The Queen's Gambit (17 page)

“Yes,” she said, between her teeth. A flash bulb popped. Beth pushed her queen’s pawn to queen four.

She played the Queen’s Gambit against him and by midgame felt with dismay that it had been a mistake. The Queen’s Gambit could lead to complicated positions, and this one was Byzantine. There were half a dozen threats on each side, and the thing that made her nervous, that made her reach out for a piece several times and then stop her hand before touching it and draw back, was that she didn’t trust herself. She did not trust herself to see everything Benny Watts could see. He played with a calm, pleasant precision, picking up his pieces lightly and setting them down noiselessly, sometimes smiling to himself as he did so. Every move he made looked solid as a rock. Beth’s great strength was in fast attack, and she could find no way to attack. By the sixteenth move she was furious with herself for playing the gambit in the first place.

There must have been forty people clustered around the especially large wooden table. There was a brown velvet curtain behind them with the names
HARMON
and
WATTS
pinned to it. The horrible feeling, at the bottom of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s office. For a moment she looked over the crowd around the table, trying to find Mrs. Wheatley, but she was not there. Beth turned back to the board and looked briefly at Benny. He smiled at her serenely, as though he were offering her a drink rather than a head-splitting chess position. Beth set her elbows on the table, leaned her cheeks against her clenched fists and began to concentrate.

After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess. She looked at him again. His eyes were studying the board now. He can’t move until I do. He can only move one piece at a time. She looked back to the board and began to consider the effects of trading, to picture where the pawns would be if the pieces that clogged the center were exchanged. If she took his king knight with her bishop and he retook with the queen pawn… No good. She could advance the knight and force a trade. That was better. She blinked and began to relax, forming and reforming the relationships of pawns in her mind, searching for a way of forcing an advantage. There was nothing in front of her now but the sixty-four squares and the shifting architecture of pawns—a jagged skyline of imaginary pawns, black and white, that flowed and shifted as she tried variation after variation, branch after branch of the game tree that grew from each set of moves. One branch began to look better than the others. She followed it for several half-moves to the possibilities that grew from it, holding in her mind the whole set of imaginary positions until she found one that had what she wanted to find.

She sighed and sat upright. When she pulled her face away from her fists, her cheeks were sore and her shoulders stiff. She looked at her clock. Forty minutes had passed. Watts was yawning. She reached out and made the move, advancing a knight in a way that would force the first trade. It looked innocuous enough. Then she punched the clock.

Watts studied the board for half a minute and started the trade. For a moment she felt panic in her stomach: Could he see what she was planning? That quickly? She tried to shake off the idea and took the offered piece. He took another, just as she had planned. She took. Watts reached out to take again, but hesitated.
Do it!
she commanded silently. But he pulled his hand back. If he saw through what she was planning, there was still time to get out of it. She bit her lip. He was studying the board intently. He would see it. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud. Beth’s heart was beating so strongly that for a moment she feared Watts would hear it and know she was panicked and—

But he didn’t. He took the trade just as she had planned
it
. She looked at his face almost in disbelief. It was too late for him now. He pressed the button that stopped his clock and started hers.

She pushed the pawn up to rook five. Immediately he stiffened in his chair—almost imperceptibly, but Beth saw it. He began studying the position intently. But he must have seen he was going to be stuck with doubled pawns; after two or three minutes he shrugged and made the necessary move, and Beth did her continuation, and then on the next move the pawn was doubled and the nervousness and anger had left her. She was out to win now. She would hammer at his weakness. She loved it. She loved attack.

Benny looked at her impassively for a moment. Then he reached out his hand, picked up his queen, and did something astonishing. He quietly captured her center pawn. Her protected pawn. The pawn that had been holding the queen to her corner for most of the game. He was sacrificing his queen. She could not believe it.

And then she saw what it meant, and her stomach twisted sharply. How had she missed it? With the pawn gone, she was open to a rook-bishop mate because of the bishop on the opened diagonal. She could protect by retreating her knight and moving one of her rooks over, but the protection wouldn’t last, because—she saw now with horror—his innocent-looking knight would block her king’s escape. It was terrible. It was the kind of thing she did to other people. It was the kind of thing Paul Morphy had done. And she had been thinking about doubled pawns.

She didn’t have to take the queen. What would happen if she didn’t? She would lose the pawn he had just taken. His queen would sit there in the center of the board. Worse, it could come over to her king rook file and press down on her castled king. The more she looked, the worse it became. And it had caught her completely off-guard. She put her elbows on the table and stared at the position. She needed a counterthreat, a move that would stop him in his tracks.

There wasn’t any. She spent a half-hour studying the board and found only that Benny’s move was even sounder than she had thought.

Maybe she could trade her way out of it if he attacked too quickly. She found a rook move and made it. If he would just bring the queen over now, there would be a chance to trade.

He didn’t. He developed his other bishop. She brought the rook up to the second rank. Then he swung the queen over, threatening mate in three. She had to respond by retreating her knight into the corner. He kept attacking, and with impotent dismay, she saw a lost game gradually become manifest. When he took her king bishop pawn with his bishop, sacrificing it, it was over, and she knew it was over. There was nothing to do. She wanted to scream, but instead set her king on its side and got up from the table. Her legs and back were stiff and painful. Her stomach was knotted. All she had really needed was a draw, and she hadn’t been able to get even that. Benny had drawn twice already in the tournament. She had gone into the game with a perfect score, and a draw would have given her the title. But she had gone for a win.

“Tough game,” Benny was saying. He was holding out his hand. She forced herself to take it. People were applauding. Not applauding her but Benny Watts.

