The Queen's Gambit (26 page)

The games she was playing were serious, workmanlike chess played by the best players in the world, and the amount of mental energy latent in each move was staggering. Yet the results were often monumentally dull and inconclusive. An enormous power of thought might be implicit in a single white pawn move, say, opening up a long-range threat that could become manifest only in half a dozen moves; but Black would foresee the threat and find the move that canceled it out, and the brilliancy would be aborted. It was frustrating and anticlimactic, yet—because Benny forced her to stop and see what was going on—fascinating. They kept it up for six days, leaving the apartment only when necessary and once, on Wednesday night, going to a movie. Benny did not own a TV, or a stereo; his apartment was for eating, sleeping and chess. They played through the Hastings booklet and the Russian one, not missing a game except for the grandmaster draws.

On Tuesday she got her lawyer in Kentucky on the phone and asked him to see if everything was all right at the house. She went to Benny’s branch of Chemical Bank and opened an account with the winner’s check from Ohio. It would take five days for it to clear. She had enough traveler’s checks to pay her share of the expenses until then.

They did remarkably little talking during the first week. Nothing sexual happened. Beth had not forgotten about it, but she was too busy going over chess games. When they finished, sometimes at midnight, she would sit for a while on a pillow on the floor or take a walk to Second or Third Avenue and get an ice cream or a Hershey bar at a deli. She went into none of the bars, and she seldom stayed out long. New York could be grim and dangerous-looking at night, but that wasn’t the reason. She was too tired to do more than go back to the apartment, pump up her mattress and go to sleep.

Sometimes being with Benny was like being with no one at all. For hours at a time he would be completely impersonal. Something in her responded to that, and she became impersonal and cool herself, communicating nothing but chess.

But sometimes it would change. Once when she was studying an especially complex position between two Russians, a position that ended in a draw, she saw something, followed it, and cried out, “Look at this, Benny!” and started moving the pieces around. “He missed one. Black has this with the knight…” and she showed a way for the black player to win. And Benny, smiling broadly, came over to where she was sitting at the board and hugged her around the shoulders.

Most of the time, chess was the only language between them. One afternoon when they had spent three or four hours on endgame analysis she said wearily, “Don’t you get bored sometimes?” and he looked at her blankly. “What else is there?” he said.

***

They were doing rook and pawn endings when there was a knock at the door. Benny got up and opened it, and there were three people. One was a woman. Beth recognized one man from a
Chess Review
piece about him a few months before and the other looked familiar, although she couldn’t place him. The woman was striking. She was about twenty-five, with black hair and a pale complexion, and she was wearing a very short gray skirt and some kind of military shirt with epaulets.

“This is Beth Harmon,” Benny said. “Hilton Wexler, Grandmaster Arthur Levertov, and Jenny Baynes.”

“Our new champ,” Levertov said, giving her a little bow. He was in his thirties and balding.

“Hi,” Beth said. She stood up from the table.

“Congratulations!” Wexler said. “Benny needed a lesson in humility.”

“I’m already tops in humility,” Benny said.

The woman held out her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

It felt strange to Beth to have all these people in Benny’s small living room. It seemed as though she had lived half her life in this apartment with him, studying chess games, and it was outrageous for anyone else to be there. She had been in New York nine days. Not knowing exactly what to do, she sat down at the board again. Wexler came over and stood at the other side. “Do you do problems?”

“No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural.
White to move and mate in two.
It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.

“Let me show you one,” Wexler said. His voice was friendly and easy. “Can I mess this up?”

“Go ahead.”

“Hilton,” Jenny said, coming over to them, “she’s not one of your problem freaks. She’s the U.S. Champion.”

“It’s okay,” Beth said. But she was glad of what Jenny had said.

Wexler put pieces on the board until there was a weird-looking position with both queens in corners and all four rooks on the same file. The kings were nearly centered, which would be unlikely in a real game. When he finished, he folded his arms across his chest. “This is my favorite,” he said. “White wins it in three.”

