The Queen's Gambit

Newsweek with her picture in it. They had given her a full page under

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“Sport.” The picture showed her playing Benny, and she remembered the
moment it was taken, during the game’s opening. The position of the pieces
on the display board was visible in the photograph, and she saw that her
memory was right, she had just made her fourth move. Benny looked
thoughtful and distant, as usual. The piece said she was the most talented
woman since Vera Menchik. Beth, reading it half-drunk, was annoyed at the
space given to Menchik, going on about her death in a 1944 bombing in
London before pointing out that Beth was the better player. And what did
being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in
America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her
being a woman in a man’s world. To hell with her; it wouldn’t be a man’s
world when she finished with it. It was noontime, and she put a pan of
canned spaghetti on to heat before reading the rest of the article. The last
paragraph was the strongest.
At eighteen, Beth Harmon has established herself as the queen of
American chess. She may be the most gifted player since Morphy or
Capablanca; no one knows just how gifted she is—how great a potential she
holds in that young girl’s body with its dazzling brain. To find out, to show
the world if America has outgrown its inferior status in world chess, she
will have to go where the big boys are. She will have to go to the Soviet
Union.
Beth closed the magazine and poured a glass of Almadén Mountain
Chablis to drink with her spaghetti. It was three in the afternoon and hot as
fury. And the wine was getting low; only two more bottles stood on the
shelf above the toaster.
***
A week after reading the Newsweek article she awoke on a Thursday
morning too sick to get out of bed. When she tried to sit up, she couldn’t.
Her head and stomach were throbbing. She was still wearing her jeans and
T-shirt from the night before, and she felt suffocated by them. But she could
not get them off. The shirt was stuck to her upper body, and she was too
weak to pull it over her head. There was a Gibson on the nightstand. She
managed to roll over and take it with both hands, and she got half of it

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down before beginning to retch. For a moment she thought she was
choking, but her breath came back eventually and she finished the drink.
She was terrified. She was alone in that furnace of a room and frightened
of dying. Her stomach was raw and all of her organs hurt. Had she poisoned
herself on wine and gin? She tried sitting up again, and with the gin in her
she managed it. She sat there for a few moments calming herself before she
went unsteadily into the bathroom and vomited. It seemed to cleanse her.
She managed to get her clothes off, and afraid of slipping in the shower and
breaking her hip the way unsteady old women did, she filled the tub with
lukewarm water and took a bath. She should call McAndrews, Mrs.
Wheatley’s old doctor, and make an appointment for sometime around
noon. If she could make it to his office. This was more than a hangover; she
was ill.
But downstairs, after her bath, she was steadier and got down two eggs
with no difficulty. The thought of picking up the phone and calling someone
seemed distant now. There was a barrier between herself and whatever
world the phone would attach her to; she could not penetrate the barrier.
She would be all right. She would drink less, taper off. Maybe she would
feel like calling McAndrews after a drink. She poured herself a glass of
chablis and began sipping it, and it healed her like the magic medicine it
was.
***
The next morning while she was eating breakfast the phone rang and she
picked it up without thinking. Someone named Ed Spencer was at the other
end; it took a moment to remember that he was the local tournament
director. “It’s about tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow?”
“The tournament. We wondered if you could come an hour early. The
Louisville paper is sending a photographer and we think WLEX will have
somebody. Could you come in at nine?”
Her heart sank. He was talking about the Kentucky State Championship,
she had completely forgotten it. She was supposed to defend her title. She
was supposed to go to Henry Clay High School tomorrow morning and
begin a two-day tournament as defending champion. Her head was

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throbbing and her hand that held her coffee cup was unsteady. “I don’t
know,” she said. “Can you call back in an hour?”
“Sure, Miss Harmon.”
“Thank you. I’ll tell you in an hour.”
She felt frightened, and she did not want to play chess. She had not
looked at a chess book or touched her pieces since buying the house from
Allston Wheatley. She did not want even to think about chess. Last night’s
bottle was still sitting on the counter next to the toaster. She poured half a
glass, but when she drank it, it stung her mouth and tasted foul. She set the
unfinished glass in the sink and got orange juice from the refrigerator. If she
didn’t clear her head and play the tournament, she would just be drunker
tomorrow and sicker. She finished the orange juice and went upstairs,
thinking of all the wine she had been drinking, remembering it in the pit of
her stomach. Her insides felt fouled and abused. She needed a hot shower
and fresh clothes.
It would be a waste. Beltik wouldn’t be in it, and there was no one else as
good as he. Kentucky was nothing in chess. Standing naked in the
bathroom, she started going through the Levenfish Variation of the Sicilian,
squinting her eyes and picturing the pieces on an imaginary board. She did
the first dozen moves without a mistake, although the pieces didn’t stand
out as clearly as they had a year before. She hesitated after move eighteen,
where Black played pawn to knight four and got equality. Smyslov-
Botvinnik, 1958. She tried to play out the rest of it, but her head was
aching, and after stopping to take two aspirin, she wasn’t sure where the
pawns were supposed to be. But she had gotten the first eighteen moves
right. She would stay sober today and play tomorrow. When she won the
state championship for the second time two years before, it had been
simple. After herself and maybe Harry, there weren’t any really strong
players in Kentucky. Goldmann and Sizemore were no problem.
When the phone rang again she told Ed Spencer she’d be there at nine-
thirty. A half-hour would be plenty of time for pictures.
***
In the back of her mind she had hoped Townes might show up with a
camera, but there was no sign of him. The man from Louisville wasn’t there

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either. She posed at Board One for a woman photographer from the Herald-
Leader, did a three-minute interview with a man from a local television
station, and excused herself to go out for a walk around the block before the
tournament began. She had managed to get through the day before without
drinking and had slept soundly enough with the help of three green pills,
but her stomach felt queasy. It was still morning but the sun was too bright;
she found herself beginning to sweat after one turn around the block. Her
feet hurt. Eighteen years old, and she felt like forty. She would have to stop
drinking. Her first opponent was somebody named Foster with a rating in
the 1800s. She would be playing Black, but it should be easy—especially if
he tried pawn to king four and let her get into the Sicilian.
Foster seemed calm enough, considering that he was playing the U.S.
Champion in his first round. He had the good sense not to open with the
king pawn against her. He played pawn to queen four, and she decided to
avoid the Queen’s Gambit and try to lead him into unfamiliar territory with
the Dutch Defense. That meant pawn to king bishop four. They went
through the book moves for a while until, somehow, she found herself
getting into the Stonewall Formation. It was a position she did not