Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

In the afternoon she bought herself a steak and a large baking potato at Kroger’s. Before pushing her cart to the checkout, she went to the wine-and-beer case and took out a fifth of burgundy. That night she watched television and got drunk. She went to sleep on the couch, only barely able to get to the set to turn it off.

Sometime during the night she awoke to a sense that the room was reeling. She had to vomit. Afterward, when she went upstairs to bed, she found that she was fully awake and very clear in her mind. There was a burning sensation in her stomach, and her eyes were wide open in the dark room as though looking for light. There was a powerful ache at the back of her neck. She reached over, found the bottle and took more tranquilizers. Eventually she went to sleep again.

She awoke the next morning with a crushing headache and a determination to get on with her career. Mrs. Wheatley was dead. Harry Beltik was gone. The U.S. Championship was in three weeks; she had been invited to it before going to Mexico, and if she was going to win it, she was going to have to beat Benny Watts. While her coffee was percolating in the kitchen, she poured out the leftover burgundy from the night before, threw away the empty bottle and found two books she had ordered from Morris’s the day the invitation had come. One was the game record from the last U.S. Championship and the other was called Benny Watts: My Fifty Best Games of Chess . On its dustjacket was a blowup of Benny’s Huckleberry Finn face. Seeing it now, she winced at the memory of losing, at her damnfool attempt to double his pawns. She got herself a cup of coffee and opened the book, forgetting her hangover.

By noon she had analyzed six of the games and was getting hungry. There was a little restaurant two blocks away, the kind of place that has liver and onions on the menu and display cards of cigarette lighters at the cashier’s stand. She brought the book with her and went over two more games while eating her hamburger and home fries. When the lemon custard came and was too thick and sweet to eat, she felt a sudden pang of longing for Mrs. Wheatley and the French desserts they had shared in places like Cincinnati and Houston. She shook it off, ordered a last cup of coffee and finished the game she was going over: the King’s Indian Defense, with the black bishop fianchettoed in the upper right-hand corner of the board, looking down the long diagonal for a chance to pounce. Black worked the king’s side while White worked the queen’s side after the bishop went into the corner. Very civilized. Benny, playing Black, won it handily.

She paid her check and left. For the rest of the day and night until one in the morning she played over all of the games in the book. When she had finished, she knew a great deal more about Benny Watts and about precision chess than she had known before. She took two of her Mexican tranquilizers and went to bed, falling asleep instantly. She awoke pleasantly at nine-thirty the next morning. While her breakfast eggs were boiling, she chose a book for morning study: Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess . It was an old book, in some ways outdated. The diagrams were grayish and cluttered, and it was hard to tell the black pieces from the white. But something in her could still thrill at the name Paul Morphy and at the idea of that strange New Orleans prodigy, well-bred, a lawyer, son of a high court judge, who when young dazzled the world with his chess and then quit playing altogether and lapsed into muttering paranoia and an early death. When Morphy played the King’s Gambit he sacrificed knights and bishops with abandon and then moved in on the black king with dizzying speed. There had never been anything like him before or since. It made her spine tingle just to open the book and see the games list: Morphy—Lowenthal; Morphy—Harrwitz; Morphy—Anderssen, followed by dates in the eighteen-fifties. Morphy would stay up all night in Paris before his games, drinking in cafes and talking with strangers, and then would play the next day like a shark—well-mannered, well-dressed, smiling, moving the big pieces with small, ladylike, blue-veined hands, crushing one European master after another. Someone had called him “the pride and the sorrow of chess.” If only he and Capablanca had lived at the same time and played each other! She began going over a game between Morphy and someone named Paulsen, played in 1857. The U.S. Championship would be in three weeks; it was time it was won by a woman. It was time she won it.

When she came into the room, she saw a thin young man wearing faded blue jeans and a matching denim shirt seated at one of the tables. His blond hair came almost to his shoulders. It was only when he rose and said, “Hello, Beth,” that she saw it was Benny Watts. The hair had been long in the cover photograph of Chess Review a few months before, but not that long. He looked pale and thin and very calm. Still, Benny had always been calm.

“Hello,” she said.

“I read about the game with Borgov.” Benny smiled. “It must have felt terrible.”

She looked at him suspiciously, but his face was open and sympathetic. And she did not hate him anymore for beating her; there was only one player she hated now, and he was in Russia.

“I felt like a fool,” she said.

“I know.” He shook his head. “Helpless. It all goes, and you just push wood.”

She stared at him. Chess players did not talk so easily about humiliations, did not admit weakness. She started to say something, when the tournament director spoke up loudly. “Play will begin in five minutes.” She nodded to Benny, attempted a smile, and found her table.

There wasn’t a face over a chessboard that she didn’t know from hotel ballrooms where tournaments were played or from photographs in Chess Review . She herself had been on the cover six months after Townes took her picture in Las Vegas. Half the other players here on this campus in the small Ohio town had been on the cover themselves at one time or another. The man she was playing now in her first game, a middle-aged master named Phillip Resnais, was on the cover of the current issue. There were fourteen players, many of them grandmasters. She was the only woman.

They played in some kind of lecture room with dark-green blackboards along the wall at one end and fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. There was a row of large institutional windows along one blue wall, with bushes, trees and a wide stretch of the campus visible through them. At one end of the room were five rows of folding chairs, and out in the hallway a sign announced a visitor’s fee of four dollars per session. During her first game there were about twenty-five people watching. A display board hung above each of the seven game tables, and two directors moved silently between the tables, changing the pieces after moves had been made on the real boards. The spectators’ seats were on a wooden platform to give them a view of the playing surfaces.

But it was all second-rate, even the university they were playing at. They were the highest-ranked players in the country, assembled here in a single room, but it had the feel of a high school tournament. If it were golf or tennis, Benny Watts and she would be surrounded by reporters, would be playing under something other than these fluorescent lights and on plastic boards with cheap plastic pieces, watched by a few polite middle-aged people with nothing better to do.

Phillip Resnais seemed to take it all seriously, but she felt like walking out. She did not, however. When he played pawn to king four, she pushed up her queen bishop pawn and started the Sicilian Defense. Now she was in the middle of the Rossolimo-Nimzovitch Attack, getting equality on the eleventh move with pawn to queen three. It was a move she had gone over with Beltik, and it worked the way Beltik said it would work.