The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  “You could move in here,” she said. “Free.”

  He looked at her for a moment and smiled. His teeth weren’t really so bad. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  ***

  She had not been so immersed in chess since she was a little girl. Beltik was in class three afternoons a week and two mornings, and she spent that time studying his books. She played mentally through game after game, learning new variations, seeing stylistic differences in offense and defense, biting her lip sometimes in excitement over a dazzling move or a subtlety of position, and at other times wearied by a sense of the hopeless depth of chess, of its endlessness, move after move, threat after threat, complication after complication. She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant’s hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.

  Sex, with its reputation for complexity, was refreshingly simple. At least for Beth and Harry. They were in bed together on his second night in the house. It took ten minutes and was punctuated by a few sharp intakes of breath. She had no orgasm, and his was restrained. Afterward he went to his bed in her old room and she slept easily, falling asleep to images not of love but of wooden counters on a wooden board. The next morning she played him at breakfast and the combinations arose from her fingertips and spread themselves on the board as prettily as flowers. She beat him four quick games, letting him play the white pieces each time and hardly looking at the board.

  While he was washing the dishes he talked about Philidor, one of his heroes. Philidor was a French musician who had played blindfolded in Paris and London.

  “I read about those old players sometimes, and it all seems strange,” she said. “I can’t believe it was really chess.”

  “Don’t knock it,” Beltik said. “Bent Larsen plays Philidor’s Defense.”

  “It’s too cramped. The king’s bishop gets locked in.”

  “It’s solid,” he said. “What I wanted to tell you about Philidor was that Diderot wrote him a letter. You know Diderot?”

  “The French Revolution?”

  “Yeah. Philidor was doing blindfold exhibitions and burning out his brain, or whatever it was they thought you did in the eighteenth century. Diderot wrote him: ‘It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.’ I think of that sometimes when I’m analyzing my ass off over a chessboard.” He looked at her quietly for a moment. “Last night was nice,” he said.

  She sensed that for him it was a concession to talk about it, and her feelings were mixed. “Doesn’t Koltanowski play blindfolded all the time?” she said. “He’s not crazy.”

  “I know. It was Morphy who went crazy. And Steinitz. Morphy thought people were trying to steal his shoes.”

  “Maybe he thought shoes were bishops.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s play chess.”

  ***

  By the end of the third week she had gone through his four Shakhmatni bulletins and most of the other game books. One day after he had been in an engineering class all morning they were studying a position together. She was trying to show him why a particular knight move was stronger than it looked.

  “Look here,” she said and began moving the pieces around fast. “Knight takes and then this pawn comes up. If he doesn’t bring it up, the bishop is locked in. When he does, the other pawn falls. Zip.” She took the pawn off.

  “What about the other bishop? Over here?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “It’ll have the check once the pawn is moved and the knight’s traded. Can’t you see that?”

  Suddenly he froze and glared at her. “No, I can’t” he said. “I can’t find it that fast.”

  She looked back at him. “I wish you could,” she said levelly.

  “You’re too sharp for me.”

  She could see the hurt underneath his anger, and she softened. “I miss them too, sometimes,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  ***

  On Saturday she started playing him with odds of a knight. He tried to act casual about it, but she could see that he hated it. There was no other way for them to have a real game. Even with the odds and with his playing the white pieces she beat him the first two and drew the third.

  That night he did not come to her bed, nor did he the next. She did not miss the sex, which meant very little to her, but she missed something. On the second night she had some difficulty going to sleep and found herself getting up at two in the morning. She went to the refrigerator and got out one of Mrs. Wheatley’s cans of beer. Then she sat down at the chessboard and began idly moving the pieces around, sipping from the can. She played over some Queen’s Gambit games: Alekhine—Yates; Tarrasch—von Scheve; Lasker—Tarrasch. The first of these was one she had memorized years before at Morris’s Book Store; the other two she had analyzed with Beltik during their first week together. In the last there was a beautiful pawn to Queen’s rook four on the fifteenth move, as sweetly deadly as a pawn move could be. She left it on the board for the time it took to drink two beers, just looking at it. It was a warm night and the kitchen window was open; moths battered at the screen and somewhere far away a dog was barking. She sat at the table wearing Mrs. Wheatley’s pink chenille robe and drinking Mrs. Wheatley’s beer, feeling relaxed and easy in herself. She was glad to be alone. There were three more beers in the refrigerator, and she finished all of them. Then she went back up to bed and slept soundly until nine in the morning.

