The Queen's Gambit: Chapters 11–12

She did not like Benny’s insouciance in the face of her uncertainty, the kind of sunny blankness that suffused his face from time to time.

She did not like Benny’s insouciance in the face of her uncertainty, the kind of sunny blankness that suffused his face from time to time.

She could hear the sullenness in her voice.

It was rigorous and intense, and he did not let up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Benny needed a lesson in humility.”
“I’m already tops in humility,” Benny said.

It was not whole games now but particular situations—positions called “theoretically important” and “warranting close study.”

He was in a cheerful mood, but Beth felt somehow resentful.

She would meet a Dutch grandmaster in ten minutes and play Black against him, but she felt no apprehension.

He was forced to yield to her a bit at a time until, bottled up and irrecoverably behind, he gave up.

His face was distorted with ponderous mirth.

When she came in and saw him sitting at the table, he did not seem so formidable.

She knew, move by move, eight games in which Borgov had played this variation, had gone over each of them with Benny, analyzing each remorselessly.

Borgov was strong, imperturbable and wily, but there was no sorcery in his play.

By the thirty-fifth her throat was dry, and what she saw in front of her on the board was the disarray of her position and the growing strength of Borgov’s.

She had played extraordinarily well. And at the end of it her position was a shambles, and Borgov looked as though it had been nothing.

The tumbler was clear and clean...

She finished it slowly, and the deep fury in her began to subside.

Her speech was clear and sharp; her gait was steady.

Sometimes, her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as intense as the pain of a burst abscess in the jaw—a toothache so potent that nothing but drink could alleviate it.

Almadén was better than Paul Masson, less astringent on the tongue.

The Gibsons, though, could hit her like a club, and she became wary of them...

She always spoke aloud to check her level of sobriety before picking up the receiver.

She would drink less, taper off.

...her stomach felt queasy.

Foster was a pale blond in his twenties; he made his moves with a prissy carefulness that was maddening.

She was suddenly angry that she had agreed to play in this third-rate tournament, and angry that she had to go back and contend with Foster.

And then, on the twenty-third move, Foster began a series of trades in the center of the board, and she found herself unable to stop it, watching her pieces disappear with a sick feeling in her stomach, watching her position become more and more stark in its deterioration.

The game she had lost was inconsequential and the tournament was nothing, but the humiliation was overwhelming.

What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift?