Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  From across the room, Lisa saw the two players shake hands and agree to a quick draw. While her own clock ticked, she walked onto the raised stage that Igor and his opponent had already abandoned. Like an unfinished meal, the position stood before her, the butter was beginning to congeal around the potatoes and the steak was stiffening like a corpse. Lisa saw some of the older players come by and shake their heads with sad but knowing smiles. Mr. Rasmussen looked down on her and said, “Oh, you know, grandmaster draw.” Does that mean they didn’t want to fight? Lisa wondered. She overheard one of the weakies say, “He was such a talent, gave it all to vodka, I guess.”

  Lisa fought. She won one game and lost the other that day and finished her tournament with a very respectable 50 percent score. That result pushed her all the way up to 1872, making her the country’s highest rated girl in her under-fourteen age group. Like a seeker who has returned from the big mountain with delicious cuts and fulfilling bruises, Lisa asked Igor, “Why did you offer a draw?”

  “Is tradition,” he answered. “We share first place money.”

  “But what about the theme and the resolution?”

  Igor pointed to the envelope in his shirt pocket, stuffed with a small percentage of the crumply bills amateurs had saved for their entry fees. “This resolution,” he said.

  “But, I mean, why would you agree to stop playing?” Lisa asked her coach. “Why would you want to leave the game?”

  Igor didn’t answer her question. He only said, “Tradition say Igor must now buy drink for friends.” Apparently, the bearer of the envelope had to redistribute some of his dollars at the hotel bar. It was a communist thing. And Lisa was informed that it would be a while before they returned home. Igor had found them a ride with a player named Demetrius who had to first deal with some “women trouble” (“You not understand”). And Igor didn’t know how long that would take.

  Lisa could either join the men at the bar and have Igor treat her to a three-dollar bottle of water, or she could join the Patel family’s post-tournament celebration of Brahmin treats and blitz chess. The Patels were staying overnight before driving back to the South Bay in the morning, and Lisa was about to go up to their hotel room. But Igor’s old student, Jeffrey Phillips, came up and introduced himself. He said that he had really wanted to meet her, and had been watching her play.

  Soon Lisa and the two men were lounging on the broad white couches next to the hotel bar. Eighty feet above them a pyramid skylight announced that it was already darkest night. Asa joined them, and several other players came for the drink Igor eagerly offered—to fulfill the obligation of the envelope. But Lisa only remembered what Igor and Jeffrey talked about.

  Jeffrey never did say how he started playing chess. He didn’t look like a chessplayer either: A gleaming dagger cut open four blood teardrops on his lean left forearm. He kept the tattoo hidden, like Lisa hid her scars, and it would occasionally poke out from underneath his long shirtsleeves.

  Jeffrey had been unable to understand school. Even when he tried his best to do what they wanted, he would fail. “But Jeffrey, you’re so smart,” they would tell him. He began sitting at the back of the class. His ears dutifully heard his name at roll call, and his mouth would say “here” or “present.” But then he would recede. The melancholy pot he smoked before class opened up into the enterprising geometry of Korchnoi’s 400 Best Games. That was the book he always had with him. Through Korchnoi, while everyone else did what they were told, Jeffrey grabbed the centers of fierce Soviet opponents and played for domination.

  Jeffrey made up his own stories as to why Korchnoi moved the way he did. With his pocket chess set at the back of the class, Jeffrey sat with a balcony view of the surgery room at a grand hospital. But he didn’t have anyone to tell him the names of the surgeon’s tools. Nor was he ever present when the surgeon practiced those tools with other men and invented new ones. He only had his own words. That private knowledge was good enough to win local tournaments and crown him as Utah’s representative to the Denker Tournament of High School Champions, the genderless equivalent of the Polgar tournament Lisa had qualified to play in. And playing in that tournament had been his proudest moment.

  But coming out of high school, Jeffrey had been unable to make it in the chess world. Russians beat him down every time he went to one of the bigger tournaments. To those men, Jeffrey’s moves were like glib assertions. At the hotel bar they would laugh and say, “Da. Amerikanskiy make big shot into emptiness.” It was at one of those big tournaments, in Reno, that he had first played Igor.

