On Tuesday she got her lawyer in Kentucky on the phone and asked him to see if everything was all right at the house. She went to Benny’s branch of Chemical Bank and opened an account with the winner’s check from Ohio. It would take five days for it to clear. She had enough traveler’s checks to pay her share of the expenses until then.
They did remarkably little talking during the first week. Nothing sexual happened. Beth had not forgotten about it, but she was too busy going over chess games. When they finished, sometimes at midnight, she would sit for a while on a pillow on the floor or take a walk to Second or Third Avenue and get an ice cream or a Hershey bar at a deli. She went into none of the bars, and she seldom stayed out long. New York could be grim and dangerous-looking at night, but that wasn’t the reason. She was too tired to do more than go back to the apartment, pump up her mattress and go to sleep.
Sometimes being with Benny was like being with no one at all. For hours at a time he would be completely impersonal. Something in her responded to that, and she became impersonal and cool herself, communicating nothing but chess.
But sometimes it would change. Once when she was studying an especially complex position between two Russians, a position that ended in a draw, she saw something, followed it, and cried out, “Look at this, Benny!” and started moving the pieces around. “He missed one. Black has this with the knight…” and she showed a way for the black player to win. And Benny, smiling broadly, came over to where she was sitting at the board and hugged her around the shoulders.
Most of the time, chess was the only language between them. One afternoon when they had spent three or four hours on endgame analysis she said wearily, “Don’t you get bored sometimes?” and he looked at her blankly. “What else is there?” he said.
They were doing rook and pawn endings when there was a knock at the door. Benny got up and opened it, and there were three people. One was a woman. Beth recognized one man from a Chess Review piece about him a few months before and the other looked familiar, although she couldn’t place him. The woman was striking. She was about twenty-five, with black hair and a pale complexion, and she was wearing a very short gray skirt and some kind of military shirt with epaulets.
“This is Beth Harmon,” Benny said. “Hilton Wexler, Grandmaster Arthur Levertov, and Jenny Baynes.”
“Our new champ,” Levertov said, giving her a little bow. He was in his thirties and balding.
“Hi,” Beth said. She stood up from the table.
“Congratulations!” Wexler said. “Benny needed a lesson in humility.”
“I’m already tops in humility,” Benny said.
The woman held out her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
It felt strange to Beth to have all these people in Benny’s small living room. It seemed as though she had lived half her life in this apartment with him, studying chess games, and it was outrageous for anyone else to be there. She had been in New York nine days. Not knowing exactly what to do, she sat down at the board again. Wexler came over and stood at the other side. “Do you do problems?”
“No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural. White to move and mate in two. It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.
“Let me show you one,” Wexler said. His voice was friendly and easy. “Can I mess this up?”
“Go ahead.”
“Hilton,” Jenny said, coming over to them, “she’s not one of your problem freaks. She’s the U.S. Champion.”
“It’s okay,” Beth said. But she was glad of what Jenny had said.
Wexler put pieces on the board until there was a weird-looking position with both queens in corners and all four rooks on the same file. The kings were nearly centered, which would be unlikely in a real game. When he finished, he folded his arms across his chest. “This is my favorite,” he said. “White wins it in three.”
Beth looked at it, annoyed. It seemed silly to deal with something like this. It could never come up in a game. Advance the pawn, check with the knight, and the king moved to the corner. But then the pawn queened, and it was stalemate. Maybe the pawn knighted, to make the next check. That worked. Then if the king didn’t move there after the first check… She went back to that for a moment and saw what to do. It was like a problem in algebra, and she had always been good at algebra. She looked up at Wexler. “Pawn to queen seven.”
He looked astonished. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s fast.”
Jenny was smiling. “See, Hilton,” she said.
Benny had been watching all this silently. “Let’s do a simultaneous,” he said suddenly to Beth. “Play us all.”
“Not me,” Jenny said. “I don’t even know the rules.”
“Do we have enough boards and pieces?” Beth asked.
“On the shelf in the closet.” Benny went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard box. “We’ll set these up on the floor.”
“Time control?” Levertov said.
Beth suddenly thought of something. “Let’s do speed chess.”
“It gives us an edge,” Benny said. “We can think on your time.”
“I want to try it.”
“No good.” Benny’s tone was severe. “You’re not very good at speed chess anyway. Remember?”
Something in her responded strongly to what he was not saying. “I’ll bet you ten I beat you.”
“What if you throw the other games and use all your time against me?”
She could have kicked him. “I’ll bet you ten on each of them, too.” She was surprised at the firmness in her own voice. She sounded like Mrs. Deardorff.
Benny shrugged. “Okay. It’s your money.”
“Let’s put all three boards on the floor. I’ll sit in the middle.”
They did it, using three clocks. Beth had been very sharp for the past several days, and she played with unhesitating precision, attacking on all the boards at once. She beat the three of them with time to spare.
When it was over, Benny didn’t say anything. He went to the bedroom, got his billfold, took three tens out of it and handed them to Beth.
“Let’s do it again,” Beth said. There was a bitterness in her voice; hearing the words, she knew it could have meant sex: Let’s do it again. If this was what Benny wanted, this was what he would get. She began setting up the pieces.
They got into position on the floor, and Beth played the whites on all three again. The boards were fanned out in front of her so that she didn’t have to spin around to play them, but she found herself hardly consulting them, anyway, except to make the moves. She played from chessboards in her head. Even the mechanical business of making the moves and punching the clocks was effortless. Benny’s position was hopeless when his clock flag fell; she had time left over. He gave her another thirty, and when she suggested trying again he said, “No.”
There was tension in the room, and no one knew how to deal with it. Jenny tried to laugh about it, saying, “It’s just male chauvinism,” but it didn’t help. Beth was furious with Benny—furious at him for being easy to beat and furious with the way he was taking it, trying to look unmoved, as though nothing affected him.