The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  She needed to clean up the place. There were cobwebs and messy-looking sheets and pillowcases. She could use some new ones. Some new clothes, too. Harry Beltik had left his razor in the bathroom; should she mail it back? The milk had gone sour and the butter was old. The freezer was full of ice crystals with a stack of old frozen chicken dinners stuck in the back. The bedroom rug was dusty, and the windows had fingerprints on the glass and grit on the sills.

  Beth shook the confusion out of her head as well as she could and made an appointment with Roberta for a haircut at two. She would ask where to find a cleaning woman for a few weeks. She would go to Morris’s, order some chess books, and have lunch at Toby’s.

  But her usual clerk wasn’t at Morris’s that day, and the woman who had replaced him knew nothing about ordering chess books. Beth managed to get her to find a catalogue and ordered three on the Sicilian Defense. She needed game books from grandmaster matches and Chess Informants. But she didn’t know which Yugoslav press published Chess Informant, and neither did the new clerk. It was infuriating. She needed a library as good as Benny’s. Better. Thinking of this, she finally realized angrily that she could go back to New York and forget all this confusion and continue with Benny from where she had left off. But what could Benny teach her now? What could any American teach her? She had moved past them all. She was on her own. She would have to bridge the gap herself that separated American chess from Russian.

  At Toby’s the headwaiter knew her and put her at a good table near the front. She ordered asperges vinaigrette for an appetizer and told the waiter she would have that before ordering a main course. “Would you care for a cocktail?” he asked pleasantly. She looked around her at the quiet restaurant, at the people eating lunch, at the table with desserts near the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. “A Gibson,” she said. “On the rocks.”

  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 suff
ocated 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.

  ***

  The next morning while she was eating breakfast the phone rang and she picked it up without thinking. Someone named Ed Spencer was at the other end; it took a moment to remember that he was the local tournament director. “It’s about tomorrow,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “The tournament. We wondered if you could come an hour early. The Louisville paper is sending a photographer and we think WLEX will have somebody. Could you come in at nine?”

  Her heart sank. He was talking about the Kentucky State Championship, she had completely forgotten it. She was supposed to defend her title. She was supposed to go to Henry Clay High School tomorrow morning and begin a two-day tournament as defending champion. Her head was throbbing and her hand that held her coffee cup was unsteady. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you call back in an hour?”

  “Sure, Miss Harmon.”

  “Thank you. I’ll tell you in an hour.”

  She felt frightened, and she did not want to play chess. She had not looked at a chess book or touched her pieces since buying the house from Allston Wheatley. She did not want even to think about chess. Last night’s bottle was still sitting on the counter next to the toaster. She poured half a glass, but when she drank it, it stung her mouth and tasted foul. She set the unfinished glass in the sink and got orange juice from the refrigerator. If she didn’t clear her head and play the tournament, she would just be drunker tomorrow and sicker. She finished the orange juice and went upstairs, thinking of all the wine she had been drinking, remembering it in the pit of her stomach. Her insides felt fouled and abused. She needed a hot shower and fresh clothes.

  It would be a waste. Beltik wouldn’t be in it, and there was no one else as good as he. Kentucky was nothing in chess. Standing naked in the bathroom, she started going through the Levenfish Variation of the Sicilian, squinting her eyes and picturing the pieces on an imaginary board. She did the first dozen moves without a mistake, although the pieces didn’t stand out as clearly as they had a year before. She hesitated after move eighteen, where Black played pawn to knight four and got equality. Smyslov-Botvinnik, 1958. She tried to play out the rest of it, but her head was aching, and after stopping to take two aspirin, she wasn’t sure where the pawns were supposed to be. But she had gotten the first eighteen moves right. She would stay sober today and play tomorrow. When she won the state championship for the second time two years before, it had been simple. After herself and maybe Harry, there weren’t any really strong players in Kentucky. Goldmann and Sizemore were no problem.

  When the phone rang again she told Ed Spencer she’d be there at nine-thirty. A half-hour would be plenty of time for pictures.

