Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

It came almost immediately. It was wonderful to look at. The tumbler was clear and clean; the gin inside was crystalline; the white onions were like two pearls. When she tasted it, it stung her upper lip, then stung her throat with a sweet tease as it went down. The effect on her tense stomach was remarkable; everything about it was rewarding. She finished it slowly, and the deep fury in her began to subside. She ordered another. Back in the shadows at the far end of the room someone was playing a piano. Beth looked at her watch. It was a quarter to twelve. It was good to be alive.

She never got around to ordering the main course. She came out of Toby’s at two, squinting into the sunshine, and jaywalked across Main to David Manly’s Wine Shop. Using two of her traveler’s checks from Ohio she bought a case of Paul Masson burgundy, four bottles of Gordon’s gin and a bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth and had Mr. Manly call her a taxi. Her speech was clear and sharp; her gait was steady. She had eaten six stalks of asparagus and drunk four Gibsons. She had flirted with alcohol for years. It was time to consummate the relationship.

The phone was ringing when she came in, but she did not answer it. The driver helped her with the case of wine, and she tipped him a dollar. When he had left, she got the bottles out one at a time and put them neatly into the cabinet over the toaster, in front of Mrs. Wheatley’s old cans of spaghetti and chili. Then she opened a bottle of gin and twisted the cap off the vermouth. She had never made a cocktail before. She poured gin into the tumbler and added a little vermouth, stirring it with one of Mrs. Wheatley’s spoons. She carried the drink carefully into the living room, sat down and took a long swallow.

The mornings were horrible, but she managed them. She went to Kroger’s on the third day and bought three dozen eggs and a supply of TV dinners. After that she always had two eggs before her first glass of wine. By noon she had usually passed out. She would awake on the sofa or in a chair with her limbs stiff and the back of her neck damp with hot sweat. Sometimes, her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as intense as the pain of a burst abscess in the jaw—a toothache so potent that nothing but drink could alleviate it. Sometimes the drink had to be forced against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.

On Saturday morning she spilled wine on her kitchen chessboard, and on Monday she bumped into the table by accident and sent some of the pieces falling to the floor. She left them there, picking them up only on Thursday, when finally the young man came by to mow the lawn. She lay on the sofa drinking from the last bottle in her case and listened to the roaring of his power mower, smelling the grass cuttings. When she had paid him, she went outside into the grass smell and looked at the lawn with its clumps of cuttings. It touched her to see it so altered, so changed from what it had been. She went back in, got her purse and called a cab. The law did not permit deliveries of wine or liquor. She would have to get another case on her own. Two would be smarter. And she would try Almadén. Someone had said Almadén burgundy was better than Paul Masson. She would try it. Maybe a few bottles of white wine, too. And she needed food.

Lunches came from a can. The chili was pretty good if you added pepper and ate it with a glass of burgundy. Almadén was better than Paul Masson, less astringent on the tongue. The Gibsons, though, could hit her like a club, and she became wary of them, saving them until just before passing out or, sometimes, for the first drink in the morning. By the third week she was taking a Gibson up to bed with her on the nights she made it upstairs to bed. She put it on the nightstand with a Chess Informant over it to keep the alcohol from evaporating, and drank it when she woke up in the middle of the night. Or if not then, in the morning, before going downstairs.

Sometimes the phone rang, but she answered it only when her head and voice were clear. She always spoke aloud to check her level of sobriety before picking up the receiver. She would say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” and if it came out all right, she would take up the phone. A woman called from New York, wanting her on the Tonight Show . She refused.

It wasn’t until her third week of drinking that she went through the pile of magazines that had come while she was in New York and found the Newsweek with her picture in it. They had given her a full page under “Sport.” The picture showed her playing Benny, and she remembered the moment it was taken, during the game’s opening. The position of the pieces on the display board was visible in the photograph, and she saw that her memory was right, she had just made her fourth move. Benny looked thoughtful and distant, as usual. The piece said she was the most talented woman since Vera Menchik. Beth, reading it half-drunk, was annoyed at the space given to Menchik, going on about her death in a 1944 bombing in London before pointing out that Beth was the better player. And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man’s world. To hell with her; it wouldn’t be a man’s world when she finished with it. It was noontime, and she put a pan of canned spaghetti on to heat before reading the rest of the article. The last paragraph was the strongest.

At eighteen, Beth Harmon has established herself as the queen of American chess. She may be the most gifted player since Morphy or Capablanca; no one knows just how gifted she is—how great a potential she holds in that young girl’s body with its dazzling brain. To find out, to show the world if America has outgrown its inferior status in world chess, she will have to go where the big boys are. She will have to go to the Soviet Union.

Beth closed the magazine and poured a glass of Almadén Mountain Chablis to drink with her spaghetti. It was three in the afternoon and hot as fury. And the wine was getting low; only two more bottles stood on the shelf above the toaster.

A week after reading the Newsweek article she awoke on a Thursday morning too sick to get out of bed. When she tried to sit up, she couldn’t. Her head and stomach were throbbing. She was still wearing her jeans and T-shirt from the night before, and she felt suffocated by them. But she could not get them off. The shirt was stuck to her upper body, and she was too weak to pull it over her head. There was a Gibson on the nightstand. She managed to roll over and take it with both hands, and she got half of it down before beginning to retch. For a moment she thought she was choking, but her breath came back eventually and she finished the drink.

She was terrified. She was alone in that furnace of a room and frightened of dying. Her stomach was raw and all of her organs hurt. Had she poisoned herself on wine and gin? She tried sitting up again, and with the gin in her she managed it. She sat there for a few moments calming herself before she went unsteadily into the bathroom and vomited. It seemed to cleanse her. She managed to get her clothes off, and afraid of slipping in the shower and breaking her hip the way unsteady old women did, she filled the tub with lukewarm water and took a bath. She should call McAndrews, Mrs. Wheatley’s old doctor, and make an appointment for sometime around noon. If she could make it to his office. This was more than a hangover; she was ill.

But downstairs, after her bath, she was steadier and got down two eggs with no difficulty. The thought of picking up the phone and calling someone seemed distant now. There was a barrier between herself and whatever world the phone would attach her to; she could not penetrate the barrier. She would be all right. She would drink less, taper off. Maybe she would feel like calling McAndrews after a drink. She poured herself a glass of chablis and began sipping it, and it healed her like the magic medicine it was.