Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

By the fourteenth move she had him on the run, and by the twentieth it was decisive. He resigned on the twenty-sixth. She looked around her at the other games, all of them still in progress, and felt better about the whole thing. It would be good to be U.S. Champion. If she could beat Benny Watts.

She had a small private room in a dormitory with the bathroom down the hall. It was austerely furnished, but there was no sense of anyone else’s having lived in it, and she liked that. For the first several days she took her meals alone in the cafeteria and spent the evenings either at the desk in her room or in bed, studying. She had brought a suitcase full of chess books with her. They were lined up neatly at the back of the desk. She had also brought tranquilizers, just in case, but she did not even open the bottle during the first week. Her one game a day went smoothly, and although some of them lasted three or four hours and were grueling, she was never in danger of losing. As time went on, the other players looked at her with more and more respect. She felt serious, professional, sufficient.

Benny Watts was doing as well as she. The games were printed up every night from a Xerox in the college library, and copies were given to the players and spectators. She went over them in the evenings and mornings, playing some out on her board but going through most of them in her head. She always took the trouble to set up the game Benny had played and actually move the pieces, carefully studying the way he had played it. In a round robin each player met each of the others one time; she would meet Benny in the eleventh game.

Since there were thirteen games and the tournament lasted two weeks, there was one day off—the first Sunday. She slept late that morning, stayed a long time in the shower, and then took a long walk around the campus. It was very tranquil, with well-mowed lawns and elm trees and an occasional patch of flowers—a serene Midwestern Sunday morning, but she missed the competition of the match. She momentarily considered walking into the town, where she had heard there were a dozen places to drink beer, but thought better of it. She did not want to erode any more brain cells. She looked at her watch; it was eleven o’clock. She headed for the Student Union Building, where the cafeteria was. She would get some coffee.

There was a pleasant wood-paneled lounge on the main floor. When she came in, Benny Watts was sitting on a beige corduroy sofa at the far end of it with a chessboard and clock on the table in front of him. Two other players were standing nearby, and he was smiling at them, explaining something about the game in front of him.

She had started downstairs for the cafeteria when Benny’s voice called to her. “Come on over.” She hesitated, turned and walked over. She recognized the other two players at once; one of them she had beaten two days before with the Queen’s Gambit.

“Look at this, Beth,” Benny said, pointing to the board. “White’s move. What would you do?”

She looked at it a moment. “The Lopez?”

“That’s right.”

She was a little irritated. She wanted a cup of coffee. The position was delicate, and it took concentration. The other players remained silent. Finally she saw what was needed. She bent over wordlessly, picked up the knight at king three and set it down on queen five.

“ See! ” Benny said to the others, laughing.

“Maybe you’re right,” one of them said.

“I know I’m right. And Beth here thinks the same way I do. The pawn move’s too weak.”

“The pawn works only if he plays his bishop,” Beth said, feeling better.

“Exactly!” Benny said. He was wearing jeans and some kind of loose white blouse. “How about some skittles, Beth?”

“I was on my way for coffee,” she said.

“Barnes’ll get you coffee. Won’t you, Barnes?” A big, soft-looking young man, a grandmaster, nodded assent. “Sugar and cream?”

“Yes.”

Benny was pulling a dollar bill out of his jeans pocket. He handed it to Barnes. “Get me some apple juice. But not in one of those plastic cups. Get a milk glass.”

Benny set the clock by the board. He held out two pawns concealed in his hands, and the hand Beth tapped had the white one. After they set up the pieces Benny said, “Would you like to bet?”

“Bet?”

“We could play for five dollars a game.”

“I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“Here it comes.” Beth saw Barnes hurrying across the room with a glass of juice and a white Styrofoam cup.

“Okay,” she said. “Five dollars.”

“Have some coffee,” Benny said, “and I’ll punch your clock.”

She took it from Barnes, had a long drink and set the half-empty cup on the coffee table. “Go ahead,” she said to Benny. She felt very good. The spring morning outdoors was all right, but this was what she loved.

He beat her with only three minutes on his clock. She played well but he played brilliantly, moving almost immediately each time, seeing through whatever she tried doing to him. She handed him a five-dollar bill from the billfold in her pocket and set up the pieces again, this time taking the black ones for herself. There were four other players standing nearby now, watching them.

She tried the Sicilian against his pawn to king four, but he wiped it away with a pawn gambit and got her into an irregular opening. He was incredibly fast. She had him in trouble at midgame with doubled rooks on an open file, but he ignored them and attacked down the center, letting her check him twice with the rooks, exposing his king. But when she tried to bring a knight into it for mate, he sprang loose and was at her queen and then her king, catching her finally in a mating net. She resigned before he could move in for the kill. She gave him a ten this time and he gave her the five back. She had sixty dollars in her pocket and more money back at the room.

By noon there were forty or more people watching. Most of the players from the tournament were there along with some of the spectators who regularly attended the games, college students and a group of men who might have been professors. She and Benny kept playing, not even talking now between games. Beth won the third one with a beautiful save just before her flag dropped, but she lost the next four and drew the fifth. Some of the positions were brilliantly complex, but there was no time for analysis. It was thrilling but frustrating. She had never in her life been beaten so consistently, and although it was only five-minute chess and not serious, it was an immersion in quiet humiliation. She had never felt like this before. She played beautifully, followed the game with precision and responded accurately to every threat, mounted powerful threats of her own, but it meant nothing. Benny seemed to have some resource beyond her understanding, and he won game after game from her. She felt helpless, and inside her there grew a quiet sense of outrage.

Finally she gave him her last five dollars. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. A row of empty Styrofoam cups sat by the board. When she got up to leave, there was applause and Benny shook her hand. She wanted to hit him but said nothing. There was random applause from the crowd in the room.

As she was leaving, the man she had played the first of the week, Phillip Resnais, stopped her. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “Benny plays speed chess as well as anyone in the world. It doesn’t really mean a lot.”

She nodded curtly and thanked him. When she went outside into the late-afternoon sunlight, she felt like a fool.

That night she stayed in her room and took tranquilizers. Four of them.

She felt rested in the morning, but stupid. Mrs. Wheatley had once described things as looking askew; that was how they looked to Beth when she awoke from her deep, tranquilized sleep. But she no longer felt the humiliation she had felt after being beaten by Benny. She took her pill bottle from the bedstand drawer and squeezed the top on it tight. It would not do to take any more. Not until the tournament was over. She thought suddenly of Thursday, the day she would play Benny, and she tensed. But she put the pills back in the drawer and got dressed. She ate breakfast early and drank three cups of strong coffee with it. Then she took a brisk walk around the main part of the campus, playing through one of the games from Benny Watts’s book. He was brilliant, she told herself, but not unbeatable. Anyway, she wouldn’t play him for three more days.