“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.
“What about the other bishop? Over here?”