The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  She began setting up the pieces on the board. “It’s Beth.”

  “I’d rather call you Harmon.”

  “Let’s play skittles,” she said. “You can play White.”

  Skittles was speed chess, and there wasn’t time for much complexity. He got his chess clock from the bureau and set it to give them each five minutes. “I should give you three,” he said.

  “Go ahead,” Beth said, not looking at him. She wished he would just come over and touch her—on the arm maybe, or put his hand on her cheek. He seemed terribly sophisticated, and his smile was easy. He couldn’t be thinking about her the way she was thinking about him. But Jolene had said, “They all think about it, honey. That’s just what they think about.” And they were alone in his room, with the king-sized bed. In Las Vegas.

  When he set the clock at the side of the board, she saw they both had the same amount of time. She did not want to play this game with him. She wanted to make love with him. She punched the button on her side, and his clock started ticking. He moved pawn to king four and pushed his button. She held her breath for a moment and began to play chess.

  ***

  When Beth came back to their room Mrs. Wheatley was sitting in bed, smoking a cigarette and looking mournful. “Where’ve you been, honey?” she said. Her voice was quiet and had some of the strain it had when she spoke of Mr. Wheatley.

  “Playing chess,” Beth said. “Practicing.”

  There was a copy of Chess Review on the television set. Beth got it and opened it to the masthead page. His name wasn’t among the editors, but down below, under “Correspondents,” were three names; the third was D. L. Townes. She still didn’t know his first name.

  After a moment Mrs. Wheatley said, “Would you hand me a can of beer? On the dresser.”

  Beth stood up. Five cans of Pabst were on one of the brown trays room service used, and a half-eaten bag of potato chips. “Why don’t you have one yourself?” Mrs. Wheatley said.

  Beth picked up two cans; they felt metallic and cold. “Okay.” She handed them to Mrs. Wheatley and got herself a clean glass from the bathroom.

  When Beth gave her the glass, Mrs. Wheatley said, “I guess you’ve never had a beer before.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Well…” Mrs. Wheatley frowned. She lifted the tab with a little pop and poured expertly into Beth’s glass until the white collar stood above the rim. “Here,” she said, as though offering medicine.

  Beth sipped the beer. She had never had it before but it tasted much as she had expected, as though she had always known what beer would taste like. She tried not to make a face and finished almost half the glass. Mrs. Wheatley reached out from the bed and poured the rest of it in. Beth drank another mouthful. It stung her throat slightly, but then she felt a sensation of warmth in her stomach. Her face was flushed—as though she were blushing. She finished off the glassful. “Goodness,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “you shouldn’t drink so fast.”

  “I’d like another,” Beth said. She was thinking of Townes, how he had looked after they finished playing and she stood up to leave. He had smiled and taken her hand. Just holding his hand for that short time made her cheeks feel the way the beer had. She had won seven fast games from him. She held her glass tightly and for a moment wanted to throw it on the floor as hard as she could and watch it shatter. Instead she walked over, picked up another can of beer, put her finger in the ring and opened it.

  “You really shouldn’t…” Mrs. Wheatley said. Beth filled her glass. “Well,” Mrs. Wheatley said, resigned, “if you’re going to do that, let me have one too. I just don’t want you to be sick…”

  Beth banged her shoulder against the door frame going into the bathroom and barely got to the toilet in time. It stung her nose horribly as she threw up. After she finished, she stood by the toilet for a while and began to cry. Yet, even while she was crying, she knew that she had made a discovery with the three cans of beer, a discovery as important as the one she had made when she was eight years old and saved up her green pills and then took them all at one time. With the pills there was a long wait before the swooning came into her stomach and loosened the tightness. The beer gave her the same feeling with almost no wait.

  “No more beer, honey,” Mrs. Wheatley said when Beth came back into the bedroom. “Not until you’re eighteen.”

  ***

  The ballroom was set up for seventy chess players, and Beth’s first game was at Board Nine, against a small man from Oklahoma. She beat him as if in a dream, in two dozen moves. That afternoon, at Board Four, she crushed the defenses of a serious young man from New York, playing the King’s Gambit and sacrificing the bishop the way Paul Morphy had done.

  Benny Watts was in his twenties, but he looked nearly as young as Beth. He was not much taller, either. Beth saw him from time to time during the tournament. He started at Board One and stayed there; people said he was the best American player since Morphy. Beth stood near him once at the Coke machine, but they did not speak. He was talking to another male player and smiling a lot; they were amiably debating the virtues of the Semi-Slav defense. Beth had made a study of the Semi-Slav a few days before, and she had a good deal to say about it, but she remained silent, got her Coke and walked away. Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.

  Watts was wearing a white shirt open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled up. His face was both cheerful and sly. With his flat straw-colored hair he looked as American as Huckleberry Finn, yet there was something untrustworthy about his eyes. He, too, had been a child prodigy and that, besides the fact that he was Champion, made Beth uneasy. She remembered a Watts game book with a draw against Borstmann and a caption reading “Copenhagen: 1948.” That meant Benny had been eight years old—the age Beth was when she was playing Mr. Shaibel in the basement. In the middle of that book was a photograph of him at thirteen, standing solemnly at a long table facing a group of uniformed midshipmen seated at chessboards; he had played against the twenty-three-man team at Annapolis without losing a game.

