Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

He clicked off the last shot and began rewinding the film. “One of those should do it,” he said. He set the camera on the nightstand by the bed. “Let’s play chess.”

She looked at him. “I don’t know what your first name is.”

“Everyone calls me Townes,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I call you Harmon. Instead of Elizabeth.”

She began setting up the pieces on the board. “It’s Beth.”

“I’d rather call you Harmon.”

“Let’s play skittles,” she said. “You can play White.”

Skittles was speed chess, and there wasn’t time for much complexity. He got his chess clock from the bureau and set it to give them each five minutes. “I should give you three,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Beth said, not looking at him. She wished he would just come over and touch her—on the arm maybe, or put his hand on her cheek. He seemed terribly sophisticated, and his smile was easy. He couldn’t be thinking about her the way she was thinking about him. But Jolene had said, “They all think about it, honey. That’s just what they think about.” And they were alone in his room, with the king-sized bed. In Las Vegas.

When he set the clock at the side of the board, she saw they both had the same amount of time. She did not want to play this game with him. She wanted to make love with him. She punched the button on her side, and his clock started ticking. He moved pawn to king four and pushed his button. She held her breath for a moment and began to play chess.

When Beth came back to their room Mrs. Wheatley was sitting in bed, smoking a cigarette and looking mournful. “Where’ve you been, honey?” she said. Her voice was quiet and had some of the strain it had when she spoke of Mr. Wheatley.

“Playing chess,” Beth said. “Practicing.”

There was a copy of Chess Review on the television set. Beth got it and opened it to the masthead page. His name wasn’t among the editors, but down below, under “Correspondents,” were three names; the third was D. L. Townes. She still didn’t know his first name.

After a moment Mrs. Wheatley said, “Would you hand me a can of beer? On the dresser.”

Beth stood up. Five cans of Pabst were on one of the brown trays room service used, and a half-eaten bag of potato chips. “Why don’t you have one yourself?” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Beth picked up two cans; they felt metallic and cold. “Okay.” She handed them to Mrs. Wheatley and got herself a clean glass from the bathroom.

When Beth gave her the glass, Mrs. Wheatley said, “I guess you’ve never had a beer before.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Well…” Mrs. Wheatley frowned. She lifted the tab with a little pop and poured expertly into Beth’s glass until the white collar stood above the rim. “Here,” she said, as though offering medicine.

Beth sipped the beer. She had never had it before but it tasted much as she had expected, as though she had always known what beer would taste like. She tried not to make a face and finished almost half the glass. Mrs. Wheatley reached out from the bed and poured the rest of it in. Beth drank another mouthful. It stung her throat slightly, but then she felt a sensation of warmth in her stomach. Her face was flushed—as though she were blushing. She finished off the glassful. “Goodness,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “you shouldn’t drink so fast.”

“I’d like another,” Beth said. She was thinking of Townes, how he had looked after they finished playing and she stood up to leave. He had smiled and taken her hand. Just holding his hand for that short time made her cheeks feel the way the beer had. She had won seven fast games from him. She held her glass tightly and for a moment wanted to throw it on the floor as hard as she could and watch it shatter. Instead she walked over, picked up another can of beer, put her finger in the ring and opened it.

“You really shouldn’t…” Mrs. Wheatley said. Beth filled her glass. “Well,” Mrs. Wheatley said, resigned, “if you’re going to do that, let me have one too. I just don’t want you to be sick…”

Beth banged her shoulder against the door frame going into the bathroom and barely got to the toilet in time. It stung her nose horribly as she threw up. After she finished, she stood by the toilet for a while and began to cry. Yet, even while she was crying, she knew that she had made a discovery with the three cans of beer, a discovery as important as the one she had made when she was eight years old and saved up her green pills and then took them all at one time. With the pills there was a long wait before the swooning came into her stomach and loosened the tightness. The beer gave her the same feeling with almost no wait.

“No more beer, honey,” Mrs. Wheatley said when Beth came back into the bedroom. “Not until you’re eighteen.”

The ballroom was set up for seventy chess players, and Beth’s first game was at Board Nine, against a small man from Oklahoma. She beat him as if in a dream, in two dozen moves. That afternoon, at Board Four, she crushed the defenses of a serious young man from New York, playing the King’s Gambit and sacrificing the bishop the way Paul Morphy had done.

Benny Watts was in his twenties, but he looked nearly as young as Beth. He was not much taller, either. Beth saw him from time to time during the tournament. He started at Board One and stayed there; people said he was the best American player since Morphy. Beth stood near him once at the Coke machine, but they did not speak. He was talking to another male player and smiling a lot; they were amiably debating the virtues of the Semi-Slav defense. Beth had made a study of the Semi-Slav a few days before, and she had a good deal to say about it, but she remained silent, got her Coke and walked away. Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.

Watts was wearing a white shirt open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled up. His face was both cheerful and sly. With his flat straw-colored hair he looked as American as Huckleberry Finn, yet there was something untrustworthy about his eyes. He, too, had been a child prodigy and that, besides the fact that he was Champion, made Beth uneasy. She remembered a Watts game book with a draw against Borstmann and a caption reading “Copenhagen: 1948.” That meant Benny had been eight years old—the age Beth was when she was playing Mr. Shaibel in the basement. In the middle of that book was a photograph of him at thirteen, standing solemnly at a long table facing a group of uniformed midshipmen seated at chessboards; he had played against the twenty-three-man team at Annapolis without losing a game.

When she came back with her empty Coke bottle, he was still standing by the machine. He looked at her. “Hey,” he said pleasantly, “you’re Beth Harmon.”

She put the bottle in the case. “Yes.”

“I saw the piece in Life ,” he said. “The game they printed was a pretty one.” It was the game she’d won against Beltik.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I’m Benny Watts.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have castled, though,” he said smiling.

She stared at him. “I needed to get the rook out.”

“You could have lost your king pawn.”

She wasn’t sure what he was talking about. She remembered the game well and had gone over it in her head a few times but found nothing wrong with it. Was it possible he had memorized the moves from Life and found a weakness? Or was he just showing off? Standing there, she pictured the position after the castle; the king pawn looked all right to her.