  Jeffrey remembered staring up into the big oily thumbprints coating Igor’s glasses, held together with an improvised machinery of scotch tape and safety pins. Then came an unflinching layer of alcoholic mucus. Jeffrey looked for something beyond that, some kind of life that could feel pain. But he only found silence.

  Igor’s big hand would forcefully grab a piece, his pudgy fingers easily enveloping the cheap plastic. Then he would push it so deeply inside Jeffrey’s position that he knew he would never be strong enough. That was the adjective for chess skill Lisa had heard all summer; she had used it herself—not insightful or wise, but strong.

  Jeffrey returned home to party. Like a saw with worn and rusty teeth, drugs and alcohol tried to cut chess from his soul. Little jobs found him in his small town, and gave him enough money to hurt himself. It was mostly booze and pot. But he discovered other drugs too, with names that sounded like chemicals.

  Then one day, several years later, Igor found a comfortable bed and a piano while playing a little tournament in a small Utah town. It was a place to stop for a while, and he met Jeffrey at the local chess club—though Igor didn’t remember having played him. His lessons with Igor began as friendly banter. And Jeffrey didn’t think much of them at first. It was just cool to hang out with the guy, to get wildly drunk with him and see him throw down a crushing move on the board, yelling, “First big drink, then big fuck!” But slowly, little hints and gestures from Igor began pointing Jeffrey’s chess to where it had wanted to go in high school. The hidden mysteries of his adolescent dreamworld began to rouse themselves, and his chess began to feel weighty, like a slight man whose frame suddenly explodes with powerful muscles.

  He was in his mid-twenties. It wasn’t too late! He got a night shift as a parking lot attendant and did all the tasks Igor gave him in the streetlight glare of his little hut: endgame studies, famous games and most of all the study of his own games. Igor gave him ways to approach various positions and the game. He was finally understanding all the things he couldn’t by himself, in high school. He would make International Master! Maybe someday even GM.

  But then Igor left, on one of his journeys, and Jeffrey’s chess became lonesome. He missed Igor’s grand view of the game, where chess stood at the center of everything. Girls wouldn’t date him; they said he was a late-night parking lot attendant who played with little plastic figurines. Jeffrey’s chess progress again halted, and he began to rewrap his old wound with more urgent acts of self-destruction. Then, as penance, as a way out, Jeffrey enlisted in the army. That was right before 9/11. But he refused to talk about any of that.

  Jeffrey said that chess now calmed him. It was a way for him to remember. In brief moments, he could feel the magnificence of positions spreading outward, allowing him to perceive the splendor of everything. Jeffrey had won the under 2200 prize and proudly laid out some worn dollars on the table before his old master. Let me fulfill the obligation of the envelope. Let me buy you a drink, Igor. Let us share a drunk.

  That’s when their ride back to the Bay, Demetrius Jordan, finally came to meet Lisa and Igor on the soft couches next to the hotel bar. The big black man looked so depressed, like he had just been mated by an obnoxious eight-year-old boy. Igor ordered him a beer and a shot of whiskey.

  He was so down that everyone else started to feel sad; even though no one knew what the miserable woman had done to him. “Fuck the womens,” Igor said. “They not u
nderstand the chess.” It was true, Lisa thought, Jan never would get it. Igor tried to cheer him up; he told of the old times, before computers, when grandmasters were giant men.

  Lisa wasn’t ready to be sad, the joy of her successful tournament filled her like the memory of Asa’s deep blue lake. Lisa sprang out of her seat to stand in the middle of the men. Everyone’s eyes were suddenly on the shy girl who hadn’t said anything for at least the last hour. She had never been good at this kind of thing, being in front of people. It never went well. So she put so much energy into what she said that she yelled. “Hey! So the Panda gave me some of his opening prep and it felt like I was wearing a MASSIVE strap-on!” Lisa did some pelvic thrusts and shouted, “I WAS SO POWERFUL!!” All the men broke down laughing. They laughed until they cried, Demetrius too. He shouted back: “Oh darlin’, I need me a Panda! Ha ha. Where do I get one?”

