Ryle's with Kate Gompert: the Gertraude story, the doctrine of chosen love, and the Entertainment hint

pivotal · 14 Nov YDAU, evening

• When: 14 Nov YDAU, evening, Ryle's Inman Square Jazz Club (Marathe uses its telephone; comes for the after-hours quiet)
• What: Drunk (uncharacteristically — "when I drink I have many drinks… this is how it is for my people"), Marathe tells a mugged, suicidal stranger, Kate Gompert (an Ennet House resident) his whole life transposed to a fictional "Switzerland": the train, the father's pacemaker, the moribund depression, the hilltop rescue of the skull-less woman (Gertraude), the choice that was love, the marriage, and the coma he is now betraying his cell to treat. He states outright: "I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill… awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them." Kate rejects his doctrine ("that's not love: that's low self-esteem… choosing a coma over your comrades"). The scene ends with Marathe seeming to make Kate the veiled offer of the Entertainment — that "three streets from here" he could show her a pleasure after which "you would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing." [Cross-ref: the same night is also told from Kate Gompert's side in the archive, which carries her non-return that night and the Protective-Custody warrant that follows.]