  ***

  On Monday at breakfast he said, “Look, I’ve taught you everything I know.”

  She started to say something but kept silent.

  “I’ve got to start studying. I’m supposed to be an electrical engineer, not a chess bum.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You’ve taught me a lot.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes. She finished her eggs and took her plate to the sink. “I’m moving to that apartment,” Beltik said. “It’s closer to the university.”

  “Okay,” Beth said, not turning from the sink.

  He was gone by noon. She took a TV dinner from the freezer for her lunch but didn’t turn on the oven. She was alone in the house, her stomach was in a knot, and she did not know any place to go. There were no movies she wanted to see or people she wanted to call; there was nothing she wanted to read. She walked up the stairs and through the two bedrooms. Mrs. Wheatley’s dresses still hung in the closets and a half bottle of her tranquilizers was still on the nightstand by the unmade bed. The tension she felt would not go away. Mrs. Wheatley was gone, her body buried in a cemetery at the edge of town, and Harry Beltik had driven off with his chessboard and books, not even waving goodbye as he left. For a moment she had wanted to shout at him to stay with her, but she said nothing as he went down the steps and into his car. She took the bottle from the nightstand and shook three of the green pills into her hand, and then a fourth. She hated being alone. She swallowed the four pills without water, the way she had as a child.

  In the afternoon she bought herself a steak and a large baking potato at Kroger’s. Before pushing her cart to the checkout, she went to the wine-and-beer case and took out a fifth of burgundy. That night she watched television and got drunk. She went to sleep on the couch, only barely able to get to the set to turn it off.

  Sometime during the night she awoke to a sense that the room was reeling. She had to vomit. Afterward, when she went upstairs to bed, she found that she was fully awake and very clear in her mind. There was a burning sensation in her stomach, and her eyes were wide open in the dark room as though looking for light. There was a powerful ache at the back of her neck. She reached over, found the bottle and too
k more tranquilizers. Eventually she went to sleep again.

  She awoke the next morning with a crushing headache and a determination to get on with her career. Mrs. Wheatley was dead. Harry Beltik was gone. The U.S. Championship was in three weeks; she had been invited to it before going to Mexico, and if she was going to win it, she was going to have to beat Benny Watts. While her coffee was percolating in the kitchen, she poured out the leftover burgundy from the night before, threw away the empty bottle and found two books she had ordered from Morris’s the day the invitation had come. One was the game record from the last U.S. Championship and the other was called Benny Watts: My Fifty Best Games of Chess. On its dustjacket was a blowup of Benny’s Huckleberry Finn face. Seeing it now, she winced at the memory of losing, at her damnfool attempt to double his pawns. She got herself a cup of coffee and opened the book, forgetting her hangover.

  By noon she had analyzed six of the games and was getting hungry. There was a little restaurant two blocks away, the kind of place that has liver and onions on the menu and display cards of cigarette lighters at the cashier’s stand. She brought the book with her and went over two more games while eating her hamburger and home fries. When the lemon custard came and was too thick and sweet to eat, she felt a sudden pang of longing for Mrs. Wheatley and the French desserts they had shared in places like Cincinnati and Houston. She shook it off, ordered a last cup of coffee and finished the game she was going over: the King’s Indian Defense, with the black bishop fianchettoed in the upper right-hand corner of the board, looking down the long diagonal for a chance to pounce. Black worked the king’s side while White worked the queen’s side after the bishop went into the corner. Very civilized. Benny, playing Black, won it handily.