  But then Igor got real solemn. “Before go,” he said. “I wish for tell Jeffrey story: For lesson, Jeffrey barter gifts. One was Bobby Fischer Collected Game. Was beautiful book, hardbind, notation of all games have, with some gloss photo of man in middle. Bobby picture look so clean, like he strong, invincible—so far from breakdown of later life.

  “Jeffrey improve his chess; he inspire. When I leave Utah, for again make soldier march for win Church’s Fried Chicken Grand Prix, I take this collection of Fischer. I play every game on little travel set, in café, on bus. Own chess was a shit, no prospect for beauty. Bobby try for universal, for truth outside tradition. Was hot summer on bus. Fat lady sit next to me, child on lap. He find my pawn, stick in face. He eat! Whole summer, friends say, ‘Igor, you play without pawn?’ You understand? Ha ha. Like for say, ‘You have screw loose?’ They think I crazy, all alone in big Fischer study.

  “Jeffry, listen for big truth: games I study from Fischer book. Your book. They try for find clear blue water I see this morning in Dr. Silber lake. I understand now. I want swim in this water. But I never find.” Igor then reached out and touched Jeffrey’s arm. They beheld one another.

  Trying to be helpful, Dr. Silber said, “Isn’t that a beautiful color! It’s called H2O blue. I took one gallon of the stuff on the canoe and spread it out this spring. And it’s still there! It’s that concentrated. It’s a dye that creates a more opaque layer at the surface of the water, and that blocks the photosynthesis of the algae that I am constantly battling.”

  Lisa shouted, “What? The water’s not real?”

  Dr. Silber chuckled a little, and everyone fell silent. Finally, Igor said, “You know, Jeffrey, I remember now that Fischer book have stamp of Provo Public Library on inside cover.” Jeffrey laughed and said, “I fucking liberated that book.”

  *

  Demetrius Jordan’s jet-black convertible BMW was the kind of sports car where the back seat seems meant as more of a formality than a place for people to sit. The prestige of the leather front seats pushed itself back boldly, making the back seat look like a padded shelf. The seatbelt was too small for her, and Lisa secretly unclicked it before they even started. She figured the seatbelts weren’t meant to be used by a person anyway. It was probably some law that you had to have them in the back seat.

  Top down, they sped away, and everyone felt real cool with the hot summer wind swirling all around. Lisa poked her head between the two men and shouted into the less volatile air currents. She asked Demetrius about his tournament, what his rating was, who his teacher was.

  “I’ve never been able to play against the queen pawn” he said. “I’ve tried everything, like a middle-aged man who’s never been able to keep a relationship. I never say the right words. She’s always looking at my bad skin and my bald head. Whole thing makes me tired. I never have any power, to finish.” Both men laughed.

  Lisa confidently announced, “Oh, King’s Indian for sure. You can play it against the English and knight f3 too. First couple moves you don’t even have to think. You just go ahead and build that death star.”

  Demetrius grinned. “Alright, alright, ‘sac sac mate,’ right?”

  Lisa didn’t know that Demetrius was quoting Fischer. But she loved the steaming vulgarity of that phrase’s need to kill. And she screamed out to the quickly vanishing California farmland, “Oh, I’m definitely gonna get my sac on!” Lisa then rehearsed her own openings for Demetrius as if they were an elegant flowchart. She sounded professional, offering Tal’s openings from 1960 as if they were her personal secrets.

  After a time, the exhilarating breeze of the hot central valley at eighty-five miles per hour began to fray at the already tired chessplayers, and Demetrius pulled over to put the top up. The car now felt intimate, and Demetrius began confessing his woman troubles to the grandmaster. A pretense of their conversation seemed to be that Lisa was asleep in the back, not paying attention. But Lisa thought this was an adult sham, and that they were actually saying: Please, Lisa, feel free to listen. We men always follow the same paths in these conversations. They are worn and familiar. It is maybe the closest we ever come to each other.