Beth looked at it, annoyed. It seemed silly to deal with something like this. It could never come up in a game. Advance the pawn, check with the knight, and the king moved to the corner. But then the pawn queened, and it was stalemate. Maybe the pawn knighted, to make the next check. That worked. Then if the king didn’t move there after the first check… She went back to that for a moment and saw what to do. It was like a problem in algebra, and she had always been good at algebra. She looked up at Wexler. “Pawn to queen seven.”

He looked astonished. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s fast.”

Jenny was smiling. “See, Hilton,” she said.

Benny had been watching all this silently. “Let’s do a simultaneous,” he said suddenly to Beth. “Play us all.”

“Not me,” Jenny said. “I don’t even know the rules.”

“Do we have enough boards and pieces?” Beth asked.

“On the shelf in the closet.” Benny went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard box. “We’ll set these up on the floor.”

“Time control?” Levertov said.

Beth suddenly thought of something. “Let’s do speed chess.”

“It gives us an edge,” Benny said. “We can think on your time.”

“I want to try it.”

“No good.” Benny’s tone was severe. “You’re not very good at speed chess anyway. Remember?”

Something in her responded strongly to what he was not saying. “I’ll bet you ten I beat you.”

“What if you throw the other games and use all your time against me?”

She could have kicked him. “I’ll bet you ten on each of them, too.” She was surprised at the firmness in her own voice. She sounded like Mrs. Deardorff.

Benny shrugged. “Okay. It’s your money.”

“Let’s put all three boards on the floor. I’ll sit in the middle.”

They did it, using three clocks. Beth had been very sharp for the past several days, and she played with unhesitating precision, attacking on all the boards at once. She beat the three of them with time to spare.

When it was over, Benny didn’t say anything. He went to the bedroom, got his billfold, took three tens out of it and handed them to Beth.

“Let’s do it again,” Beth said. There was a bitterness in her voice; hearing the words, she knew it could have meant sex:
Let’s do it again
. If this was what Benny wanted, this was what he would get. She began setting up the pieces.

They got into position on the floor, and Beth played the whites on all three again. The boards were fanned out in front of her so that she didn’t have to spin around to play them, but she found herself hardly consulting them, anyway, except to make the moves. She played from chessboards in her head. Even the mechanical business of making the moves and punching the clocks was effortless. Benny’s position was hopeless when his clock flag fell; she had time left over. He gave her another thirty, and when she suggested trying again he said, “No.”

There was tension in the room, and no one knew how to deal with it. Jenny tried to laugh about it, saying, “It’s just male chauvinism,” but it didn’t help. Beth was furious with Benny—furious at him for being easy to beat and furious with the way he was taking it, trying to look unmoved, as though nothing affected him.

Then Benny did something surprising. He had been sitting with his back straight. Suddenly he leaned against the wall, pushing his legs out on the floor, relaxing. “Well, kid,” he said, “I think you’ve got it.” And everybody laughed. Beth looked at Jenny, who was sitting on the floor next to Wexler. Jenny, who was beautiful and intelligent, was looking at her with admiration.

***

Beth and Benny spent the next few days studying
Shakhmatni Byulletens
, going back to the nineteen-fifties. Every now and then they would play a game, and Beth always won it. She could feel herself moving past Benny in a way that was almost physical. It was astounding to them both. In one game she uncovered an attack on his queen on the thirteenth move and had him laying down his king on the sixteenth. “Well,” he said softly, “nobody’s done that to me in fifteen years.”

“Not even Borgov?”

“Not even Borgov.”

Sometimes chess would keep her awake at night for hours. It was like Methuen, except that she was more relaxed and not afraid of sleeplessness. She would lie on her mattress on the living-room floor after midnight with New York street noises coming in through the open bay window and study positions in her mind. They were as clear as they had ever been. She did not take tranquilizers, and that helped the clarity. It was not whole games now but particular situations—positions called “theoretically important” and “warranting close study.” She lay there hearing the shouts of drunks in the street outside and mastered the intricacies of chess positions that were classic in their difficulty. Once during a lovers’ quarrel where the woman kept shouting, “I’m at my fucking wit’s end. At my wit’s fucking
end
!” and the man kept saying, “Like your fucking sister,” Beth lay on her cot and came to see a way of queening a pawn that she had never seen before. It was beautiful. It would work. She could use it. “Up your ass,” the woman shouted, and Beth lay back exulting and then fell pleasantly asleep.

