He saw Tamara almost every night of the two weeks he was in the city.
She had abandoned her psychiatrist and espoused Art, which was less demanding and cheaper.
“Let’s not learn a single new thing about one another, Tamara.”
“Is that laziness or friendship?”
“It’s love!”
He staged a theatrical swoon.
She lived in a curious little room on Fort Street, a street of dolls’ houses. There was a marble fireplace with carved torches and hearts, above it a narrow mirror surrounded by slender wood pillars and entablatures, a kind of brown Acropolis.
“That mirror’s doing nobody any good up there.”
They pried it out and arranged it beside the couch.
The room had been partitioned flimsily by an economical landlady. Tamara’s third, because of the high ceiling, seemed to be standing on one end. She liked it because it felt so temporary.
Tamara was a painter now, who did only self-portraits. There were canvases everywhere. The sole background for all the portraits was this room she lived in. There was paint under her fingernails.
“Why do you only do yourself?”
“Can you think of anyone more beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, et cetera?”
“You’re getting fat, Tamara.”
“So I can paint my childhood.”
Her hair was the same black, and she hadn’t cut it.
They founded the Compassionate Philistines one night, and limited the membership to two. It was devoted to the adoration of the vulgar. They celebrated the fins of the new Cadillac, defended Hollywood and the Hit Parade, wall-to-wall carpets, Polynesian restaurants, affirmed their allegiance to the Affluent Society.
Wallpaper roses were peeling from the grapevine moulding. The single piece of furniture was a small Salvation Army couch, over-stuffed and severely wounded. She supported herself as an artist’s model and ate only bananas, the theory of the week.
The night before he left she had a surprise for him and all loyal Compassionate Philistines. She removed her bandanna. She had dyed her hair blonde in accordance with the aims of the organization.
Good-bye, old Tamara, Breavman recorded for his biographers, may you flourish, you have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mouth.