Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

“All of them?”

“He’ll be in Paris when you go.”

She looked at the magazine in her hand and then over at the table by the window again, then at her watch. It was ten after eight. “I’ll have the eggs first,” she said.

They got sandwiches from a deli for lunch and ate them over the board. Supper came from a Chinese take-out on First Avenue. Benny would not let her play quickly through the openings; he stopped her whenever a move was at all obscure and asked her why she did it. He made her analyze everything out of the ordinary. Sometimes he would physically stop her hand from moving a piece to ask questions. “Why not advance the knight?” or “Why isn’t he defending against the rook?” or “What’s going to become of the backward pawn?” It was rigorous and intense, and he did not let up. She had been aware of such questions for years but had never allowed herself to pursue them with this kind of rigor. Often her mind would be racing with the attack possibilities inherent in the positions that developed in front of her, wanting to push Luchenko or Mecking or Czerniak into lightning attacks against Borgov, when Benny stopped her with a question about defense or opening the light or dark squares or contesting a file with a rook. It infuriated her sometimes, yet she could see the rightness of his questions. She had been playing grandmaster games in her head from the time she first discovered Chess Review , but she had not been disciplined about it. She played them to exult in the win—to feel the stab of excitement at a sacrifice or a forced mate, especially in the games that were printed in books precisely because they incorporated drama of that kind—like the game books by Fred Reinfeld that were full of queen sacrifices and melodrama. She knew from her tournament experience that you couldn’t rely on your opponent setting himself up for a queen sacrifice or a surprise mate with knight and rook; still, she treasured the thrill of games like that. It was what she loved in Morphy, not his routine games and certainly not his lost ones—and Morphy like everyone else had lost games. But she had always been bored by ordinary chess even when it was played by grandmasters, bored in the way that she was bored by Reuben Fine’s endgame analyses and the counteranalyses in places like Chess Review that pointed out errors in Reuben Fine. She had never done anything like what Benny was making her do now.

The games she was playing were serious, workmanlike chess played by the best players in the world, and the amount of mental energy latent in each move was staggering. Yet the results were often monumentally dull and inconclusive. An enormous power of thought might be implicit in a single white pawn move, say, opening up a long-range threat that could become manifest only in half a dozen moves; but Black would foresee the threat and find the move that canceled it out, and the brilliancy would be aborted. It was frustrating and anticlimactic, yet—because Benny forced her to stop and see what was going on—fascinating. They kept it up for six days, leaving the apartment only when necessary and once, on Wednesday night, going to a movie. Benny did not own a TV, or a stereo; his apartment was for eating, sleeping and chess. They played through the Hastings booklet and the Russian one, not missing a game except for the grandmaster draws.

On Tuesday she got her lawyer in Kentucky on the phone and asked him to see if everything was all right at the house. She went to Benny’s branch of Chemical Bank and opened an account with the winner’s check from Ohio. It would take five days for it to clear. She had enough traveler’s checks to pay her share of the expenses until then.

They did remarkably little talking during the first week. Nothing sexual happened. Beth had not forgotten about it, but she was too busy going over chess games. When they finished, sometimes at midnight, she would sit for a while on a pillow on the floor or take a walk to Second or Third Avenue and get an ice cream or a Hershey bar at a deli. She went into none of the bars, and she seldom stayed out long. New York could be grim and dangerous-looking at night, but that wasn’t the reason. She was too tired to do more than go back to the apartment, pump up her mattress and go to sleep.

Sometimes being with Benny was like being with no one at all. For hours at a time he would be completely impersonal. Something in her responded to that, and she became impersonal and cool herself, communicating nothing but chess.

But sometimes it would change. Once when she was studying an especially complex position between two Russians, a position that ended in a draw, she saw something, followed it, and cried out, “Look at this, Benny!” and started moving the pieces around. “He missed one. Black has this with the knight…” and she showed a way for the black player to win. And Benny, smiling broadly, came over to where she was sitting at the board and hugged her around the shoulders.

Most of the time, chess was the only language between them. One afternoon when they had spent three or four hours on endgame analysis she said wearily, “Don’t you get bored sometimes?” and he looked at her blankly. “What else is there?” he said.

They were doing rook and pawn endings when there was a knock at the door. Benny got up and opened it, and there were three people. One was a woman. Beth recognized one man from a Chess Review piece about him a few months before and the other looked familiar, although she couldn’t place him. The woman was striking. She was about twenty-five, with black hair and a pale complexion, and she was wearing a very short gray skirt and some kind of military shirt with epaulets.

“This is Beth Harmon,” Benny said. “Hilton Wexler, Grandmaster Arthur Levertov, and Jenny Baynes.”

“Our new champ,” Levertov said, giving her a little bow. He was in his thirties and balding.

“Hi,” Beth said. She stood up from the table.

“Congratulations!” Wexler said. “Benny needed a lesson in humility.”

“I’m already tops in humility,” Benny said.

The woman held out her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

It felt strange to Beth to have all these people in Benny’s small living room. It seemed as though she had lived half her life in this apartment with him, studying chess games, and it was outrageous for anyone else to be there. She had been in New York nine days. Not knowing exactly what to do, she sat down at the board again. Wexler came over and stood at the other side. “Do you do problems?”

“No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural. White to move and mate in two. It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.

“Let me show you one,” Wexler said. His voice was friendly and easy. “Can I mess this up?”

“Go ahead.”

“Hilton,” Jenny said, coming over to them, “she’s not one of your problem freaks. She’s the U.S. Champion.”

“It’s okay,” Beth said. But she was glad of what Jenny had said.

Wexler put pieces on the board until there was a weird-looking position with both queens in corners and all four rooks on the same file. The kings were nearly centered, which would be unlikely in a real game. When he finished, he folded his arms across his chest. “This is my favorite,” he said. “White wins it in three.”

Beth looked at it, annoyed. It seemed silly to deal with something like this. It could never come up in a game. Advance the pawn, check with the knight, and the king moved to the corner. But then the pawn queened, and it was stalemate. Maybe the pawn knighted, to make the next check. That worked. Then if the king didn’t move there after the first check… She went back to that for a moment and saw what to do. It was like a problem in algebra, and she had always been good at algebra. She looked up at Wexler. “Pawn to queen seven.”