  Demetrius began his complaint by saying that he needed a girlfriend who played chess. At least one who understood something about chess. If she didn’t, how would she understand and suffer his trips to places like Fresno? How would she know the pains and joys he suffered at the board? Igor didn’t say much in reply. And Demetrius’s hope for a chessplaying bride began to feel immodest after being spoken, as if that wish needed to put some clothes on: “I mean, I just want a woman who will tolerate my game, you know what I mean?”

  Igor said, “Don’t do it, man. Is disease, itch make worse.”

  Demetrius mentioned a woman way down in LA. She was 1800, he 1950. Together, they would study the classic games over their morning coffee. They would develop a whole vocabulary to talk about the game, with inside jokes that only they would understand. They would watch over each other’s progress, and become incredibly strong. They would reach expert (2000), maybe even master (2200)! Then they would go on a tour together, travelling the world.

  Igor laughed and said, “I think you wear chess goggles, yes?”

  “You know her?”

  “All Soviet player know. We share. We good communists.”

  “Well fuck, man. What am I supposed to do? Tell me what I’m supposed to do!”

  “You must cut,” Igor said.

  Then, as if Igor were telling a secret dream that could only be spoken very softly, he said, “She sometime call to me. She in Eastern Europe, big chess culture. She say, ‘Odysseus, come home. Tell me about your struggle.’ But is fantasy, you understand? Lifetime take for cut.”

  Igor fell silent. And Demetrius began telling about his experiences dating black women; how they openly despised his chess, and actively worked against that part of his life.

  Igor replied, “At least they honest. White American woman make underground system to stop the chess. Their anti-intellectualism always, how you say, ‘passive-aggressive.’ They never admit hatred to themselves.”

  Demetrius became thoughtful for a time, and then said, “The bitch of it is that black women hate chess because they associate it with white people.”

  “Such cruel misunderstanding,” Igor said.

  “They see a rich white man in a tailored suit. He holds his pinky finger out while he drinks his coffee from a little dainty cup.”

  “Ho!” Igor laughed. “Chessplayer poorest on planet!”

  “Nah, man,” Demetrius said. “It’s deeper than that. They see the same whitey whose children their mother raised. Same whitey who cheated their grandfathers. Same whitey whose blood is inside their lighter-skinned cousins. He’s always one move ahead, controlling everything—can’t be beat.”

  “Such misdirected hatred.”

  “Amen, Igor, Amen.”

  “Women never understand us, Demetrius, sacrifices we make. We share this trouble, that why we brothers.”

  *

  At 3:20 A.M., Lisa wiggled out of the sports car into the soft Orinda night. She
said her goodbyes to the two men and walked up a steep grassy lawn to a mansion that was not her own. But they didn’t pull away. The black convertible continued to quietly hum on the curb and Lisa realized that Demetrius was doing that adult thing where they wait until you’re inside the house. Her old house was two blocks away, with a foreclosed sign in front of it. There was no way she was going to admit this trouble to Igor and the world. If she ever told the truth everyone would make such a fuss, and they wouldn’t let her spend this one last night in Orinda.

  She rushed back down the slope to the car. “It’s not dangerous here,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  Demetrius said, “Hey, Lisa, you’re my friend, I just want to make sure you’re safely inside.”

  “I always use the back door,” Lisa lied. Then, after a pause in which Demetrius still didn’t drive away, Lisa said, “Umm . . . see, it’s just that I don’t want Jan to see you here.”

  Insulted, the black man drove away with the Russian. Alone, Lisa looked up to the stern mountain she had climbed over on her bicycle. That bulge blocked the Pacific wind that rolled underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and bit into Berkeley and Oakland. The foothills to the east guarded against the wild heat of the Central Valley that Lisa had just experienced. She had been protected, in Orinda.

  Lisa had often daydreamed about escaping out of her old window and climbing down the tree. In her mind, Lisa had practiced clambering down the branches of the great oak. She would be meeting her older friends; together they would do illegal things. She now laughed at herself and that memory. She never had any friends who broke things in the middle of the night. And she wouldn’t have been able to climb back up the tree in the early morning; she had been too fat. Now she climbed like an orangutan. And she was right, they hadn’t locked her old window.