“Bet?”
“We could play for five dollars a game.”
“I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Here it comes.” Beth saw Barnes hurrying across the room with a glass of juice and a white Styrofoam cup.
“Okay,” she said. “Five dollars.”
“Have some coffee,” Benny said, “and I’ll punch your clock.”
She took it from Barnes, had a long drink and set the half-empty cup on the coffee table. “Go ahead,” she said to Benny. She felt very good. The spring morning outdoors was all right, but this was what she loved.
He beat her with only three minutes on his clock. She played well but he played brilliantly, moving almost immediately each time, seeing through whatever she tried doing to him. She handed him a five-dollar bill from the billfold in her pocket and set up the pieces again, this time taking the black ones for herself. There were four other players standing nearby now, watching them.
She tried the Sicilian against his pawn to king four, but he wiped it away with a pawn gambit and got her into an irregular opening. He was incredibly fast. She had him in trouble at midgame with doubled rooks on an open file, but he ignored them and attacked down the center, letting her check him twice with the rooks, exposing his king. But when she tried to bring a knight into it for mate, he sprang loose and was at her queen and then her king, catching her finally in a mating net. She resigned before he could move in for the kill. She gave him a ten this time and he gave her the five back. She had sixty dollars in her pocket and more money back at the room.
By noon there were forty or more people watching. Most of the players from the tournament were there along with some of the spectators who regularly attended the games, college students and a group of men who might have been professors. She and Benny kept playing, not even talking now between games. Beth won the third one with a beautiful save just before her flag dropped, but she lost the next four and drew the fifth. Some of the positions were brilliantly complex, but there was no time for analysis. It was thrilling but frustrating. She had never in her life been beaten so consistently, and although it was only five-minute chess and not serious, it was an immersion in quiet humiliation. She had never felt like this before. She played beautifully, followed the game with precision and responded accurately to every threat, mounted powerful threats of her own, but it meant nothing. Benny seemed to have some resource beyond her understanding, and he won game after game from her. She felt helpless, and inside her there grew a quiet sense of outrage.
Finally she gave him her last five dollars. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. A row of empty Styrofoam cups sat by the board. When she got up to leave, there was applause and Benny shook her hand. She wanted to hit him but said nothing. There was random applause from the crowd in the room.
As she was leaving, the man she had played the first of the week, Phillip Resnais, stopped her. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “Benny plays speed chess as well as anyone in the world. It doesn’t really mean a lot.”
She nodded curtly and thanked him. When she went outside into the late-afternoon sunlight, she felt like a fool.
That night she stayed in her room and took tranquilizers. Four of them.
She felt rested in the morning, but stupid. Mrs. Wheatley had once described things as looking askew; that was how they looked to Beth when she awoke from her deep, tranquilized sleep. But she no longer felt the humiliation she had felt after being beaten by Benny. She took her pill bottle from the bedstand drawer and squeezed the top on it tight. It would not do to take any more. Not until the tournament was over. She thought suddenly of Thursday, the day she would play Benny, and she tensed. But she put the pills back in the drawer and got dressed. She ate breakfast early and drank three cups of strong coffee with it. Then she took a brisk walk around the main part of the campus, playing through one of the games from Benny Watts’s book. He was brilliant, she told herself, but not unbeatable. Anyway, she wouldn’t play him for three more days.
The games started at one and went on until four or five in the afternoon. Adjournments were finished either in the evening or the morning of the next day. By noon her head was clear and when she started her one o’clock game against a tall, silent Californian in a Black Power T-shirt, she was ready for him. Although he wore his hair in a kind of Afro, he was white—as all of them were. She answered his English Opening with both knights, making it a four-knights game, and decided against her normal practice to trade him down to an endgame. It worked beautifully, and she was pleased with her handling of the pawns; she had one on the sixth and one on the seventh rank when he resigned. It was easier than she had expected; her endgame study with Beltik had paid off.
That evening Benny Watts joined her at the cafeteria table while she was eating her dessert. “Beth,” he said, “it’s going to be you or me.”
She looked up from her rice pudding. “Are you trying to psych me out?”
He laughed. “No. I can beat you without that.”
She went on eating and said nothing.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t trying to hustle you.”
She took a sip of coffee. “You weren’t?”
“I just wanted some action.”
“And money,” Beth said. Although that wasn’t the point.
“You’re the best player here,” he said. “I’ve been reading your games. You attack like Alekhine.”
“You held me off well enough yesterday.”
“That doesn’t count. I know speed chess better than you. I play a lot of it in New York.”
“You beat me in Las Vegas.”
“That was a long time ago. You were too wrapped up in doubling my pawns. I couldn’t get away with that again.”
She finished her coffee in silence while he ate his dinner and drank his milk. When he had finished, she said, “Do you go over games in your head when you’re alone? I mean, play all the way through them?”
He smiled. “Doesn’t everybody?”
She permitted herself to watch television in the lounge of the Student Union Building that evening. Benny wasn’t there, although a few of the other players were. She went back to her room afterward, feeling lonely. It was her first tournament since Mrs. Wheatley died, and she missed her now. She took the endgame book from the collection on the desk and began studying. Benny was all right. It had been nice of him to talk to her that way. And she had gotten used to his hair by now; she liked it long, the way it was. He had really very good-looking hair.
She won Tuesday’s game, and Wednesday’s. Benny was still playing when she finished on Wednesday and she walked over to his table and saw in a moment that he had it all but won. He looked up at her and smiled. Then he made the word silently with his mouth: “Tomorrow.”
There was a children’s playground at the edge of the campus. She walked to it by moonlight and sat on one of the swings. What she really wanted was a drink, but that was out of the question. A bottle of red wine, with a little cheese. Then a few pills and off to bed. But she couldn’t. She had to be clear in the morning, had to be ready for the game against Benny Watts at one o’clock. Maybe she could take one pill and go to bed. Or two. She would take two. She swung herself back and forth a few times, listening to the squeaking of the chain that held the swing, before heading purposively back to the dormitory. She took the two pills, but it still was over an hour before she could sleep.