TEN
When she came into the room, she saw a thin young man wearing faded blue jeans and a matching denim shirt seated at one of the tables. His blond hair came almost to his shoulders. It was only when he rose and said, “Hello, Beth,” that she saw it was Benny Watts. The hair had been long in the cover photograph of Chess Review a few months before, but not that long. He looked pale and thin and very calm. Still, Benny had always been calm.
“Hello,” she said.
“I read about the game with Borgov.” Benny smiled. “It must have felt terrible.”
She looked at him suspiciously, but his face was open and sympathetic. And she did not hate him anymore for beating her; there was only one player she hated now, and he was in Russia.
“I felt like a fool,” she said.
“I know.” He shook his head. “Helpless. It all goes, and you just push wood.”
She stared at him. Chess players did not talk so easily about humiliations, did not admit weakness. She started to say something, when the tournament director spoke up loudly. “Play will begin in five minutes.” She nodded to Benny, attempted a smile, and found her table.
There wasn’t a face over a chessboard that she didn’t know from hotel ballrooms where tournaments were played or from photographs in Chess Review. She herself had been on the cover six months after Townes took her picture in Las Vegas. Half the other players here on this campus in the small Ohio town had been on the cover themselves at one time or another. The man she was playing now in her first game, a middle-aged master named Phillip Resnais, was on the cover of the current issue. There were fourteen players, many of them grandmasters. She was the only woman.
They played in some kind of lecture room with dark-green blackboards along the wall at one end and fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. There was a row of large institutional windows along one blue wall, with bushes, trees and a wide stretch of the campus visible through them. At one end of the room were five rows of folding chairs, and out in the hallway a sign announced a visitor’s fee of four dollars per session. During her first game there were about twenty-five people watching. A display board hung above each of the seven game tables, and two directors moved silently between the tables, changing the pieces after moves had been made on the real boards. The spectators’ seats were on a wooden platform to give them a view of the playing surfaces.
But it was all second-rate, even the university they were playing at. They were the highest-ranked players in the country, assembled here in a single room, but it had the feel of a high school tournament. If it were golf or tennis, Benny Watts and she would be surrounded by reporters, would be playing under something other than these fluorescent lights and on plastic boards with cheap plastic pieces, watched by a few polite middle-aged people with nothing better to do.
Phillip Resnais seemed to take it all seriously, but she felt like walking out. She did not, however. When he played pawn to king four, she pushed up her queen bishop pawn and started the Sicilian Defense. Now she was in the middle of the Rossolimo-Nimzovitch Attack, getting equality on the eleventh move with pawn to queen three. It was a move she had gone over with Beltik, and it worked the way Beltik said it would work.
By the fourteenth move she had him on the run, and by the twentieth it was decisive. He resigned on the twenty-sixth. She looked around her at the other games, all of them still in progress, and felt better about the whole thing. It would be good to be U.S. Champion. If she could beat Benny Watts.
She had a small private room in a dormitory with the bathroom down the hall. It was austerely furnished, but there was no sense of anyone else’s having lived in it, and she liked that. For the first several days she took her meals alone in the cafeteria and spent the evenings either at the desk in her room or in bed, studying. She had brought a suitcase full of chess books with her. They were lined up neatly at the back of the desk. She had also brought tranquilizers, just in case, but she did not even open the bottle during the first week. Her one game a day went smoothly, and although some of them lasted three or four hours and were grueling, she was never in danger of losing. As time went on, the other players looked at her with more and more respect. She felt serious, professional, sufficient.
Benny Watts was doing as well as she. The games were printed up every night from a Xerox in the college library, and copies were given to the players and spectators. She went over them in the evenings and mornings, playing some out on her board but going through most of them in her head. She always took the trouble to set up the game Benny had played and actually move the pieces, carefully studying the way he had played it. In a round robin each player met each of the others one time; she would meet Benny in the eleventh game.
Since there were thirteen games and the tournament lasted two weeks, there was one day off—the first Sunday. She slept late that morning, stayed a long time in the shower, and then took a long walk around the campus. It was very tranquil, with well-mowed lawns and elm trees and an occasional patch of flowers—a serene Midwestern Sunday morning, but she missed the competition of the match. She momentarily considered walking into the town, where she had heard there were a dozen places to drink beer, but thought better of it. She did not want to erode any more brain cells. She looked at her watch; it was eleven o’clock. She headed for the Student Union Building, where the cafeteria was. She would get some coffee.
There was a pleasant wood-paneled lounge on the main floor. When she came in, Benny Watts was sitting on a beige corduroy sofa at the far end of it with a chessboard and clock on the table in front of him. Two other players were standing nearby, and he was smiling at them, explaining something about the game in front of him.
She had started downstairs for the cafeteria when Benny’s voice called to her. “Come on over.” She hesitated, turned and walked over. She recognized the other two players at once; one of them she had beaten two days before with the Queen’s Gambit.
“Look at this, Beth,” Benny said, pointing to the board. “White’s move. What would you do?”
She looked at it a moment. “The Lopez?”
“That’s right.”
She was a little irritated. She wanted a cup of coffee. The position was delicate, and it took concentration. The other players remained silent. Finally she saw what was needed. She bent over wordlessly, picked up the knight at king three and set it down on queen five.
“See!” Benny said to the others, laughing.
“Maybe you’re right,” one of them said.
“I know I’m right. And Beth here thinks the same way I do. The pawn move’s too weak.”
“The pawn works only if he plays his bishop,” Beth said, feeling better.
“Exactly!” Benny said. He was wearing jeans and some kind of loose white blouse. “How about some skittles, Beth?”
“I was on my way for coffee,” she said.
“Barnes’ll get you coffee. Won’t you, Barnes?” A big, soft-looking young man, a grandmaster, nodded assent. “Sugar and cream?”
“Yes.”
Benny was pulling a dollar bill out of his jeans pocket. He handed it to Barnes. “Get me some apple juice. But not in one of those plastic cups. Get a milk glass.”
Benny set the clock by the board. He held out two pawns concealed in his hands, and the hand Beth tapped had the white one. After they set up the pieces Benny said, “Would you like to bet?”