“Queen takes queen. Check.” She could hear the sullenness in her voice.
“King takes,” Benny said, relaxing now at the wheel. Pennsylvania rolled by. Beth forced him to resign on the twenty-seventh move and felt somewhat better for it. She had always liked the Sicilian.
There were plastic bags full of garbage in the entryway to Benny’s apartment and the light overhead was only a dirty bare bulb. It was a white tile hallway and as depressing at midnight as the toilet in a bus station. There were three locks on Benny’s front door, which was painted red and had some impenetrable word like “Bezbo” written on it in black spray paint.
Inside was a small and cluttered living room with books piled everywhere. But the lighting was pleasant when he got the lamps on. One end of the room was a kitchen, and near it was a door going off to the bedroom. There was a grass rug and no sofa and chairs—just black pillows to sit on with lamps beside them.
The bathroom was orthodox enough, with a floor made of black-and-while tile and a broken handle on the hot-water tap. There was a tub and shower with a black plastic curtain. She washed her hands and face and came back into the living room. Benny had gone into the bedroom to unpack. Her bag was still on the living-room floor next to a bookcase. She walked over to it and looked wearily at the books. They were all on chess—all five shelves of them. Some were in Russian and German, but they were all on chess. She walked across the hard little rug to the other side of the room where there was another bookcase, this one made of boards resting on bricks. More chess. One whole shelf was Shakhmatni Byulleten going back to the nineteen-fifties.
“There’s room in this closet,” Benny shouted from the bedroom. “You can hang up when you want to.”
“Okay,” she said. Back on the turnpike she had thought they might make love when they got here. Now she wanted only to sleep. And what was she supposed to sleep on? “I thought I was going to get a sofa,” she said.
He came into the doorway. “I said ‘living room.’” He went back to the bedroom and returned with a bulky-looking thing and some kind of pump. He flipped it out in the middle of the floor and began pedaling the pump with his foot, and after a while it puffed up and became an air mattress. “I’ll get sheets,” Benny said. He brought them out of the bedroom.
“I’ll do it,” she said and took them from him. She didn’t like the looks of the mattress, but she knew where her pills were. She could get them out after he fell asleep, if she needed to. There would be nothing to drink in this apartment. Benny had not said so, but she knew.
She must have fallen asleep before Benny did, since she forgot about the pills in her luggage. She awoke to the sound of a klaxon outside—an ambulance or fire truck. When she tried to sit up she could not; there was no edge of the bed to hang her legs over. She pushed herself up and stood, wearing pajamas, and looked around. Benny was standing at the sink counter with his back to her. She knew where she was, but it looked different by daylight. The siren faded and was replaced by the general traffic sounds of New York. One blind was open and she could see the cab of a big truck as close as Benny was, and beyond it taxis weaving past. A dog barked intermittently.
Benny turned and came over to her. He was holding out a big cardboard cup to her.
“Chock Full O’ Nuts,” the cup read. Something seemed very strange about this. No one had ever given her anything in the morning—certainly not Mrs. Wheatley, who was never up before Beth had eaten her breakfast. She took the plastic top off and tasted the coffee. “Thanks,” she said.
“Dress in the bedroom,” Benny said.
“I need a shower.”
“It’s all yours.”
Benny had set up a folding card table with a green and beige chessboard on it. He was arranging the pieces when she came into the living room. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll start with these.” He handed her a roll of pamphlets and magazines wrapped with a rubber band. On top was a small pamphlet with a cheap paper cover reading “The Hastings Christmas Chess Congress—Falaise Hall, White Rock Gardens,” and under this, “A Record of Games.” The pages inside were dense with type, smudgily printed. There were two chess games on a page, with boldface captions: Luchenko—Uhlmann; Borgov—Penrose. He handed her another, titled simply Grandmaster Chess. It was much like the Hastings booklet. Three of the magazines were from Germany, and one was from Russia.
“We’ll play through the Hastings games,” Benny said. He went into the bedroom and came back with two plain wooden chairs, setting one on each side of the card table near the front window. The truck was still parked outside and the street was full of slow-moving cars. “You play the white pieces and I’ll play Black.”
“I haven’t had breakfast…”
“Eggs in the fridge,” Benny said. “We’ll play the Borgov games first.”
“All of them?”
“He’ll be in Paris when you go.”
She looked at the magazine in her hand and then over at the table by the window again, then at her watch. It was ten after eight. “I’ll have the eggs first,” she said.
They got sandwiches from a deli for lunch and ate them over the board. Supper came from a Chinese take-out on First Avenue. Benny would not let her play quickly through the openings; he stopped her whenever a move was at all obscure and asked her why she did it. He made her analyze everything out of the ordinary. Sometimes he would physically stop her hand from moving a piece to ask questions. “Why not advance the knight?” or “Why isn’t he defending against the rook?” or “What’s going to become of the backward pawn?” It was rigorous and intense, and he did not let up. She had been aware of such questions for years but had never allowed herself to pursue them with this kind of rigor. Often her mind would be racing with the attack possibilities inherent in the positions that developed in front of her, wanting to push Luchenko or Mecking or Czerniak into lightning attacks against Borgov, when Benny stopped her with a question about defense or opening the light or dark squares or contesting a file with a rook. It infuriated her sometimes, yet she could see the rightness of his questions. She had been playing grandmaster games in her head from the time she first discovered Chess Review, but she had not been disciplined about it. She played them to exult in the win—to feel the stab of excitement at a sacrifice or a forced mate, especially in the games that were printed in books precisely because they incorporated drama of that kind—like the game books by Fred Reinfeld that were full of queen sacrifices and melodrama. She knew from her tournament experience that you couldn’t rely on your opponent setting himself up for a queen sacrifice or a surprise mate with knight and rook; still, she treasured the thrill of games like that. It was what she loved in Morphy, not his routine games and certainly not his lost ones—and Morphy like everyone else had lost games. But she had always been bored by ordinary chess even when it was played by grandmasters, bored in the way that she was bored by Reuben Fine’s endgame analyses and the counteranalyses in places like Chess Review that pointed out errors in Reuben Fine. She had never done anything like what Benny was making her do now.
The games she was playing were serious, workmanlike chess played by the best players in the world, and the amount of mental energy latent in each move was staggering. Yet the results were often monumentally dull and inconclusive. An enormous power of thought might be implicit in a single white pawn move, say, opening up a long-range threat that could become manifest only in half a dozen moves; but Black would foresee the threat and find the move that canceled it out, and the brilliancy would be aborted. It was frustrating and anticlimactic, yet—because Benny forced her to stop and see what was going on—fascinating. They kept it up for six days, leaving the apartment only when necessary and once, on Wednesday night, going to a movie. Benny did not own a TV, or a stereo; his apartment was for eating, sleeping and chess. They played through the Hastings booklet and the Russian one, not missing a game except for the grandmaster draws.