The Queen's Gambit (12 page)

It made her sad in a way when she eventually saw how to beat him. It was after the nineteenth move, and she felt herself resisting it as it opened up in her mind, hating to let go of the pleasant ballet they had danced together. But there it was: four moves and he would have to lose a rook or worse. She hesitated and made the first move of the sequence.

He didn’t see what was happening until two moves later, when he frowned suddenly and said, “Jesus Christ, Harmon, I’m going to drop a rook!” She loved his voice; she loved the way he said it. He shook his head in mock bafflement; she loved that.

Some players who had finished their game early had gathered around the board, and a couple were whispering about the maneuver Beth had brought off.

Townes went on playing for five more moves, and Beth felt genuinely sorry for him when he resigned, tipping his king over and saying “Damn!” But he stood up, stretched and smiled down at her. “You’re one hell of a chess player, Harmon,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

He whistled. “Where do you go to school?”

“Fairfield Junior.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know where that is.”

He was even better-looking than a movie star.

An hour later she drew Goldmann and Board Three. She walked into the tournament room at exactly eleven, and the people standing stopped talking when she came in. Everyone looked at her. She heard someone whisper, “Thirteen fucking years old,” and immediately the thought came into her mind, along with the exultant feeling the whispered voice had given her:
I could have done this at eight
.

Goldmann was tough and silent and slow. He was a short, heavy man, and he played the black pieces like a gruff general trained in defense. For the first hour everything that Beth tried he got out of. Every piece he had was protected; it seemed as though there were double the usual complement of pawns to protect them.

Beth got fidgety during the long waits for him to move; once after she had advanced a bishop she got up, and went to the bathroom. Something was hurting in her abdomen, and she felt a bit faint. She washed her face with cold water and dried it on a paper towel. As she was leaving, the girl she’d played her first game with came in. Packer. Packer looked glad to see her. “You’re moving right on up, aren’t you?” she said.

“So far,” Beth said, feeling another twinge in her belly.

“I heard you’re playing Goldmann.”

“Yes,” Beth said. “I have to get back.”

“Sure,” Packer said, “sure. Beat his ass, will you? Just beat his ass.”

Suddenly Beth grinned. “Okay,” she said.

When she got back she saw that Goldmann had moved, and her clock was ticking. He sat there in his dark suit looking bored. She felt refreshed and ready. She seated herself and put everything out of her mind except the sixty-four squares in front of her. After a minute she saw that if she attacked on both flanks simultaneously, as Morphy did sometimes, Goldmann would have difficulty playing it safe. She played pawn to queen rook four.

It worked. After five moves she had opened his king up a little, and after three more she was at his throat. She paid no attention to Goldmann himself or to the crowd or to the feeling in her lower abdomen or the sweat that had broken out on her brow. She played against the board only, with lines of force etched for her into its surface: the small stubborn fields for the pawns, the enormous one for the queen, the gradations in between. Just before his clock was about to run out she checkmated him.

When she circled her name on the score sheet she looked again at the number of Goldmann’s rating. It was 1997. People were applauding.

She went directly to the girls’ room and discovered that she had begun to menstruate. For a moment she felt, looking at the redness in the water below her, as though something catastrophic had happened. Had she bled on the chair at Board Three? Were the people there staring at the stains of her blood? But she saw with relief that her cotton panties were barely spotted. She thought abruptly of Jolene. If it hadn’t been for Jolene, she would have had no idea what was happening. No one else had said a word about this—certainly not Mrs. Wheatley. She felt a sudden warmth for Jolene, remembering that Jolene had also told her what to do “in an emergency.” Beth began pulling a long sheet from the roll of toilet paper and folding it into a tightly packed rectangle. The pain in her abdomen had eased. She was menstruating, and she had just beaten Goldmann: 1997. She put the folded paper into her panties, pulled them up tight, straightened her skirt and walked confidently back into the playing area.

***

Beth had seen Sizemore before; he was a small, ugly, thin-faced man who smoked cigarettes continuously. Someone had told her he was State Champion before Beltik. Beth would play him on Board Two in the room with the sign reading “Top Boards.”

