Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

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.