“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 Games of Chess. On its dustjacket was a blowup of Benny’s Huckleberry Finn face. Seeing it now, she winced at the memory of losing, at her damnfool attempt to double his pawns. She got herself a cup of coffee and opened the book, forgetting her hangover.
By noon she had analyzed six of the games and was getting hungry. There was a little restaurant two blocks away, the kind of place that has liver and onions on the menu and display cards of cigarette lighters at the cashier’s stand. She brought the book with her and went over two more games while eating her hamburger and home fries. When the lemon custard came and was too thick and sweet to eat, she felt a sudden pang of longing for Mrs. Wheatley and the French desserts they had shared in places like Cincinnati and Houston. She shook it off, ordered a last cup of coffee and finished the game she was going over: the King’s Indian Defense, with the black bishop fianchettoed in the upper right-hand corner of the board, looking down the long diagonal for a chance to pounce. Black worked the king’s side while White worked the queen’s side after the bishop went into the corner. Very civilized. Benny, playing Black, won it handily.
She paid her check and left. For the rest of the day and night until one in the morning she played over all of the games in the book. When she had finished, she knew a great deal more about Benny Watts and about precision chess than she had known before. She took two of her Mexican tranquilizers and went to bed, falling asleep instantly. She awoke pleasantly at nine-thirty the next morning. While her breakfast eggs were boiling, she chose a book for morning study: Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess. It was an old book, in some ways outdated. The diagrams were grayish and cluttered, and it was hard to tell the black pieces from the white. But something in her could still thrill at the name Paul Morphy and at the idea of that strange New Orleans prodigy, well-bred, a lawyer, son of a high court judge, who when young dazzled the world with his chess and then quit playing altogether and lapsed into muttering paranoia and an early death. When Morphy played the King’s Gambit he sacrificed knights and bishops with abandon and then moved in on the black king with dizzying speed. There had never been anything like him before or since. It made her spine tingle just to open the book and see the games list: Morphy—Lowenthal; Morphy—Harrwitz; Morphy—Anderssen, followed by dates in the eighteen-fifties. Morphy would stay up all night in Paris before his games, drinking in cafes and talking with strangers, and then would play the next day like a shark—well-mannered, well-dressed, smiling, moving the big pieces with small, ladylike, blue-veined hands, crushing one European master after another. Someone had called him “the pride and the sorrow of chess.” If only he and Capablanca had lived at the same time and played each other! She began going over a game between Morphy and someone named Paulsen, played in 1857. The U.S. Championship would be in three weeks; it was time it was won by a woman. It was time she won it.