Sizemore wasn’t there yet, but next to her, at Board One, Beltik was facing in her direction. Beth looked at him and then looked away. It was a few minutes before three. The lights in this smaller room—bare bulbs under a metal protection basket—seemed brighter than those in the big room, brighter than they had been in the morning, and for a moment the shine on the varnished floor with its painted red lines was blinding.

Sizemore came in, combing his hair in a nervous, quick way. A cigarette hung from his thin lips. As he pulled his chair back, Beth felt herself becoming very tight.

“Ready?” Sizemore asked gruffly, slipping the comb into his shirt pocket.

“Yes,” she said and punched his clock.

He played pawn to king four and then pulled out his comb and started biting on it the way a person bites on the eraser end of a pencil. Beth played pawn to queen bishop four.

By the middle game Sizemore had begun combing his hair after each move. He hardly ever looked at Beth but concentrated on the board, wriggling in his seat sometimes as he combed and parted and reparted his hair. The game was even, and there were no weaknesses on either side. There was nothing to do but find the best squares for her knights and bishops and wait. She would move, write the move down on her score sheet and sit back in her chair. After a while a crowd began to gather at the ropes. She glanced at them from time to time. There were more people watching her play than watching Beltik. She kept looking at the board, waiting for something to open up. Once when she looked up she saw Annette Packer standing at the back. Packer smiled and Beth nodded to her.

Back at the board, Sizemore brought a knight to queen five, posting it in the best place for a knight. Beth frowned; she couldn’t dislodge it. The pieces were thick in the middle of the board and for a moment she lost the sense of them. There were occasional twinges in her abdomen. She could feel the thick batch of paper between her thighs. She adjusted herself in her chair and squinted at the board. This wasn’t good. Sizemore was creeping up on her. She looked at his face. He had put away his comb and was looking at the pieces in front of him with satisfaction. Beth leaned over the table, digging her fists into her cheeks, and tried to penetrate the position. Some people in the crowd were whispering. With an effort she drove distractions from her mind. It was time to fight back. If she moved the knight on the left… No. If she opened the long diagonal for her white bishop…
That was it
. She pushed the pawn up, and the bishop’s power was tripled. The picture started to become clearer. She leaned back in her seat and took a deep breath.

During the next five moves Sizemore kept bringing pieces up, but Beth, seeing the limits to what he could do to her, kept her attention focused on the far left-hand corner of the board, on Sizemore’s queenside; when the time came she brought her bishop down in the middle of his clustered pieces there, setting it on his knight two square. From where it sat now, two of his pieces could capture it, but if either did, he would be in trouble.

She looked at him. He had taken out his comb again and was running it through his hair. His clock was ticking.

It took him fifteen minutes to make the move, and when he did it was a shock. He took the bishop with his rook. Didn’t he know he was a fool to move the rook off the back rank? Couldn’t he see that? She looked back at the board, double-checked the position and brought out her queen.

He didn’t see it until the move after next, and his game fell apart. He still had his comb in his hand six moves later when she got her queen’s pawn, passed, to the sixth rank. He brought his rook under the pawn. She attacked it with her bishop. Sizemore stood up, put his comb in his pocket, reached down to the board and set his king on its side. “You win,” he said grimly. The applause was thunderous.

After she had turned in the score sheet she waited while the young man checked it, made a mark on a list in front of him, stood up and walked to the bulletin board. He took the pushpins from the card saying
SIZEMORE
and threw the card into a green metal wastebasket. Then he pulled the pins out of the bottom card and raised it to where Sizemore’s had been. The U
NDEFEATED
list now read:
BELTIK, HARMON
.

When she was walking toward the girls’ room Beltik came out of “Top Boards” striding fast and looking very pleased with himself. He was carrying the little score sheet, on his way to the winners’ basket. He didn’t seem to see Beth.

She went over to the doorway of the “Top Boards” room, and Townes was standing there. There were lines of fatigue in his face; he looked like Rock Hudson, except for the weariness. “Good work, Harmon,” he said.

