The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  “Murderous.” He raised his glass and finished off his beer. He had drunk only the one. “Beth,” he said, “you’re the only American I know who might do it.”

  “I went to pieces with Borgov in Mexico City…”

  “When do you go to Paris?” Benny said.

  “In five weeks.”

  “Then get your life organized around that and study. Get a trainer.”

  “What about you?”

  He thought a moment. “Can you come to New York?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can sleep in my living room, and leave for Paris from there.”

  The idea shocked her. “I’ve got a house to take care of, in Kentucky.”

  “Let the fucking house fall down.”

  “I’m not ready…”

  “When will you be? Next year? Ten years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He leaned forward and said slowly, “If you don’t do it, you’ll drink your talent away. It’ll go down the drain.”

  “Borgov made me look like a fool.”

  “You weren’t ready.”

  “I don’t know how good I really am.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re the best there is.”

  She took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll come to New York.”

  “You can come with me from here,” he said. “I’ll drive us.”

  “When?” This was happening too fast. She felt frightened.

  “Tomorrow afternoon, when everything here’s finished. Whenever we can get away.” He stood up. “And about sex…”

  She looked up at him.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  ***

  “Spring,” Benny said, “is first class. Absolutely first class.”

  “How can you tell?” Beth asked. They were driving along a gray asphalt section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, pounding along the gritty road with semis and dusty passenger cars.

  “It’s out there somewhere. Up in the hills. It’s even in New York.”

  “Ohio was pleasant,” Beth said. But she didn’t like this discussion. Weather did not interest her. She had made no arrangements for the house in Lexington, had not been able to get the lawyer on the telephone and did not know what to expect in New York. She did not like Benny’s insouciance in the face of her uncertainty, the kind of sunny blankness that suffused his face from time to time. He had looked that way during the awards ceremony and during the time she did her interviews and signed autographs and thanked the officials and the USCF people who had come down from upstate New York to talk about the importance of chess. His face was blank now. She turned her eyes to the road.

  After a while he spoke up. “When you go to Russia I want to go with you.”

  That was a surprise. They hadn’t talked about Russia, or chess, since getting in the car. “As my second?”

  “Whatever. I can’t afford to pay expenses.”

  “You want me to pay them?”

  “Something will turn up. While you were interviewed by that magazine, I talked to Johanssen. He said there wouldn’t be any Federation money for seconds.”

  “I’m only thinking about Paris,” she said. “I haven’t decided to go to Moscow yet.”

  “You’ll go.”

  “I don’t even know if I’m going to stay more than a few days with you. I have to get a passport.”

  “We can do that in New York.”

  She started to say something but didn’t. She looked at Benny. Now that blankness had left his face, she felt warmer toward him. She had made love to two men in her life, and it was hardly making love; if she and Benny went to bed together, there would be more to it. She would see there was more to it. They would be in his apartment by midnight; maybe something would happen there. Maybe he would feel differently at home.

  “Let’s play chess,” Benny said. “I’ll be White. Pawn to king four.”

  She shrugged. “Pawn to queen bishop four.”

  “N,” he said, using the letter for “knight.” “K-B3.”

  “Pawn to queen three.” She wasn’t sure she liked this. She had never shared her interior chessboard before, and there was a sense of violation in opening it to Benny’s moves.

  “P to Q four,” Benny said.

  “Pawn takes pawn.”

  “Knight takes.”

  “Knight. King bishop three.” Actually it was easy. She could look at the road ahead and at the same time see the imaginary chessboard and the pieces on it without difficulty.

  “N to Q-B3,” Benny said.

  “Pawn to king’s knight three.”

  “P to B four.”

  “P to B four.”

  “The Levenfish,” Benny said dryly. “I never liked it.”

  “Play your knight.”

  Suddenly his voice was like ice. “Don’t tell me what to move,” he said. She pulled back as if stung.

  They drove in silence for a few miles. Beth watched the gray steel divider that separated them from the oncoming lanes. Then, as they were coming to a tunnel, Benny said, “You were right about the knight on B-3. I’ll put it there.”

  She hesitated a moment before speaking. “Okay. I’ll take the knight.”

  “Pawn takes,” Benny said.

  “Pawn to king five.”

  “Pawn takes again,” Benny said. “Do you know what Scharz says about that one? The footnote?”

  “I don’t read footnotes,” Beth said.

  “It’s time you started.”

  “I don’t like Scharz.”

