Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

“New Circle Road. I won’t be coming by so much.”

“It’s not that far.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll be taking classes. I ought to get a part-time job.”

“You could move in here,” she said. “Free.”

He looked at her for a moment and smiled. His teeth weren’t really so bad. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

She had not been so immersed in chess since she was a little girl. Beltik was in class three afternoons a week and two mornings, and she spent that time studying his books. She played mentally through game after game, learning new variations, seeing stylistic differences in offense and defense, biting her lip sometimes in excitement over a dazzling move or a subtlety of position, and at other times wearied by a sense of the hopeless depth of chess, of its endlessness, move after move, threat after threat, complication after complication. She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant’s hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.

Sex, with its reputation for complexity, was refreshingly simple. At least for Beth and Harry. They were in bed together on his second night in the house. It took ten minutes and was punctuated by a few sharp intakes of breath. She had no orgasm, and his was restrained. Afterward he went to his bed in her old room and she slept easily, falling asleep to images not of love but of wooden counters on a wooden board. The next morning she played him at breakfast and the combinations arose from her fingertips and spread themselves on the board as prettily as flowers. She beat him four quick games, letting him play the white pieces each time and hardly looking at the board.

While he was washing the dishes he talked about Philidor, one of his heroes. Philidor was a French musician who had played blindfolded in Paris and London.

“I read about those old players sometimes, and it all seems strange,” she said. “I can’t believe it was really chess.”

“Don’t knock it,” Beltik said. “Bent Larsen plays Philidor’s Defense.”

“It’s too cramped. The king’s bishop gets locked in.”

“It’s solid,” he said. “What I wanted to tell you about Philidor was that Diderot wrote him a letter. You know Diderot?”

“The French Revolution?”

“Yeah. Philidor was doing blindfold exhibitions and burning out his brain, or whatever it was they thought you did in the eighteenth century. Diderot wrote him: ‘It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.’ I think of that sometimes when I’m analyzing my ass off over a chessboard.” He looked at her quietly for a moment. “Last night was nice,” he said.

She sensed that for him it was a concession to talk about it, and her feelings were mixed. “Doesn’t Koltanowski play blindfolded all the time?” she said. “He’s not crazy.”

“I know. It was Morphy who went crazy. And Steinitz. Morphy thought people were trying to steal his shoes.”

“Maybe he thought shoes were bishops.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s play chess.”

By the end of the third week she had gone through his four Shakhmatni bulletins and most of the other game books. One day after he had been in an engineering class all morning they were studying a position together. She was trying to show him why a particular knight move was stronger than it looked.

“Look here,” she said and began moving the pieces around fast. “Knight takes and then this pawn comes up. If he doesn’t bring it up, the bishop is locked in. When he does, the other pawn falls. Zip. ” She took the pawn off.

“What about the other bishop? Over here?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “It’ll have the check once the pawn is moved and the knight’s traded. Can’t you see that?”

Suddenly he froze and glared at her. “No, I can’t” he said. “I can’t find it that fast.”

She looked back at him. “I wish you could,” she said levelly.

“You’re too sharp for me.”

She could see the hurt underneath his anger, and she softened. “I miss them too, sometimes,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

On Saturday she started playing him with odds of a knight. He tried to act casual about it, but she could see that he hated it. There was no other way for them to have a real game. Even with the odds and with his playing the white pieces she beat him the first two and drew the third.

That night he did not come to her bed, nor did he the next. She did not miss the sex, which meant very little to her, but she missed something. On the second night she had some difficulty going to sleep and found herself getting up at two in the morning. She went to the refrigerator and got out one of Mrs. Wheatley’s cans of beer. Then she sat down at the chessboard and began idly moving the pieces around, sipping from the can. She played over some Queen’s Gambit games: Alekhine—Yates; Tarrasch—von Scheve; Lasker—Tarrasch. The first of these was one she had memorized years before at Morris’s Book Store; the other two she had analyzed with Beltik during their first week together. In the last there was a beautiful pawn to Queen’s rook four on the fifteenth move, as sweetly deadly as a pawn move could be. She left it on the board for the time it took to drink two beers, just looking at it. It was a warm night and the kitchen window was open; moths battered at the screen and somewhere far away a dog was barking. She sat at the table wearing Mrs. Wheatley’s pink chenille robe and drinking Mrs. Wheatley’s beer, feeling relaxed and easy in herself. She was glad to be alone. There were three more beers in the refrigerator, and she finished all of them. Then she went back up to bed and slept soundly until nine in the morning.

On Monday at breakfast he said, “Look, I’ve taught you everything I know.”

She started to say something but kept silent.

“I’ve got to start studying. I’m supposed to be an electrical engineer, not a chess bum.”

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve taught me a lot.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. She finished her eggs and took her plate to the sink. “I’m moving to that apartment,” Beltik said. “It’s closer to the university.”

“Okay,” Beth said, not turning from the sink.

He was gone by noon. She took a TV dinner from the freezer for her lunch but didn’t turn on the oven. She was alone in the house, her stomach was in a knot, and she did not know any place to go. There were no movies she wanted to see or people she wanted to call; there was nothing she wanted to read. She walked up the stairs and through the two bedrooms. Mrs. Wheatley’s dresses still hung in the closets and a half bottle of her tranquilizers was still on the nightstand by the unmade bed. The tension she felt would not go away. Mrs. Wheatley was gone, her body buried in a cemetery at the edge of town, and Harry Beltik had driven off with his chessboard and books, not even waving goodbye as he left. For a moment she had wanted to shout at him to stay with her, but she said nothing as he went down the steps and into his car. She took the bottle from the nightstand and shook three of the green pills into her hand, and then a fourth. She hated being alone. She swallowed the four pills without water, the way she had as a child.