“I’m sorry you lost,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s back to the drawing board.” And then, nodding to where Beltik was standing at the front table with a small crowd gathered near him, he said, “He’s a killer, Harmon. A genuine killer.”

She looked at his face. “You need a rest.”

He smiled down at her. “What I need, Harmon, is some of your talent.”

As she passed the front table, Beltik took a step toward her and said, “Tomorrow.”

***

When Beth came into the living room just before supper, Mrs. Wheatley looked pale and strange. She was sitting in the chintz armchair and her face was puffy. She was holding a brightly colored postcard in her lap.

“I’ve started menstruating,” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “That’s nice,” she said, as though from a great distance.

“I’ll need some pads or something,” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley seemed nonplused for a moment. Then she brightened. “That’s certainly a milepost for you. Why don’t you just go up to my room and look in the top drawer of my chiffonier? Take all you require.”

“Thank you,” Beth said, heading for the stairs.

“And, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “bring down that little bottle of green pills by my bedside.”

When Beth came back she gave the pills to Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley had half a glass of beer sitting beside her; she took out two of the pills and swallowed them with the beer. “My tranquility needs to be refurbished,” she said.

“Is something wrong?” Beth asked.

“I’m not Aristotle,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “but it could be construed as wrong. I have received a message from Mr. Wheatley.”

“What did he say?”

“Mr. Wheatley has been indefinitely detained in the Southwest. The American Southwest.”

“Oh,” Beth said.

“Between Denver and Butte.”

Beth sat down on the sofa.

“Aristotle was a moral philosopher,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “while I am a housewife. Or was a housewife.”

“Can’t they send me back if you don’t have a husband?”

“You put it concretely.” Mrs. Wheatley sipped her beer. “They won’t if we lie about it.”

“That’s easy enough,” Beth said.

“You’re a good soul, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, finishing her beer. “Why don’t you heat the two chicken dinners in the freezer? Set the oven at four hundred.”

Beth had been holding two sanitary napkins in her right hand. “I don’t know how to put these on.”

Mrs. Wheatley straightened herself up from her slumped position in the chair. “I am no longer a wife,” she said, “except by legal fiction. I believe I can learn to be a mother. I’ll show you how if you promise me never to go near Denver.”

***

During the night Beth woke to hear rain on the roof over her head and intermittent rattling against the panes of her dormer windows. She had been dreaming of water, of herself swimming easily in a quiet ocean of still water. She put a pillow over her head and curled up on her side, trying to get back to sleep. But she could not. The rain was loud, and as it continued to fall, the sad languor of her dream was replaced by the image of a chessboard filled with pieces demanding her attention, demanding the clarity of her intelligence.

It was two in the morning and she did not get back to sleep for the rest of the night. It was still raining when she went downstairs at seven; the backyard outside the kitchen window looked like a swamp with hillocks of near-dead grass sticking up like islands. She was not certain how to fry eggs but decided she could boil some. She got two from the refrigerator, filled a pan with water and put it on the burner. She would play pawn to king four against him, and hope for the Sicilian. She boiled the eggs five minutes and put them in cold water. She could see Beltik’s face, youthful, arrogant and smart. His eyes were small and black. When he stepped toward her yesterday as she was leaving, some part of her had thought he would hit her.

The eggs were perfect; she opened them with a knife, put them in a cup and ate them with salt and butter. Her eyes were grainy under the lids. The final game would begin at eleven; it was seven-twenty now. She wished she had a copy of
Modern Chess Openings
, to look over variations on the Sicilian. Some of the other players at the tournament had carried battered copies of the book under their arms.

It was only drizzling when she left the house at ten, and Mrs. Wheatley was still upstairs asleep. Before she left, Beth went into the bathroom and checked the sanitary belt Mrs. Wheatley had given her to wear, and the thick white pad. It was all right. She put on her galoshes and her blue coat, got Mrs. Wheatley’s umbrella from the closet and left.