  “I don’t either,” Benny said. “But I read him. What’s your move?”

  “Queen takes queen. Check.” She could hear the sullenness in her voice.

  “King takes,” Benny said, relaxing now at the wheel. Pennsylvania rolled by. Beth forced him to resign on the twenty-seventh move and felt somewhat better for it. She had always liked the Sicilian.

  ***

  There were plastic bags full of garbage in the entryway to Benny’s apartment and the light overhead was only a dirty bare bulb. It was a white tile hallway and as depressing at midnight as the toilet in a bus station. There were three locks on Benny’s front door, which was painted red and had some impenetrable word like “Bezbo” written on it in black spray paint.

  Inside was a small and cluttered living room with books piled everywhere. But the lighting was pleasant when he got the lamps on. One end of the room was a kitchen, and near it was a door going off to the bedroom. There was a grass rug and no sofa and chairs—just black pillows to sit on with lamps beside them.

  The bathroom was orthodox enough, with a floor made of black-and-while tile and a broken handle on the hot-water tap. There was a tub and shower with a black plastic curtain. She washed her hands and face and came back into the living room. Benny had gone into the bedroom to unpack. Her bag was still on the living-room floor next to a bookcase. She walked over to it and looked wearily at the books. They were all on chess—all five shelves of them. Some were in Russian and German, but they were all on chess. She walked across the hard little rug to the other side of the room where there was another bookcase, this one made of boards resting on bricks. More chess. One whole shelf was Shakhmatni Byulleten going back to the nineteen-fifties.

  “There’s room in this closet,” Benny shouted from the bedroom. “You can hang up when you want to.”

  “Okay,” she said. Back on the turnpike she had thought they might make love when they got here. Now she wanted only to sleep. And what was she supposed to sleep on? “I thought I was going to get a sofa,” she said.

  He came into the doorway. “I said ‘living room.’” He went back to the bedroom and returned with a bulky-looking thing and some kind of pump. He flipped it out in the middle of the floor and began pedaling the pump with his foot, and after a while it puffed up and became an air mattress. “I’ll get sheets,” Benny said. He brought them out of the bedroom.

  “I’ll do it,” she said and took them from him. She didn
’t like the looks of the mattress, but she knew where her pills were. She could get them out after he fell asleep, if she needed to. There would be nothing to drink in this apartment. Benny had not said so, but she knew.

  She must have fallen asleep before Benny did, since she forgot about the pills in her luggage. She awoke to the sound of a klaxon outside—an ambulance or fire truck. When she tried to sit up she could not; there was no edge of the bed to hang her legs over. She pushed herself up and stood, wearing pajamas, and looked around. Benny was standing at the sink counter with his back to her. She knew where she was, but it looked different by daylight. The siren faded and was replaced by the general traffic sounds of New York. One blind was open and she could see the cab of a big truck as close as Benny was, and beyond it taxis weaving past. A dog barked intermittently.

  Benny turned and came over to her. He was holding out a big cardboard cup to her.

  “Chock Full O’ Nuts,” the cup read. Something seemed very strange about this. No one had ever given her anything in the morning—certainly not Mrs. Wheatley, who was never up before Beth had eaten her breakfast. She took the plastic top off and tasted the coffee. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Dress in the bedroom,” Benny said.

  “I need a shower.”

  “It’s all yours.”

  ***

  Benny had set up a folding card table with a green and beige chessboard on it. He was arranging the pieces when she came into the living room. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll start with these.” He handed her a roll of pamphlets and magazines wrapped with a rubber band. On top was a small pamphlet with a cheap paper cover reading “The Hastings Christmas Chess Congress—Falaise Hall, White Rock Gardens,” and under this, “A Record of Games.” The pages inside were dense with type, smudgily printed. There were two chess games on a page, with boldface captions: Luchenko—Uhlmann; Borgov—Penrose. He handed her another, titled simply Grandmaster Chess. It was much like the Hastings booklet. Three of the magazines were from Germany, and one was from Russia.

  “We’ll play through the Hastings games,” Benny said. He went into the bedroom and came back with two plain wooden chairs, setting one on each side of the card table near the front window. The truck was still parked outside and the street was full of slow-moving cars. “You play the white pieces and I’ll play Black.”

  “I haven’t had breakfast…”

  “Eggs in the fridge,” Benny said. “We’ll play the Borgov games first.”

  “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 lit
tle 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.”

  He looked astonished. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s fast.”