  When she came back with her empty Coke bottle, he was still standing by the machine. He looked at her. “Hey,” he said pleasantly, “you’re Beth Harmon.”

  She put the bottle in the case. “Yes.”

  “I saw the piece in Life,” he said. “The game they printed was a pretty one.” It was the game she’d won against Beltik.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “I’m Benny Watts.”

  “I know.”

  “You shouldn’t have castled, though,” he said smiling.

  She stared at him. “I needed to get the rook out.”

  “You could have lost your king pawn.”

  She wasn’t sure what he was talking about. She remembered the game well and had gone over it in her head a few times but found nothing wrong with it. Was it possible he had memorized the moves from Life and found a weakness? Or was he just showing off? Standing there, she pictured the position after the castle; the king pawn looked all right to her.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He plays bishop to B-5, and you’ve got to break the pin.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said.

  “I can’t,” Benny said. “I’ve got to play an adjournment. Set it up and think it out. Your problem is his queen knight.”

  Suddenly she was angry. “I don’t have to set it up to think it out.”

  “Goodness!” he said and left.

  When he was gone, she stood by the Coke machine for several minutes going over the game, and then she saw it. There was an empty tournament board on a table near her; she set up the position before castling against Beltik, just to be certain, but she felt a knot in her stomach doing it. Beltik could have made the pin, and then his queen knight became a threat. She had to break the pin and then protect against a fork with that damned knight, and after that he had a rook threat
and, bingo, there went her pawn. It could have been crucial. But what was worse, she hadn’t seen it. And Benny Watts, just reading Life magazine, reading about a player he knew nothing about, had picked it up. She was standing at the board; she bit her lip, reached down and toppled the king. She had been so proud of finding an error in a Morphy game when she was in seventh grade. Now she’d had something like that done to her, and she did not like it. Not at all.

  She was sitting behind the white pieces at Board One when Watts came in. When he shook her hand, he said in a low voice, “Knight to knight five. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said, between her teeth. A flash bulb popped. Beth pushed her queen’s pawn to queen four.

  She played the Queen’s Gambit against him and by midgame felt with dismay that it had been a mistake. The Queen’s Gambit could lead to complicated positions, and this one was Byzantine. There were half a dozen threats on each side, and the thing that made her nervous, that made her reach out for a piece several times and then stop her hand before touching it and draw back, was that she didn’t trust herself. She did not trust herself to see everything Benny Watts could see. He played with a calm, pleasant precision, picking up his pieces lightly and setting them down noiselessly, sometimes smiling to himself as he did so. Every move he made looked solid as a rock. Beth’s great strength was in fast attack, and she could find no way to attack. By the sixteenth move she was furious with herself for playing the gambit in the first place.

  There must have been forty people clustered around the especially large wooden table. There was a brown velvet curtain behind them with the names HARMON and WATTS pinned to it. The horrible feeling, at the bottom of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s office. For a moment she looked over the crowd around the table, trying to find Mrs. Wheatley, but she was not there. Beth turned back to the board and looked briefly at Benny. He smiled at her serenely, as though he were offering her a drink rather than a head-splitting chess position. Beth set her elbows on the table, leaned her cheeks against her clenched fists and began to concentrate.

  After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess. She looked at him again. His eyes were studying the board now. He can’t move until I do. He can only move one piece at a time. She looked back to the board and began to consider the effects of trading, to picture where the pawns would be if the pieces that clogged the center were exchanged. If she took his king knight with her bishop and he retook with the queen pawn… No good. She could advance the knight and force a trade. That was better. She blinked and began to relax, forming and reforming the relationships of pawns in her mind, searching for a way of forcing an advantage. There was nothing in front of her now but the sixty-four squares and the shifting architecture of pawns—a jagged skyline of imaginary pawns, black and white, that flowed and shifted as she tried variation after variation, branch after branch of the game tree that grew from each set of moves. One branch began to look better than the others. She followed it for several half-moves to the possibilities that grew from it, holding in her mind the whole set of imaginary positions until she found one that had what she wanted to find.

  She sighed and sat upright. When she pulled her face away from her fists, her cheeks were sore and her shoulders stiff. She looked at her clock. Forty minutes had passed. Watts was yawning. She reached out and made the move, advancing a knight in a way that would force the first trade. It looked innocuous enough. Then she punched the clock.

  Watts studied the board for half a minute and started the trade. For a moment she felt panic in her stomach: Could he see what she was planning? That quickly? She tried to shake off the idea and took the offered piece. He took another, just as she had planned. She took. Watts reached out to take again, but hesitated. Do it! she commanded silently. But he pulled his hand back. If he saw through what she was planning, there was still time to get out of it. She bit her lip. He was studying the board intently. He would see it. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud. Beth’s heart was beating so strongly that for a moment she feared Watts would hear it and know she was panicked and—

  But he didn’t. He took the trade just as she had planned it. She looked at his face almost in disbelief. It was too late for him now. He pressed the button that stopped his clock and started hers.

