“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?”
“Yes,” she said, between her teeth. A flash bulb popped. Beth pushed her queen’s pawn to queen four.
She played the Queen’s Gambit against him and by midgame felt with dismay that it had been a mistake. The Queen’s Gambit could lead to complicated positions, and this one was Byzantine. There were half a dozen threats on each side, and the thing that made her nervous, that made her reach out for a piece several times and then stop her hand before touching it and draw back, was that she didn’t trust herself. She did not trust herself to see everything Benny Watts could see. He played with a calm, pleasant precision, picking up his pieces lightly and setting them down noiselessly, sometimes smiling to himself as he did so. Every move he made looked solid as a rock. Beth’s great strength was in fast attack, and she could find no way to attack. By the sixteenth move she was furious with herself for playing the gambit in the first place.
There must have been forty people clustered around the especially large wooden table. There was a brown velvet curtain behind them with the names HARMON and WATTS pinned to it. The horrible feeling, at the bottom of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s office. For a moment she looked over the crowd around the table, trying to find Mrs. Wheatley, but she was not there. Beth turned back to the board and looked briefly at Benny. He smiled at her serenely, as though he were offering her a drink rather than a head-splitting chess position. Beth set her elbows on the table, leaned her cheeks against her clenched fists and began to concentrate.
After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess. She looked at him again. His eyes were studying the board now. He can’t move until I do. He can only move one piece at a time. She looked back to the board and began to consider the effects of trading, to picture where the pawns would be if the pieces that clogged the center were exchanged. If she took his king knight with her bishop and he retook with the queen pawn… No good. She could advance the knight and force a trade. That was better. She blinked and began to relax, forming and reforming the relationships of pawns in her mind, searching for a way of forcing an advantage. There was nothing in front of her now but the sixty-four squares and the shifting architecture of pawns—a jagged skyline of imaginary pawns, black and white, that flowed and shifted as she tried variation after variation, branch after branch of the game tree that grew from each set of moves. One branch began to look better than the others. She followed it for several half-moves to the possibilities that grew from it, holding in her mind the whole set of imaginary positions until she found one that had what she wanted to find.