The Queen's Gambit (22 page)

She finished unpacking that afternoon and came down from the bedroom to fix coffee. While the water was coming to a boil she went into the little downstairs bathroom to wash her face and suddenly, standing there surrounded by blue, by Mrs. Wheatley’s blue bathroom rug and blue towels and blue soap and blue washcloths, something hot exploded in her belly and her face was drenched with tears. She took a towel from the rack and held it against her face and said, “Oh Jesus Christ” and leaned against the washbasin and cried for a long time.

She was still drying her face when the phone rang.

The voice was male. “Beth Harmon?”

“Yes.”

“This is Harry Beltik. From the State Tournament.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah. I hear you dropped one to Borgov. Wanted to give condolences.”

As she laid the towel on the back of the overstuffed sofa she noticed a half-finished pack of Mrs. Wheatley’s cigarettes on its arm. “Thanks,” she said, picking up the package and holding on to it tightly.

“What were you playing? White?”

“Black.”

“Yeah.” There was a pause. “Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“It’s better that way.”

“What’s better?”

“It’s better to be Black if you’re going to lose it.”

“I suppose so.”

“What’d you play? Sicilian?”

She gently set the package of cigarettes back on the chair arm. “Ruy Lopez. I let him do it to me.”

“Mistake,” Beltik said. “Look, I’m in Lexington for the summer. Would you like some training?”

“Training?”

“I know. You’re better than me. But if you’re going to play Russians, you’ll need help.”

“Where are you?”

“At the Phoenix Hotel. I’m moving to an apartment Thursday.”

She looked around the room for a moment, at the stack of Mrs. Wheatley’s women’s magazines on the cobbler’s bench, the pale-blue drapes on the windows, the oversized ceramic lamps with the cellophane still wrapped around their yellowing shades. She took in a long breath and let it out silently. “Come on over,” she said.

He drove up twenty minutes later in a 1955 Chevrolet with red-and-black flames painted on the fenders and a broken headlamp, pulling up to the curb at the end of the patterned-brick walk. She had been watching for him from the window and was on the front porch when he got out of the car. He waved at her and went to the trunk. He was wearing a bright-red shirt and gray corduroy pants with a pair of sneakers that matched the shirt. There was something dark and quick about him, and Beth, remembering his bad teeth and his fierce way of playing chess, felt herself stiffen a little at the sight of him.

He bent over the trunk and lifted out a cardboard box, clearly heavy, tossed the hair out of his eyes and came up the walk. The box said HEINZ TOMATO KETCHUP in red letters; it was open at the top and filled with books.

He set it on the living-room rug and unceremoniously took Mrs. Wheatley’s magazines from the coffee table and slipped them into the magazine rack. He began taking books out of the box one at a time, reading off the titles and piling them on the table. “A. L. Deinkopf,
Middle Game Strategy
; J. R. Capablanca,
My Chess Career
; Fornaut,
Alekhine’s Games 1938–1945
; Meyer,
Rook and Pawn Endings
.”

Some of them were books she had seen before; a few of them she owned. But most were new to her, heavy-looking and depressing to see. She knew there were a great many things she needed to know. But Capablanca had almost never studied, had played on intuition and his natural gifts, while inferior players like Bogolubov and Grünfeld memorized lines of play like German pedants. She had seen players at tournament after their games had ended, sitting motionless in uncomfortable chairs oblivious to the world, studying opening variations or middle-game strategy or endgame theory. It was endless. Seeing Beltik methodically removing one heavy book after another, she felt weary and disoriented. She glanced over at the TV: a part of her wanted to turn it on and forget chess forever.

“My summer’s reading,” Beltik said.

She shook her head irritably. “I study books. But I’ve always tried to play it by ear.”

He stopped, holding three copies of
Shakhmatni Byulleten
in his hands, their covers worn with use, frowning at her. “Like Morphy,” he said, “or Capablanca?”

She was embarrassed. “Yes.”

He nodded grimly and set the stack of bulletins on the floor by the coffee table. “Capablanca would have beaten Borgov.”

“Not every game.”

“Every game that counted,” Beltik said.

She studied his face. He was younger than she remembered him. But she was older now. He was an uncompromising young man; every part of him was uncompromising. “You think I’m a prima donna, don’t you?”

He permitted himself a small smile. “We’re all prima donnas,” he said. “That’s chess for you.”

When she put the TV dinners in the oven that night, they had two boards set up with endgame positions: his set with its green and cream squares, its heavy plastic pieces; her wooden board with its rosewood and maple men. Both sets were the Staunton pattern that all serious players used; both had four-inch kings. She hadn’t invited him to stay for lunch and dinner; it had been understood. He went to the grocery store a few blocks away for the food while she sat musing over a group of possible rook moves, trying to avoid a draw in a theoretical game. While she made lunch he lectured her about keeping in good physical shape and getting enough sleep. He had also bought the two frozen dinners for supper.

