The Queen's Gambit (16 page)

“They really do,” Nobile said. “I don’t think there’s been an American with a prayer against the Russians for twenty years. It’s like ballet. They
pay
people to play chess.”

Beth thought of those pictures in
Chess Review
, of the men with grim faces, bending over chessboards—Borgov and Tal, Laev and Shapkin, scowling, wearing dark suits. Chess in Russia was a different thing than chess in America. Finally she asked, “How do I get in the U.S. Open?”

“Just send in an entry fee,” Nobile said. “It’s like any other tournament, except the competition’s stiffer.”

***

She sent in her entry fee, but she did not play in the U.S. Open that year. Mrs. Wheatley developed a virus that kept her in bed for two weeks, and Beth, who had just passed her fifteenth birthday, was unwilling to go alone. She did her best to hide it, but she was furious at Alma Wheatley for being sick, and at herself for being afraid to make the trip to Los Angeles. The Open was not as important as the U.S. Championship, but it was time she started playing in something other than events chosen solely on the basis of the prize money. There was a tight little world of tournaments like the United States Championship and the Merriwether Invitational that she knew of through overheard conversations and from articles in
Chess Review
; it was time she got into it, and then into international chess. Sometimes she would visualize herself as what she wanted to become; a truly professional woman and the finest chessplayer in the world, traveling confidently by herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene. She often told herself that she would send Jolene a card or a letter, but she never did. Instead she would study herself in the bathroom mirror, looking for signs of that poised and beautiful woman she wanted to become.

At sixteen she had grown taller and better-looking, had learned to have her hair cut in a way that showed her eyes to some advantage, but she still looked like a schoolgirl. She played tournaments about every six weeks now—in states like Illinois and Tennessee, and sometimes in New York. They still chose ones that would pay enough to show a profit after the expenses for the two of them. Her bank account grew, and that was a considerable pleasure, but somehow her career seemed to be on a plateau. And she was too old to be called a prodigy anymore.

SIX

Although the U.S. Open was being held in Las Vegas, the other people at the Mariposa Hotel seemed oblivious to it. In the main room the players at the craps tables, at roulette and at the blackjack tables wore brightly colored double-knits and shirts; they went about their business in silence. On the other side of the casino was the hotel coffee shop. The day before the tournament Beth walked down an aisle between crapshooters where the main sound was the tapping of clay chips and of dice on felt. In the coffee shop she slid onto a stool at the counter, turned around to look at the mostly empty booths and saw a handsome young man sitting hunched over a cup of coffee, alone. It was Townes, from Lexington.

She stood up and went over to the booth. “Hello,” she said.

He looked up and blinked, not recognizing her at first. Then he said, “Harmon! For Christ’s sake!”

“Can I sit down?”

“Sure,” he said. “I should have known you. You were on the list.”

“The list?”

“The tournament list. I’m not playing.
Chess Review
sent me to write it up.” He looked at her. “I could write you up. For the
Herald-Leader
.”

“Lexington?”

“You got it. You’ve grown a lot, Harmon. I saw the piece in
Life
.” He looked at her closely. “You’ve even gotten good-looking.”

She felt flustered and did not know what to say. Everything about Las Vegas was strange. On the table in each booth was a lamp with a glass base filled with purple liquid that bubbled and swirled below its bright pink shade. The waitress who handed her a menu was dressed in a black miniskirt and fishnet hose, but she had the face of a geometry teacher. Townes was handsome, smiling, dressed in a dark sweater with a striped shirt open at the throat. She chose the Mariposa Special: hot cakes, scrambled eggs and chili peppers with the Bottomless Cup of coffee.

“I could do half a page on you for the Sunday paper,” Townes was saying.

The hot cakes and eggs came, and Beth ate them and drank two cups of coffee.

“I’ve got a camera in my room,” Townes said. He hesitated. “I’ve got chessboards, too. Do you want to play?”

She shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go up.”

“Terrific!” His smile was dazzling.

The drapes were open, with a view of a parking lot. The bed was huge and unmade. It seemed to fill the room. There were three chessboards set up: one on a table by the window, one on the bureau, and the third in the bathroom next to the basin. He posed her by the window and shot a roll of film while she sat at the board and moved the pieces. It was difficult not to look at him as he walked around. When he came close to her and held a little light meter near her face, she found herself catching her breath at the sensation of warmth from his body. Her heart was beating fast, and when she reached out to move a rook she saw that her fingers were trembling.

He clicked off the last shot and began rewinding the film. “One of those should do it,” he said. He set the camera on the nightstand by the bed. “Let’s play chess.”

She looked at him. “I don’t know what your first name is.”

“Everyone calls me Townes,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I call you Harmon. Instead of Elizabeth.”

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?”