Ryle's with Marathe: "novocaine of the soul," the Gertraude story rejected, the veiled Entertainment offer

pivotal · 14 Nov YDAU, evening

• When: 14 Nov YDAU, evening, Ryle's Inman Square Jazz Club (she staggers in from the mugging to vomit)
• What: Mugged, moneyless, and (before the mugging) "walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself," Kate ducks into Ryle's to throw up and is joined by the wheelchair-bound Marathe ("Rémy"), also drinking hard and telephoning "to betray" his friends. She drinks Kahlua and milk (an in-joke off the AA "insanity of the first drink" story), her first real alcohol, and finds it "novocaine of the soul" — decent for the first time in nine weeks. She Identifies "every step of the way" as Marathe tells his life transposed to a fictional "Switzerland" (the lost legs, the moribund depression, the hilltop rescue of the skull-less woman, the marriage, the coma he is betraying his cell to treat), diagnosing him — "You're depressed is what you are" — and rejecting his doctrine of chosen love as "low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades." The scene ends with Marathe seeming to make her the veiled offer of the Entertainment — a pleasure "three streets from here" after which she "would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing" — pressing her, unanswered on the page, toward yes.