Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

She looked around again. The other games were finished. That was a surprise. She looked at her watch. It was after one o’clock. They had been playing for over three hours. She turned her attention back to the board, studied it a few minutes and brought her queen to the center. It was time to apply more pressure. She looked across the table at Borgov.

He was as unruffled as ever. He did not meet her eyes but kept his on the board, studying her queen move. Then he shrugged almost imperceptibly and attacked the queen with a rook. She had known he might do that, and she had her response ready. She interposed a knight, threatening a check that would take the rook. He would have to move the king now and she would bring the queen over to the rook file. She could see half a dozen ways of threatening him from there, with threats more urgent than the ones she had been making.

Borgov moved immediately, and he did not move his king. He merely advanced a rook pawn. She had to study it for five minutes before seeing what he was up to. If she checked him, he would let her take the rook and then station his bishop ahead of the pawn he had just pushed, and she would have to move her queen. She held her breath, alarmed. Her rook on the back rank would fall, and with it two pawns. That would be disastrous. She had to back her queen off to a place where it could escape. She gritted her teeth and moved it.

Borgov brought the bishop out, anyway, where the pawn protected it. She stared at it a moment before the meaning of it dawned on her; any of the several moves she could make to dislodge it would cost her in some way, and if she left it there, it strengthened everything about his position. She looked up at his face. He was regarding her now with a hint of a smile. She looked quickly back at the board.

She tried countering with one of her own bishops, but he neutralized it with a pawn move that blocked the diagonal. She had played beautifully, was still playing beautifully, but he was outplaying her. She would have to bear down harder.

She did bear down harder and found excellent moves, as good as any she had ever found, but they were not enough. By the thirty-fifth her throat was dry, and what she saw in front of her on the board was the disarray of her position and the growing strength of Borgov’s. It was incredible. She was playing her best chess, and he was beating her.

On the thirty-eighth move he brought his rook crisply down to her second rank for the first threat of mate. She could see clearly enough how to parry that, but behind it were more and more threats that would either mate her or take her queen or give him a second queen. She felt sick. For a moment it dizzied her just to look at the board, at the visible manifestation of her own powerlessness.

She did not topple her king. She stood up, and looking at his emotionless face, said, “I resign.” Borgov nodded. She turned and walked out of the room, feeling physically ill.

The plane back to New York was like a trap; she sat in her window seat and could not escape the memory of the game, could not stop playing through it in her mind. Several times the stewardess offered her a drink, but she forced herself to decline. She wanted one only too badly; it was frightening. She took tranquilizers, but the knot would not leave her stomach. She had made no mistakes. She had played extraordinarily well. And at the end of it her position was a shambles, and Borgov looked as though it had been nothing.

She did not want to see Benny. She was supposed to call him to pick her up, but she did not want to go back to his apartment. It had been eight weeks since she left her house in Lexington; she would go back and lick her wounds for a while. Her third-prize money from Paris had been surprisingly good; she could afford a quick round trip to Lexington. And there were still papers to sign with her lawyer. She would stay a week and then come back and go on studying with Benny. But what else had she to learn from him? Remembering for a moment all the work she had done readying herself for Paris, she felt sick again. With an effort she shook it off. The main thing was to get ready for Moscow. There was still time.

She called Benny from Kennedy Airport and told him she had lost the final game, that Borgov had outplayed her. Benny was sympathetic but a little distant, and when she told him she was going to Kentucky for a while he sounded irritated.

“Don’t quit,” he said. “One lost game doesn’t prove anything.”

“I’m not quitting,” she said.

In the pile of mail waiting for her at home were several letters from Michael Chennault, the lawyer who had arranged for the deed to the house. It seemed there was some kind of problem; she did not yet have clear title or something. Allston Wheatley was creating difficulty. Without opening the rest of the mail she went to the phone and called Chennault’s office.

The first thing he said when he came on the line was “I tried to get you three times yesterday. Where’ve you been?”

“In Paris,” Beth said, “playing chess.”

“How sweet it must be.” He paused. “It’s Wheatley. He doesn’t want to sign.”

“Sign what?”

“Title,” Chennault said. “Can you get over here? We’ve got to work it out.”

“I don’t see why you need me,” Beth said. “You’re the lawyer. He told me he’d sign what was necessary.”

“He’s changed his mind. Maybe you could talk to him.”

“Is he there ?”

“Not in the office. But he’s in town. I think if you could look him in the eye and remind him you’re his legal daughter…”

“Why won’t he sign?”

“Money,” the lawyer said. “He wants to sell the house.”

“Can the two of you come here tomorrow?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the lawyer said.

She looked around the living room after hanging up. The house still belonged to Wheatley. That was a shock. She had barely seen him in it, and yet it was in fact his . She did not want him to have it.

Although it was a hot July afternoon, Allston Wheatley was wearing a suit, a dark-gray salt-and-pepper tweed, and when he seated himself on the sofa he pulled up the creases in the pants legs, showing the whiteness of his thin shanks above the tops of his maroon socks. He had lived in the house for sixteen years, but he showed no interest in anything in it. He entered it like a stranger, with a look that could have been anger or apology, sat down at one end of the sofa, pulled his pants legs up an inch and said nothing.

Something about him made Beth feel sick. He looked exactly the way he had looked when she first saw him, when he came to Mrs. Deardorff’s office with Mrs. Wheatley to look her over.

“Mr. Wheatley has a proposal, Beth,” the lawyer was saying. She looked at Wheatley’s face, which was turned slightly away from them. “You can live here,” the lawyer said, “while you are finding something permanent.” Why wasn’t Wheatley telling her this?

Wheatley’s embarrassment made her somehow squirm for him, as though she were embarrassed herself. “I thought I could keep the house if I made the payments,” she said.

“Mr. Wheatley says you misconstrued him.”

Why was her lawyer speaking for him? Why couldn’t he get his own lawyer, for Christ’s sake? She looked over at him and saw he was lighting a cigarette, his face still inclined away from her, a pained look on his features. “He claims he was only permitting you to stay in the house until you got settled.”

“That’s not true,” Beth said. “He said I could have it…” Suddenly something hit her with full force and she turned to Wheatley. “I’m your daughter ,” she said. “You adopted me. Why don’t you talk to me?”