  ***

  In the back of her mind she had hoped Townes might show up with a camera, but there was no sign of him. The man from Louisville wasn’t there either. She posed at Board One for a woman photographer from the Herald-Leader, did a three-minute interview with a man from a local television station, and excused herself to go out for a walk around the block before the tournament began. She had managed to get through the day before without drinking and had slept soundly enough with the help of three green pills, but her stomach felt queasy. It was still morning but the sun was too bright; she found herself beginning to sweat after one turn around the block. Her feet hurt. Eighteen years old, and she felt like forty. She would have to stop drinking. Her first opponent was somebody named Foster with a rating in the 1800s. She would be playing Black, but it should be easy—especially if he tried pawn to king four and let her get into the Sicilian.

  Foster seemed calm enough, considering that he was playing the U.S. Champion in his first round. He had the good sense not to open with the king pawn against her. He played pawn to queen four, and she decided to avoid the Queen’s Gambit and try to lead him into unfamiliar territory with the Dutch Defense. That meant pawn to king bishop four. They went through the book moves for a while until, somehow, she found herself getting into the Stonewall Formation. It was a position she did not particularly like, and after she started considering the way the board looked she began to feel annoyed with herself. The thing to do was break it open and go for Foster’s throat. She had just been diddling with him, and she wanted to get this over with. Her head was still aching, and she felt uncomfortable even in the good swivel chair. There were too many spectators in the room. Foster was a pale blond in his twenties; he made his moves with a prissy carefulness that was maddening. After the twelfth she looked at the tight position on the board and quickly pushed a center pawn up for sacrifice; she would open up the game and start threatening. She must have a good 600 rating points on this creep; she would wipe him out, get a good lunch and some coffee, and be ready for Goldmann or Sizemore in the afternoon.

  Somehow the pawn sacrifice had been hasty. After Foster took with a knight instead of the pawn she had planned on, she found she had either to defend or to drop another pawn. She bit her lip, annoyed, and looked for something to terrorize him with. But she could find nothing. And her mind was working with damnable slowness. She retreated a bishop to protect the pawn.

  Foster raised his eyebrows slightly at that and brought a rook over to the queen file, the one she had opened with her pawn sacrifice. She blinked. She did not like the way this was going. Her headache was getting worse. She got up from the board, went to the director and asked him for aspirin. He found some somewhere, and she took three, chasing them with water from a paper cup, before she went back to Foster. As she walked through the main tournament room people looked up from their games to stare at her. She was suddenly angry that she had agreed to play in this third-rate tournament, and angry that she had to go back and contend with Foster. She hated the situation: if she beat him, it was meaningless to her, and if he beat her, she would look terrible. But he wouldn’t beat her. Benny Watts couldn’t beat her, and some prissy graduate student from Louisville wasn’t about to drive her into a corner. She would find a combination somewhere and tear him apart with it.

  But there was no combination to be found. She kept staring at the position as it changed gradually from move to move, and it did not open up for her. Foster was good—clearly better than his rating showed—but he wasn’t that good. The people who filled the little room watched in silence as she went more and more on the defensive, trying to keep her face from showing the alarm that was beginning to dominate her moves. And what was wrong with her mind? She hadn’t had a drink for a day and two nights. What was wrong? In the pit of her s
tomach she was beginning to feel terrified. If she had somehow damaged her talent…

  And then, on the twenty-third move, Foster began a series of trades in the center of the board, and she found herself unable to stop it, watching her pieces disappear with a sick feeling in her stomach, watching her position become more and more stark in its deterioration. She found herself playing out a lost game, overwhelmed by the two-pawn advantage of a player with a rating of 1800. There was nothing she could do about it. He would queen a pawn and humiliate her with it.

  She lifted her king from the board before he could do it and left the room without looking at him, pushing her way through a crowd of people, avoiding their eyes, almost holding her breath, going out into the main room and up to the desk.

  “I’m feeling ill,” she told the director. “I’m going to have to drop out.”

  She walked up Main, heavy-footed and in turmoil, trying not to think about the game. It was horrible. She had allowed this tournament to be a test for her—the kind of rigged test an alcoholic makes for himself—and still she had failed it. She must not drink when she got home. She must read and play chess and get herself together. But the thought of going to the empty house was frightening. What else could she do? There was nothing she wanted to do and no one to call. The game she had lost was inconsequential and the tournament was nothing, but the humiliation was overwhelming. She did not want to hear discussions about how she had lost to Foster, did not want to see Foster himself again. She must not drink. She had a real tournament coming up in California in five months. What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo—and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away.