The Queen's Gambit

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.
“What about the other bishop? Over here?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “It’ll have the check once the pawn is
moved and the knight’s traded. Can’t you see that?”
Suddenly he froze and glared at her. “No, I can’t” he said. “I can’t find it
that fast.”
She looked back at him. “I wish you could,” she said levelly.
“You’re too sharp for me.”

---

She could see the hurt underneath his anger, and she softened. “I miss
them too, sometimes,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”
***
On Saturday she started playing him with odds of a knight. He tried to act
casual about it, but she could see that he hated it. There was no other way
for them to have a real game. Even with the odds and with his playing the
white pieces she beat him the first two and drew the third.
That night he did not come to her bed, nor did he the next. She did not
miss the sex, which meant very little to her, but she missed something. On
the second night she had some difficulty going to sleep and found herself
getting up at two in the morning. She went to the refrigerator and got out
one of Mrs. Wheatley’s cans of beer. Then she sat down at the chessboard
and began idly moving the pieces around, sipping from the can. She played
over some Queen’s Gambit games: Alekhine—Yates; Tarrasch—von
Scheve; Lasker—Tarrasch. The first of these was one she had memorized
years before at Morris’s Book Store; the other two she had analyzed with
Beltik during their first week together. In the last there was a beautiful pawn
to Queen’s rook four on the fifteenth move, as sweetly deadly as a pawn
move could be. She left it on the board for the time it took to drink two
beers, just looking at it. It was a warm night and the kitchen window was
open; moths battered at the screen and somewhere far away a dog was
barking. She sat at the table wearing Mrs. Wheatley’s pink chenille robe
and drinking Mrs. Wheatley’s beer, feeling relaxed and easy in herself. She
was glad to be alone. There were three more beers in the refrigerator, and
she finished all of them. Then she went back up to bed and slept soundly
until nine in the morning.
***
On Monday at breakfast he said, “Look, I’ve taught you everything I
know.”
She started to say something but kept silent.

---

“I’ve got to start studying. I’m supposed to be an electrical engineer, not
a chess bum.”
“Okay,” she said. “You’ve taught me a lot.”
They were quiet for a few minutes. She finished her eggs and took her
plate to the sink. “I’m moving to that apartment,” Beltik said. “It’s closer to
the university.”
“Okay,” Beth said, not turning from the sink.
He was gone by noon. She took a TV dinner from the freezer for her
lunch but didn’t turn on the oven. She was alone in the house, her stomach
was in a knot, and she did not know any place to go. There were no movies
she wanted to see or people she wanted to call; there was nothing she
wanted to read. She walked up the stairs and through the two bedrooms.
Mrs. Wheatley’s dresses still hung in the closets and a half bottle of her
tranquilizers was still on the nightstand by the unmade bed. The tension she
felt would not go away. Mrs. Wheatley was gone, her body buried in a
cemetery at the edge of town, and Harry Beltik had driven off with his
chessboard and books, not even waving goodbye as he left. For a moment
she had wanted to shout at him to stay with her, but she said nothing as he
went down the steps and into his car. She took the bottle from the
nightstand and shook three of the green pills into her hand, and then a
fourth. She hated being alone. She swallowed the four pills without water,
the way she had as a child.
In the afternoon she bought herself a steak and a large baking potato at
Kroger’s. Before pushing her cart to the checkout, she went to the wine-
and-beer case and took out a fifth of burgundy. That night she watched
television and got drunk. She went to sleep on the couch, only barely able
to get to the set to turn it off.
Sometime during the night she awoke to a sense that the room was
reeling. She had to vomit. Afterward, when she went upstairs to bed, she
found that she was fully awake and very clear in her mind. There was a
burning sensation in her stomach, and her eyes were wide open in the dark
room as though looking for light. There was a powerful ache at the back of
her neck. She reached over, found the bottle and took more tranquilizers.
Eventually she went to sleep again.
She awoke the next morning with a crushing headache and a
determination to get on with her career. Mrs. Wheatley was dead. Harry

---

Beltik was gone. The U.S. Championship was in three weeks; she had been
invited to it before going to Mexico, and if she was going to win it, she was
going to have to beat Benny Watts. While her coffee was percolating in the
kitchen, she poured out the leftover burgundy from the night before, threw
away the empty bottle and found two books she had ordered from Morris’s
the day the invitation had come. One was the game record from the last
U.S. Championship and the other was called Benny Watts: My Fifty Best