“You’ve got to stay
open
,” Beltik said. “If you get locked into one idea—like this king knight pawn, say—it’s death. Look at this…” She turned to his board on the kitchen table. He was holding a cup of coffee and standing, frowning down at the board, holding his chin with the other hand.

“Look at what?” she said, irritated.

He reached down, picked up the white rook, moved it across the board to king rook one—the lower right-hand corner. “Now his rook pawn’s pinned.”

“So what?”

“He’s got to move the king now or he gets stuck later.”

“I see that,” she said, her voice a little softer now. “But I don’t see—”

“Look at the queenside pawns, way over here.” He pointed to the other side of the board, at the three white pawns interlinked. She walked over to the table to get a better look. “He can do this,” she said, and moved the black rook over two squares.

Beltik looked up at her. “Try it.”

“Okay.” She sat down behind the pieces.

In half a dozen moves Beltik had gotten his queen bishop pawn to the seventh rank and queening it was inevitable. It would cost the rook and the game to stop it. He had been right; it was necessary to move the king when the rook had come across the board. “You were right,” she said. “Did you figure it out?”

“It’s from Alekhine somewhere,” he said. “I got it from a book.”

Beltik went back to his hotel after midnight, and Beth stayed up for several hours reading the middle-game book, not setting up the positions on a board but reviewing them in her imagination. One thing bothered her, but she did not let herself dwell on it. She could not picture the pieces as easily as she had when she was eight and nine years old. She could still do it, but it was more of an effort and sometimes she was uncertain about where a pawn or a bishop belonged and had to retrace the moves in her mind to make sure. She played on doggedly into the night, using her mind and the book only, sitting in Mrs. Wheatley’s old television-watching armchair in T-shirt and blue jeans. Every now and then she would blink and look around her, half expecting to see Mrs. Wheatley sitting nearby with her stockings rolled down and her black pumps on the floor beside her chair.

Beltik was back at nine the next morning, with half a dozen more books. They had coffee and played a few five-minute games on the kitchen table. Beth won all of them, decisively, and when they had finished the fifth game Beltik looked at her and shook his head. “Harmon,” he said, “you have really got it. But it’s improvisation.”

She stared at him. “What the hell,” she said. “I wiped you out five times.”

He looked back across the table at her coolly and took a sip from his coffee cup. “I’m a master,” he said, “and I’ve never played better in my life. But I’m not what you’re going to be up against if you go to Paris.”

“I can beat Borgov with a little more work.”

“You can beat Borgov with a lot more work. Years more work. What in hell do you think he is? Another Kentucky ex-champion like me?”

“He’s World Champion. But—”

“Oh, shut up!” Beltik said. “Borgov could have beaten both of us when he was ten. Do you know his career?”

Beth looked at him. “No, I don’t.”

Beltik got up from the table and walked purposively into the living room. He pulled a green-jacketed book from the stack next to Beth’s chessboard and brought it to the kitchen, tossing it on the table in front of her.
Vasily Borgov: My Life in Chess
. “Read it tonight,” he said. “Read the games from Leningrad 1962 and look at the way he plays rook-pawn endings. Look at the games with Luchenko and with Spassky.” He picked up his near-empty coffee cup. “You might learn something.”

***

It was the first week in June and japoncia blazed in bright coral outside the kitchen window. Mrs. Wheatley’s azaleas had begun to bloom and the grass needed mowing. There were birds. It was a beautiful week of the best kind of Kentucky spring. Sometimes late at night after Beltik had left, Beth would go out to the backyard to feel the warmth on her cheeks and to take a few deep breaths of warm clean air, but the rest of the time she ignored the world outside. She had become caught up in chess in a new way. Her bottles of Mexican tranquilizers remained unused in the nightstand; the cans of beer in the refrigerator stayed in the refrigerator. After standing in the backyard for five minutes, she would go back into the house and read Beltik’s chess books for hours and then go upstairs and fall into bed exhausted.

On Thursday afternoon Beltik said, “I’m supposed to move into an apartment tomorrow. The hotel bill is killing me.”

They were in the middle of the Benoni Defense. She had just played the P-K5 he had taught her, on move eight—a move Beltik said came from a player named Mikenas. She looked up from the position. “Where is it? The apartment.”

“New Circle Road. I won’t be coming by so much.”

“It’s not that far.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll be taking classes. I ought to get a part-time job.”

“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.