From Our Tub, To My Wife

HAZARD 35 JAMES HAZARD FROM OUR TUB, TO MY WIFE Fools say and their fools repeat nothing "happened" in the Fifties. Don't believe it. Half-dirty French movies "happened" in the Fifties. You can find them in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature along with mention of a crazy Frenchman who taught this Indiana kid (via Time Magazine) more than Sartre and his whole Scout Troop about Existentialism: he was arrested in Paris invading Martine Carroll's (queen of the halfdirtys ) apartment with the declared intention (Oh, Existentialism) of drinking her bath water. I am looking at your black silk panties folded on themselves as they fell, a Fact after the fact. Amazing: the bathroom floor a photographic plate having caught 36 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW the wonder of their fall. This black and white picture disproving all those assumptions of casualness! It is easy here to see (as it was in the half dirty Fifties) casualness is a fiction at the service of the fiction of the hierarchies: in the Fifties your hierarchies went right out the window when Martine Carroll walked from her chair to the door. That having-been sat-in-by-Martine-Carroll chair was no casual matter, no matter what adventure knocked at her door. "This is the last," you said sitting in it, "of the hot water. Shall I leave it for you?" Here I sit in your delicately half-dirty bath water and your "casually" fallen black panties are a picture of themselves on our bathroom floor, and it is all so matter of Fact I stand naked and operatic in our only tub of hot water wondering which word comes first in my aria—is it Indiana? or Existence precedes Essence? HAZARD 37 Paris? The World Playhouse Foreign Movie Palace? Adults Only? Time Magazine 's Man of The Year? My God, Mon Dieux, Susan you are some where in our only house: Susan I am writing a love poem! Sacre bleu, Susan, you are, can you picture this, a Hoosier boy's movie dream come true! ...