The Queen's Gambit: Chapters 13–14

Beth felt like crying, but she kept the quaver out of her voice.

When they met at Toby’s the spontaneity was gone.

She shook her head in revulsion and started prying the boxes loose. The thought of frozen fried chicken and roast beef and turkey made her ill; she dumped them all in a plastic shopping bag.

The stationery had about twenty names down the side, under an embossed cross.

The winter light in San Francisco was remarkable; she had never seen anything quite like it before. It gave the buildings a preternatural clarity of line, and when she climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill and looked back, she caught her breath at the sharp focus of the houses and hotels that lined the long steep street and below them the perfect blue of the bay.

“But you haven’t studied law.”
Jolene laughed. “I expect they like it that way. Fine, Slocum and Livingston don’t want any black female reviewing torts..."

When I did the interview I dropped a lot of words like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘dichotomy,’ and they picked right up.

When I did the interview I dropped a lot of words like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘dichotomy,’ and they picked right up.

Once the steps had looked broad and imposing to her, and the tarnished brass plaque had seemed a stern warning.

She had come to accept the Sunday-morning chess games as her prerogative.

It took another hour after putting the chairs away to write the précis Mrs. Deardorff had assigned.

She did it every Sunday for a year, and Mrs. Deardorff returned it every Monday with red marks and some grim exhortation like “Rewrite. Faulty organization.”

She had been bright and eager, and her mind was voracious in its appetite for chess.

For a moment the whole autocratic institution of Russian chess merged in her mind with the autocracy of the place where she was now standing.

She could see Deardorff’s face in her mind—the thin, rouged cheeks, the tight, reproving smile, the little sadistic glint in her eyes.

It was an ordinary-sized coffin, and Beth wondered briefly how they could fit a man of Shaibel’s girth into it.

She wore a beige suit and pumps and smiled a good deal in a way totally devoid of feeling.

The conversation faltered for a moment, and Miss Dodge spoke.

The Holy Word is anathema to the Kremlin, and it is one of the major purposes of Christian Crusade to contest the Kremlin and the atheists who sit there.

Some phrases in it were underlined, like “the atheist-communist nexus” and “a militant Christian Endeavor."

It would pay her hotel bill and incidental expenses on the trip.

Then he held the glass toward Beth in a perfunctory way, and she shook her head.

She missed Benny’s quick and sober mind, his judgment and tenacity, his knowledge of chess and his knowledge of her.

By the time they came down through the heavy clouds and she had her first sight of Russia, which looked from above as much like Kentucky as anything else, she had taken three of the pills, slept fitfully for a few hours and was feeling the glassy-eyed numbness that she used to feel after a long trip on a Greyhound bus.

Mr. Booth had said Russian men dressed as though their clothes came from a nineteen-thirties Montgomery Ward catalogue, but these men were soberly dapper in expensive gray gaberdine and worsted.

The pieces were large and solid; they stood out with a comforting clarity on the board, each of them exactly centered in its home square, each sharply outlined, cleanly turned, finely burnished.

She felt sanguine about the reading she had done over the past six months; it was nice to know what to expect.

He studied it for a long time while his clock ticked loudly and then did what she had fervently hoped he might do; he pushed the king bishop pawn up to attack the rook.

Even Laev, who had been so withdrawn at the tournament that morning, was ebullient.

Then he reached out and continued the advance of his knight’s pawn as if heedless of where she now had her knight.

They were both entrenched with every piece supported at least once and many of them twice.

Every now and then she would see a glimmer of a possibility way down the line, eight or ten moves away, but she was never able to make it materialize.

It was a hot night and she had the window open in her room while she sat at the ornate writing desk with her chessboard on it, studying the adjourned position, looking for ways to embarrass Luchenko’s rook, or to use the rook’s vulnerability as a cover for attacking him somewhere else.

On the table was a crystal decanter...

“Excellent!” he said, in English. “A beautiful recovery!”
His words were so conciliatory that she was astonished.

His naturalness and lack of rancor made her suddenly ashamed.

The Blacks were huddled around their king in a vain attempt to protect, and the White artillery was coming at its corner from all over the board.

She gave it twenty minutes, penetrated it as well as she could, and responded with a complete deviation from the Albin.

In the whole of her mind, in the whole of her attention she saw only those embodiments of danger—knight, bishop, rook, pawn, king and queen.

She kept her eyes closed and examined the position minutely. It was as complicated as anything she had ever played out from a book, and there was no printed analysis to show what the next move was or who would win.