The Queen's Gambit

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 stomach 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.
At home she tried a Russian game book, but she couldn’t concentrate.
She started going through her game with Foster, setting the board up in the
kitchen, but the moves of it were too painful. That damned Stonewall, and
the hastily pushed pawn. A patzer’s move. Bad chess. Hungover chess. The
telephone rang, but she didn’t answer. She sat at the board and wished for a
moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be
back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with
Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny
had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no
one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator,
took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice
inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in
one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she
finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess.
Most people did.
When she awoke on the sofa the next morning, still wearing the Paris
clothes she had worn when losing the game to Foster, she was frightened in
a new way. She could sense her brain being physically blurred by alcohol,

---

its positional grasp gone clumsy, its penetration clouded. But after breakfast
she showered and changed and then poured herself a glass of wine. It was
almost mechanical; she had learned to cut off thought as she did it. The
main thing was to eat some toast first, so the wine wouldn’t burn her
stomach.
She kept drinking for days, but the memory of the game she had lost and
the fear of what she was doing to the sharp edge of her gift would not go
away, except when she was so drunk that she could not even think. There
was a piece in the Sunday paper about her, with one of the pictures taken
that morning at the high school, and a headline reading C
HESS
C
HAMP
D
ROPS FROM
T
OURNEY
. She threw the paper away without reading the
article.
Then one morning after a night of dark and confusing dreams she awoke
with an unaccustomed clarity: if she did not stop drinking immediately she
would ruin what she had. She had allowed herself to sink into this
frightening murk. She had to find a foothold somewhere to push herself free
of it. She would have to get help. With a great sense of relief, she suddenly
knew who it was she wanted to get help from.

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