  She paid her check and left. For the rest of the day and night until one in the morning she played over all of the games in the book. When she had finished, she knew a great deal more about Benny Watts and about precision chess than she had known before. She took two of her Mexican tranquilizers and went to bed, falling asleep instantly. She awoke pleasantly at nine-thirty the next morning. While her breakfast eggs were boiling, she chose a book for morning study: Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess. It was an old book, in some ways outdated. The diagrams were grayish and cluttered, and it was hard to tell the black pieces from the white. But something in her could still thrill at the name Paul Morphy and at the idea of that strange New Orleans prodigy, well-bred, a lawyer, son of a high court judge, who when young dazzled the world with his chess and then quit playing altogether and lapsed into muttering paranoia and an early death. When Morphy played the King’s Gambit he sacrificed knights and bishops with abandon and then moved in on the black king with dizzying speed. There had never been anything like him before or since. It made her spine tingle just to open the book and see the games list: Morphy—Lowenthal; Morphy—Harrwitz; Morphy—Anderssen, followed by dates in the eighteen-fifties. Morphy would stay up all night in Paris before his games, drinking in cafes and talking with strangers, and then would play the next day like a shark—well-mannered, well-dressed, smiling, moving the big pieces with small, ladylike, blue-veined hands, crushing one European master after another. Someone had called him “the pride and the sorrow of chess.” If only he and Capablanca had lived at the same time and played each other! She began going over a game between Morphy and someone named Paulsen, played in 1857. The U.S. Championship would be in three weeks; it was time it was won by a woman. It was time she won it.

  TEN

  When she came into the room, she saw a thin young man wearing faded blue jeans and a matching denim shirt seated at one of the tables. His blond hair came almost to his shoulders. It was only when he rose and said, “Hello, Beth,” that she saw it was Benny Watts. The hair had been long in the cover photograph of Chess Review a few months before, but not that long. He looked pale and thin and very calm. Still, Benny had always been calm.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I read about the game with Borgov.” Benny smiled. “It must have felt terrible.”

  She looked at him suspiciously, but his face was open and sympathetic. And she did not hate him anymore for beating her; there was only one player she hated now, and he was in Russia.

  “I felt like a fool,” she said.

  “I know.” He shook his head. “Helpless. It all goes, and you just push wood.”

  She stared at him. Chess players did not talk so easily about humiliations, did not admit weakness. She started to say something, when the tournament director spoke up loudly. “Play will begin in five minutes.” She nodded to Benny, attempted a smile, and found her table.

  There wasn’t a face over a chessboard that she didn’t know from hotel ballrooms where tournaments were played or from photographs in Chess Review. She herself had been on the cover six months after Townes took her picture in Las Vegas. Half the other players here on this campus in the small Ohio town had been on the cover themselves at one time or another. The man she was playing now in her first game, a middle-aged master named Phillip Resnais, was on the cover of the current issue. There were fourteen players, many of them grandmasters. She was the only woman.

  They played in some kind of lecture room with dark-green blackboards along the wall at one end and fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. There was a row of large institutional windows along one blue wall, with bushes, trees and a wide stretch of the campus visible through them. At one end of the room were five rows of folding chairs, and out in the hallway a sign announced a visitor’s fee of four dollars per session. During her first game there were about twenty-five people watching. A display board hung above each of the seven game tables, and two directors moved silently between the tables, changing the pieces after moves had been made on the real boards. The spectators’ seats were on a wooden platform to give them a view of the playing surfaces.

  But it was all second-rate, even the university they were playing at. They were the highest-ranked players in the country, assembled here in a single room, but it had the feel of a high school tournament. If it were golf or tennis, Benny Watts and she would be surrounded by reporters, would be playing under something other than these fluorescent lights and on plastic boards with cheap plastic pieces, watched by a few polite middle-aged people with nothing better to do.

  Phillip Resnais seemed to take it all seriously, but she felt like walking out. She did not, however. When he played pawn to king four, she pushed up her queen bishop pawn and started the Sicilian Defense. Now she was in the middle of the Rossolimo-Nimzovitch Attack, getting equality on the eleventh move with pawn to queen three. It was a move she had gone over with Beltik, and it worked the way Beltik said it would work.

  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 h
er 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.