Ryle's: Marathe tells her whole story to Kate Gompert — "Swiss," drunk, and disputed on the spot

pivotal · 14 Nov YDAU, evening

• When: 14 Nov YDAU, evening (the same day as the Ennet House visit; Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz)
• What: The scene that carries nearly everything the novel knows about Gertraude (events 1-4), and the frame that makes all of it problematic. Marathe, drunk ("When I drink I have many drinks"), tells a mugged and suicidal stranger — Kate Gompert, an Ennet House resident — the whole story: train, depression, rescue, no-skull, hospital, wedding, coma, betrayal-for-her-care. The telling's terms of engagement: he claims to be "shall we say, Swiss," transposing Québec throughout; he opens with "My wife is dying at home in my native province"; and he tells Kate why her, tonight — "You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife." He states his position in the espionage plot outright, cover intact: "It is for her I betray my friends and cell, the cause of my nation" — and builds his whole doctrine of chosen love on her: "It is not choosing Gertraude over the A.F.R., my companions. Over the causes. Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices." And Kate rejects the whole doctrine to his face — this is not love but "low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less," and possibly a line: "Assuming you're even not totally lying to get me into the hay or some fucked-up disturbed sicko shit like that." The scene closes with Marathe's veiled hypothetical of the Entertainment's perfect pleasure, offered to the suicidal woman who resembles his comatose wife. Whether the story is confession, doctrine, seduction, or all three, the text does not adjudicate; this is the last attestation of Gertraude in the novel, and her fate — coma, Jaarvik IX, spike — is wholly unresolved at book's end. [Attribution note: dialogue-only scene; everything about Gertraude in it is Marathe's own account, in cover, to a drunk stranger.]