***

They spent their third week repeating the Borgov games and finished the last of them after midnight on Thursday. When Beth had done her analysis of the resignation, pointing out how Borgov could avoid a draw, she looked up to see Benny yawning. It was a hot night and the windows were open.

“Shapkin went wrong in midgame,” Beth said. “He should have protected his queenside.”

Benny looked at her sleepily. “Even I get tired of chess sometimes.”

She stood up from the board. “It’s time for bed.”

“Not so fast,” Benny said. He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Do you still like my hair?”

“I’ve been trying to learn how to beat Vasily Borgov,” Beth said. “Your hair doesn’t enter into it.”

“I’d like you to come to bed with me.”

They had been together three weeks and she had almost forgotten sex. “I’m
tired
,” she said, exasperated.

“So am I. But I’d like you to sleep with me.”

He looked very relaxed and pleasant. Suddenly she felt warm toward him. “All right,” she said.

She was startled to wake up in the morning with someone beside her in bed. Benny had rolled over to his side and all she could see of him was his pale, bare back and some of his hair. She felt self-conscious at first and afraid of waking him; she sat up carefully, leaning her back against the wall. Being in bed with a man was really all right. Making love had been all right too, although not as exciting as she had hoped. Benny hadn’t said much. He was gentle and easy with her, but there was still that distance of his. She remembered a phrase from the first man she had made love with: “Too cerebral.” She turned toward Benny. His skin did look good in the light; it seemed almost luminous. For a moment she felt like putting her arms around him and hugging him with her naked body, but she restrained herself.

Eventually Benny woke, rolled over on his back and blinked at her. She had the sheet up, covering her breasts. After a moment she said, “Good morning.”

He blinked again. “You shouldn’t try the Sicilian against Borgov,” he said. “He’s just too good at it.”

They spent the morning with two Luchenko games; Benny put the emphasis on strategy rather than tactics. He was in a cheerful mood, but Beth felt somehow resentful. She wanted something more in the way of lovemaking, or at least in intimacy, and Benny was lecturing her. “You’re a born tactician,” he said, “but your planning is jerry-built.” She said nothing and dealt with her annoyance as well as she could. What he was saying was true enough, but the pleasure he took in pointing it out was irritating.

At noon he said, “I’ve got to get to a poker game.”

She looked up from the position she had just analyzed. “A poker game?”

“I have to pay the rent.”

That was astonishing. She had not thought of him as a gambler. When she asked about it, he said he made more money from poker and backgammon than from chess. “You ought to learn,” he said, smiling. “You’re good at games.”

“Then take me with you.”

“This one’s all men.”

She frowned. “I’ve heard that said about chess.”

“I bet you have. You can come along and watch if you want to. But you’ll have to keep quiet.”

“How long will it last?”

“All night, maybe.”

She started to ask him how long he had known about this game, but didn’t. Clearly he had known it before last night. She rode the Fifth Avenue bus with him down to Forty-fourth Street and walked with him over to the Algonquin Hotel. Benny seemed to have his mind on something he wasn’t interested in talking about, and they walked in silence. She was beginning to feel angry again; she hadn’t come to New York for this, and she was annoyed at Benny’s way of offering no explanations and no advance notice. His behavior was like his chess game: smooth and easy on the surface but tricky and infuriating beneath. She did not like tagging along, but she did not want to go back to the apartment and study alone.

The game was in a small suite on the sixth floor and it was, as he had said, all male. Four men were seated around a table with coffee cups and chips and cards. An air conditioner whirred noisily. There were two other men who seemed merely to be hanging around. The players looked up when Benny came in and greeted him jokingly. Benny was cool and pleasant. “Beth Harmon,” he said, and the men nodded without recognition. He had gotten out his billfold, and now he slipped a pile of bills from it, set them in front of an empty place at the table and sat down, ignoring Beth. Not knowing what her role in all this was, Beth went into the bedroom, where she had seen a coffee pitcher and cups. She got a cup of coffee and went back into the other room. Benny had a stack of chips in front of him and was holding cards in his hand. The man on his left said, “I’ll bump that,” flatly, and threw a blue chip into the center of the table. The others followed suit, with Benny last.