The Queen's Gambit: Chapters 7–10

At the school party, several other graduates offered Beth surreptitious drinks, but she refused.

“I thought at first it was the altitude,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Seven thousand three hundred and fifty feet.” Sitting down at the little brass vanity bench, she leaned forward on one elbow and began rouging her cheeks. “It makes a person positively giddy. But I think now it’s the culture.”

Here in Mexico City the voice was distant but the tone was theatrically gay, as though Alma Wheatley were savoring an incommunicable private mirth.

“Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley went on in a voice rich with plausibility. “You haven’t visited Bellas Artes or even Chapultepec Park. The zoo there is delightful..."

“Honey, you are what is called an ‘intuitive’ player, aren’t you?” Mrs. Wheatley had never discussed chess playing with her before.
“I’ve been called that. Moves come to me sometimes.”

“You need to relax. There's not another player in the world as gifted as you are. I haven’t the remotest idea what faculties a person uses in order to play chess well, but I am convinced that relaxation can only improve them.”

Despite the Mexican reputation for gaiety and abandon, it was a quiet place, and the crowd seemed more like the crowd at a museum.

Marenco brought the king’s knight out with civil orthodoxy.

She began to relax as her mind moved away from her body and onto the tableau of forces in front of her.

In her game the next day she played the Queen’s Gambit Declined against an Austrian named Diedrich, a pale, esthetic young man in a sleeveless sweater, and she forced him to resign in midgame with a relentless pressure in the center of the board.

She smiled ruefully. “It was fun while it lasted. He really had a pleasant sense of humor.”

Then he smiled shyly, a small furtive smile.

“We should perhaps adjourn now.”

The director handed her an envelope and stepped discreetly back a few steps. Girev rose and turned away politely.

He looked at her, and suddenly his earnest face broke into a broad smile.

She felt a dim unsureness about Mrs. Wheatley, despite her apparent resurgence; the image of her white skin, rouged cheeks and forced smiles made Beth uneasy.

She opened it to the first one and began to play through it, using her board and pieces. She seldom did this, generally relying on her ability to visualize a game when going over it, but she wanted to have Borgov in front of her as palpably as possible.

Every now and then a sound from Mrs. Wheatley or a tension in the air of the room brought her out of it for a moment, and she looked around dazedly, feeling the pained tightness of her muscles and the thin, intrusive edge of fear in her stomach.

Beth sat in the green armchair for hours, not hearing Mrs. Wheatley’s gentle snores, not sensing the strange smell of a Mexican hotel in her nostrils, feeling somehow that she might fall from a precipice, that sitting over the chessboard she had bought at Purcell’s in Kentucky, she was actually poised over an abyss, sustained there only by the bizarre mental equipment that had fitted her for this elegant and deadly game.

Everything he was doing was obvious, unimaginative, bureaucratic.

She felt stifled and played pawn to queen five, attacking his bishop, and then watched his inevitable moving of the bishop to rook six, threatening to mate.

I’m strapped for cash right now, but you can have the house and the equity.

Beth had to sign some official papers, had to absolve the hotel of responsibility and fill out government forms.

But Capablanca had almost never studied, had played on intuition and his natural gifts, while inferior players like Bogolubov and Grünfeld memorized lines of play like German pedants.

“You think I’m a prima donna, don’t you?”
He permitted himself a small smile. “We’re all prima donnas,” he said. “That’s chess for you.”

He went to the grocery store a few blocks away for the food while she sat musing over a group of possible rook moves, trying to avoid a draw in a theoretical game.

She played on doggedly into the night, using her mind and the book only, sitting in Mrs. Wheatley’s old television-watching armchair in T-shirt and blue jeans.

She sensed that for him it was a concession to talk about it, and her feelings were mixed.

By the fourteenth move she had him on the run, and by the twentieth it was decisive. He resigned on the twenty-sixth.

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.

“Barnes’ll get you coffee. Won’t you, Barnes?” A big, soft-looking young man, a grandmaster, nodded assent.

She nodded curtly and thanked him.

Something in the deferential manner of the tournament directors and the way the other players looked at her told her that the attention of the tournament had focused on this game.

In a round robin there was no precedence of boards; they would play at the third table in the row that began at the classroom door. But attention was centered on that table, and the spectators, who had already filled the seats and now included a dozen people standing, all became quiet as she seated herself.

Benny made a few moves, bringing his king out in the hopeless attempt to take off her pawns before she took away his, but even his arm as it moved the king was listless.