  She pushed the pawn up to rook five. Immediately he stiffened in his chair—almost imperceptibly, but Beth saw it. He began studying the position intently. But he must have seen he was going to be stuck with doubled pawns; after two or three minutes he shrugged and made the necessary move, and Beth did her continuation, and then on the next move the pawn was doubled and the nervousness and anger had left her. She was out to win now. She would hammer at his weakness. She loved it. She loved attack.

  Benny looked at her impassively for a moment. Then he reached out his hand, picked up his queen, and did something astonishing. He quietly captured her center pawn. Her protected pawn. The pawn that had been holding the queen to her corner for most of the game. He was sacrificing his queen. She could not believe it.

  And then she saw what it meant, and her stomach twisted sharply. How had she missed it? With the pawn gone, she was open to a rook-bishop mate because of the bishop on the opened diagonal. She could protect by retreating her knight and moving one of her rooks over, but the protection wouldn’t last, because—she saw now with horror—his innocent-looking knight would block her king’s escape. It was terrible. It was the kind of thing she did to other people. It was the kind of thing Paul Morphy had done. And she had been thinking about doubled pawns.

  She didn’t have to take the queen. What would happen if she didn’t? She would lose the pawn he had just taken. His queen would sit there in the center of the board. Worse, it could come over to her king rook file and press down on her castled king. The more she looked, the worse it became. And it had caught her completely off-guard. She put her elbows on the table and stared at the position. She needed a counterthreat, a move that would stop him in his tracks.

  There wasn’t any. She spent a half-hour studying the board and found only that Benny’s move was even sounder than she had thought.

  Maybe she could trade her way out of it if he attacked too quickly. She found a rook move and made it. If he would just bring the queen over now, there would be a chance to trade.

  He didn’t. He developed his other bishop. She brought the rook up to the second rank. Then he swung the queen over, threatening mate in three. She had to respond by retreating her knight into the corner. He kept attacking, and with impotent dismay, she saw a lost game gradually become manifest. When he took her king bishop pawn with his bishop, sacrificing it, it was over, and she knew it was over. There was nothing to do. She wanted to scream, but instead set her king on its side and got up from the table. Her legs and back were stiff and painful. Her stomach was knotted. All she had really needed was a draw, and she hadn’t been able to get even that. Benny had drawn twice already in the tournament. She had gone into the game with a perfect score, and a draw would have given her the title. But she had gone for a win.

  “Tough game,” Benny was saying. He was holding out his hand. She forced herself to take it. People were applauding. Not applauding her but Benny Watts.

  By evening she could still feel it, but it had lessened. Mrs. Wheatley tried to console her. The prize money would be split. She and Benny would be co-champions, each with a small trophy. “It happens all the time,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have made inquiries, and the Open Championship is often shared.”

  “I didn’t see what he was doing,” Beth said, picturing the move where his queen took her pawn. It was like putting your tongue against an aching tooth.

  “You can’t finesse everything, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “
Nobody can.”

  Beth looked at her. “You don’t know anything about chess,” she said.

  “I know what it feels like to lose.”

  “I bet you do,” Beth said, as viciously as she could. “I just bet you do.”

  Mrs. Wheatley peered at her meditatively for a moment. “And now you do too,” she said softly.

  ***

  Sometimes on the street that winter in Lexington people would look back over their shoulders at her. She was on the Morning Show on WLEX. The interviewer, a woman with heavily lacquered hair and harlequin glasses, asked Beth if she played bridge; Beth said no. Did she like being the U.S. Open Champion at chess? Beth said she was co-champion. Beth sat in a director’s chair with bright lights shining on her face. She was willing to talk about chess, but the woman’s manner, her false appearance of interest, made it difficult. Finally she was asked how she felt about the idea that chess was a waste of time, and she looked at the woman in the other chair and said, “No more than basketball.” But before she could go on about that, the show was over. She had been on for six minutes.

  The one-page article Townes had written about her appeared in the Sunday supplement of the Herald-Leader with one of the pictures he had taken at the window of his room in Las Vegas. She liked herself in the picture, with her right hand on the white queen and her face looking clear, serious and intelligent. Mrs. Wheatley bought five copies of the paper for her scrapbook.

  Beth was in high school now, and there was a chess club, but she did not belong. The boys in it were nonplused to have a Master walking the hallways, and they would stare at her in a kind of embarrassed awe when she passed. Once a boy from twelfth grade stopped her to ask nervously if she would give a simultaneous in Chess Club sometime. She would play about thirty students at once. She remembered that other high school, near Methuen, and the way she was stared at afterward. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t have time.” The boy was unattractive and creepy-looking; it made her feel unattractive and creepy just to be talking with him.