By evening she could still feel it, but it had lessened. Mrs. Wheatley tried to console her. The prize money would be split. She and Benny would be co-champions, each with a small trophy. “It happens all the time,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have made inquiries, and the Open Championship is often shared.”

“I didn’t see what he was doing,” Beth said, picturing the move where his queen took her pawn. It was like putting your tongue against an aching tooth.

“You can’t finesse everything, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Nobody can.”

Beth looked at her. “You don’t know anything about chess,” she said.

“I know what it feels like to lose.”

“I bet you do,” Beth said, as viciously as she could. “I just bet you do.”

Mrs. Wheatley peered at her meditatively for a moment. “And now you do too,” she said softly.

***

Sometimes on the street that winter in Lexington people would look back over their shoulders at her. She was on the
Morning Show
on WLEX. The interviewer, a woman with heavily lacquered hair and harlequin glasses, asked Beth if she played bridge; Beth said no. Did she like being the U.S. Open Champion at chess? Beth said she was co-champion. Beth sat in a director’s chair with bright lights shining on her face. She was willing to talk about chess, but the woman’s manner, her false appearance of interest, made it difficult. Finally she was asked how she felt about the idea that chess was a waste of time, and she looked at the woman in the other chair and said, “No more than basketball.” But before she could go on about that, the show was over. She had been on for six minutes.

The one-page article Townes had written about her appeared in the Sunday supplement of the
Herald-Leader
with one of the pictures he had taken at the window of his room in Las Vegas. She liked herself in the picture, with her right hand on the white queen and her face looking clear, serious and intelligent. Mrs. Wheatley bought five copies of the paper for her scrapbook.

Beth was in high school now, and there was a chess club, but she did not belong. The boys in it were nonplused to have a Master walking the hallways, and they would stare at her in a kind of embarrassed awe when she passed. Once a boy from twelfth grade stopped her to ask nervously if she would give a simultaneous in Chess Club sometime. She would play about thirty students at once. She remembered that other high school, near Methuen, and the way she was stared at afterward. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t have time.” The boy was unattractive and creepy-looking; it made her feel unattractive and creepy just to be talking with him.

She spent about an hour a night on her homework and made As. But homework meant nothing to her. It was the five or six hours of studying chess that was at the center of her life. She was enrolled as a special student at the university for a class in Russian that met one night a week. It was the only schoolwork that she paid serious attention to.

SEVEN

Beth puffed, inhaled and held the smoke in. There was nothing to it. She handed the joint to the young man on her right, and he said, “Thank you.” He had been talking about Donald Duck with Eileen. They were in Eileen and Barbara’s apartment, a block off Main Street. It was Eileen who had invited Beth to the party, after the night class.

“It’s got to be Mel Blanc,” Eileen was saying now. “They’re all Mel Blanc.” Beth was still holding the smoke in, hoping that it would loosen her up. She had been sitting on the floor with these college students for half an hour and had said nothing.

“Blanc does Sylvester, but he doesn’t do Donald Duck,” the young man said with finality. He turned around to face Beth. “I’m Tim,” he said. “You’re the chess player.”

Beth let the smoke out. “That’s right.”

“You’re the U.S. Women’s Champion.”

“I’m the U.S. Open Co-Champion,” Beth said.

“Sorry. It must be a trip.” He was red-haired and thin. She had seen him sitting in the middle of the classroom and could remember his soft voice when they recited Russian phrases in unison.

“Do you play?” Beth did not like the strain in her voice. She felt out of place. She should either go home or call Mrs. Wheatley.

He shook his head. “Too cerebral. You want a beer?”

She hadn’t had a beer since Las Vegas, a year before. “Okay,” she said. She started to get up from the floor.

“I’ll get it.” He pushed himself up from where they were sitting on the carpet. He came back with two cans and handed her one. She took a long drink. During the first hour the music had been so loud that conversation was impossible, but when the last record ended no one replaced it. The disk on the hi-fi against the far wall was still turning, and she could see the little red lights on the amplifier. She hoped no one would notice and play another record.

Tim eased himself back down next to her with a sigh. “I used to play Monopoly a lot.”

“I’ve never played that.”

“It makes you a slave of capitalism. I still dream about big bucks.”

Beth laughed. The joint had come back her way, and she held it between her fingertips and got what she could from it before passing it to Tim. “Why are you taking Russian,” she said, “if you’re a slave of capitalism?” She took another swallow of beer.

“You’ve got nice boobs,” he said and took a drag. “We need another joint,” he announced to the group at large. He turned back to Beth. “I wanted to read Dostoevsky in the original.”

She finished her beer. Somebody produced another joint and began sending it around. There were a dozen people in the room. They’d had their first exam in the evening class, and Beth had been invited to the party afterward. With the beer and marijuana and talking to Tim, who seemed very easy to talk to, she felt better. When the joint came up again, she took a long drag on it, and then another. Someone put on a record. The music sounded much better, and the loudness didn’t bother her now.

Suddenly she stood up. “I ought to call home,” she said.

“In the bedroom, through the kitchen.”

In the kitchen she opened another beer. She took a long swallow, pushed open the bedroom door and felt for a light switch. She could not find it. A box of wooden matches sat on the stove by the frying pan, and she took it into the bedroom. She still could not find a switch, but on the dresser was a collection of candles in different shapes. She lit one and shook out the match. She stared for a moment at the candle. It was a lavender upright wax penis with a pair of glossy testicles at its base. The wick came from the glans, and most of the glans had already melted away. Something in her was shocked.

The telephone was on a table by the unmade bed. She carried the candle with her, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed.

Mrs. Wheatley was a bit confused at first; she was dazed from either TV or beer. “You go on to bed,” Beth said. “I’ve got a key.”

“Did you say you were partying with college students?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “From the university?”