green arms of inlaid jade, arranged like a Maltese cross and pointing toward the four directions.

That face resembles a watch but has no hands or movement. Its markers suggest orientation rather than elapsed hours: they point outward toward directions, not around a dial. This distinction is central to the object’s design. It borrows the recognizable form of a timepiece while withholding the mechanism that would make it a conventional instrument for measuring time. Evan initially does not understand the gift, and Kress directs him to turn it over and read the inscription.

Inscription and Meaning

The numbers 1998 are inscribed on the back of the face. Kress connects that date to a broader claim about Evan’s life: time no longer holds him captive, and beauty and pleasure, rather than clock time, are the measures by which life should be valued. Her explanation makes the watch an expression of an idea as well as a crafted object. Its stillness is not a defect to be corrected within the scene; it suits the view of time Kress offers Evan.

The gift also carries a tension between appearance and use. It looks enough like a watch to prompt Evan’s puzzlement, and its elaborate construction invites attention to its material details, yet it cannot perform the everyday task its shape promises. The polished surfaces, hidden clasp, and jade markers make it legible as an object of design, while the absent mechanism refuses ordinary utility. Kress’s account redirects that refusal: for Evan, she says, being free of time’s restraints matters more than keeping time. The inscription anchors that message in a precise set of numerals without making the watch a working chronometer.

The Watch at the Painting

The watch returns in a later scene in which Evan stands before a Jan Vermeer painting. He has come to regard the opulent surroundings depicted in the painting with anticipation rather than obligation, and he focuses on Samas, whose changed form retains a familiar, knowing smile. As a large English woman asks whether the painting is lovely, Evan turns to survey the exits, then looks down at the watch and smiles again. The four green arms have not moved.

Evan asks the woman for the time. She supplies it as a quarter to six and calls to her husband, Jules, that the gallery will soon close. The watch therefore remains visually present but gives Evan no usable hour; the information comes instead from an ordinary exchange with another visitor. He thinks of returning tomorrow and moves away from the painting. In this brief recurrence, the object’s still markers sit alongside the closing-time routine of the gallery, setting Kress’s idea of release from time against the practical schedule that continues to govern the visit.

Narrative Significance

The watch links Kress’s presentation of Evan’s altered outlook to a later moment in which he still checks it. Its design does not change between the scenes: the green arms remain motionless, and the object never becomes a functional clock. What changes is the context around it. At first, Kress explains its stillness as fitting a life no longer held captive by time; later, Evan’s question to the woman shows that ordinary clock time has not disappeared from daily experience. The watch holds those two meanings together without resolving them into a working mechanism.

Its material precision makes that contrast concrete. A hidden clasp, polished black links, and jade markers demonstrate careful making, while the absence of movement separates craft from utility. The inscribed 1998 gives the object a specific mark, but not a changing display of hours. As a gift from Kress, it conveys her understanding of Evan’s freedom; as he carries it into the gallery, it becomes a quiet reminder that freedom from time’s hold and participation in scheduled life can coexist. The watch is therefore both a personal keepsake and a deliberately incomplete timepiece, memorable for the very function it declines to perform.