Notes from The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

13%
For a moment she almost choked in a sudden flush of inadequacy.
14%
Beth had slept in the dining room on a folding cot. She felt trapped then, too, and her arms were numb. There was a big space under the door that separated dining room from kitchen; the light had streamed in under it, along with the shouted words.
14%
Bits of glass caught light like rhinestones and lay in place shivering while the green pills rolled outward like a bright waterfall toward Mrs. Deardorff. 
18%
There was a closet, bigger than Mother’s had been, and a nightstand by the bed, with a little reading lamp. It was a beautiful room. If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.
29%
She gave a non-threatening check to his king, and he pulled away delicately and began advancing pawns. She stopped that handily with a pin and then feinted on the queenside with a rook. He was undeceived by the feint and, smiling, removed her pin, and on his next move continued the pawn advances. She retreated, hiding her king in a queenside castle. She felt somehow spacious and amused, yet her face remained serious. They continued their dance.
29%
It was after the nineteenth move, and she felt herself resisting it as it opened up in her mind, hating to let go of the pleasant ballet they had danced together. But there it was: four moves and he would have to lose a rook or worse. She hesitated and made the first move of the sequence.
31%
He didn’t see it until the move after next, and his game fell apart. He still had his comb in his hand six moves later when she got her queen’s pawn, passed, to the sixth rank. He brought his rook under the pawn. She attacked it with her bishop. Sizemore stood up, put his comb in his pocket, reached down to the board and set his king on its side. “You win,” he said grimly. The applause was thunderous.
31%
Beth had been holding two sanitary napkins in her right hand. “I don’t know how to put these on.” Mrs. Wheatley straightened herself up from her slumped position in the chair. “I am no longer a wife,” she said, “except by legal fiction. I believe I can learn to be a mother. I’ll show you how if you promise me never to go near Denver.”
32%
She placed the piece on its home square, stepped back over the velvet rope and walked to the girls’ room. She washed her face for the third time that day, tightened her sanitary belt, combed her bangs and went back to the gymnasium. More players had come in. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her skirt so that no one could see they were trembling.
38%
“Chess isn’t always ‘competitive,’” she said. “But you play to win.” Beth wanted to say something about how beautiful chess was sometimes, but she looked at Miss Balke’s sharp, inquiring face and couldn’t find the words for it.
39%
“It talks about the orphanage.” Beth had bought her own copy. “And it gives one of my games. But it’s mostly about my being a girl.” “Well, you are one.” “It shouldn’t be that important,” Beth said. “They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian.” “But, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “it makes you a celebrity!” Beth looked at her thoughtfully, “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.
41%
When he set the clock at the side of the board, she saw they both had the same amount of time. She did not want to play this game with him. She wanted to make love with him. She punched the button on her side, and his clock started ticking. He moved pawn to king four and pushed his button. She held her breath for a moment and began to play chess.
41%
When Beth gave her the glass, Mrs. Wheatley said, “I guess you’ve never had a beer before.” “I’m sixteen.” “Well…” Mrs. Wheatley frowned. She lifted the tab with a little pop and poured expertly into Beth’s glass until the white collar stood above the rim. “Here,” she said, as though offering medicine.
49%
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 did it mostly with pawns and was herself quietly amazed at the intricacies that seemed to flow from her fingertips as she took the center of the board and began to crush his position as one might crush an egg. He had played well, made no blunders or anything that could properly be called a mistake, but Beth moved with such deadly accuracy, such ...
50%
They continued with the moves as though they had been predetermined, and when it was over, the board was full of empty spaces. Each player had a rook, a knight, four pawns and the king. She brought her king out from the back rank, and so did he. At this stage the king’s power as an attacker became abruptly manifest; it was no longer necessary to hide it.
52%
There had been a few times over the past year when she felt like this, with her mind not only dizzied but nearly terrified by the endlessness of chess. By midnight Mrs. Wheatley had put her book aside and gone quietly to sleep. 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 ...
53%
He played pawn to queen four, as she knew he would, and she played pawn to queen knight four because she had to, so she would be ready when he moved the rook. The chandelier overhead was too bright. And now she began to feel dismay, as though the rest of the game were inevitable—as though she were locked into some choreography of feints and counterthreats in which it was a fixed necessity that she lose, like a game from one of the books where you knew the outcome and played it only to see how it happened.
54%
And meanwhile she was down a knight. Against a world’s champion, whose shirt was impeccably white, whose tie was beautifully tied, whose dark-jowled Russian face admitted no doubt or weakness.
54%
She saw her hand reach out, and taking the black king by its head, topple it onto the board. She sat there for a moment and heard the applause. Then, looking at no one, she left the room.
55%
For a moment it trembled in the sunshine and she had a sudden horrific vision of it falling off the lift and crashing to the tarmac, spilling out the embalmed middle-aged corpse of Mrs. Wheatley on the hot gray asphalt. But that did not happen. The casket was pulled handily into the cargo hold.
55%
She finished unpacking that afternoon and came down from the bedroom to fix coffee. While the water was coming to a boil she went into the little downstairs bathroom to wash her face and suddenly, standing there surrounded by blue, by Mrs. Wheatley’s blue bathroom rug and blue towels and blue soap and blue washcloths, something hot exploded in her belly and her face was drenched with tears. She took a towel from the rack and held it against her face and said, “Oh Jesus Christ” and leaned against the washbasin and cried for a long time.
56%
He was an uncompromising young man; every part of him was uncompromising. “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.”
57%
She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant’s hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.
59%
She awoke the next morning with a crushing headache and a determination to get on with her career. Mrs. Wheatley was dead. Harry Beltik was gone.
61%
She had never in her life been beaten so consistently, and although it was only five-minute chess and not serious, it was an immersion in quiet humiliation.
61%
Finally she gave him her last five dollars. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. A row of empty Styrofoam cups sat by the board. When she got up to leave, there was applause and Benny shook her hand. She wanted to hit him but said nothing. There was random applause from the crowd in the room.
61%
She felt rested in the morning, but stupid. Mrs. Wheatley had once described things as looking askew; that was how they looked to Beth when she awoke from her deep, tranquilized sleep. But she no longer felt the humiliation she had felt after being beaten by Benny. She took her pill bottle from the bedstand drawer and squeezed the top on it tight. It would not do to take any more. 
62%
She knew in part of herself that it wasn’t, that in Mexico City she had overwhelmed a string of professionals before wilting in the game with Borgov, that she had beaten grandmaster after grandmaster in this tournament, that even when she had been playing the janitor at Methuen Home as an eight-year-old she had played with a solidity that was altogether remarkable, altogether professional. Yet she felt now, however illogically, inexperienced.
66%
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 ...
66%
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.
67%
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.
67%
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.
68%
It was not whole games now but particular situations—positions called “theoretically important” and “warranting close study.” She lay there hearing the shouts of drunks in the street outside and mastered the intricacies of chess positions that were classic in their difficulty. Once during a lovers’ quarrel where the woman kept shouting, “I’m at my fucking wit’s end. At my wit’s fucking end!” and the man kept saying, “Like your fucking sister,” Beth lay on her cot and came to see a way of queening a pawn that she had never seen before. It was beautiful. It would work. She could use it. “Up your ...
69%
Finally, while one of the men was dealing, she tapped Benny on the shoulder and said softly, “I’m leaving.” He nodded and said, “Okay” and turned his attention back to his cards. Going down in the elevator, she felt she could have beaten him over the head with a two-by-four. The cool son of a bitch. It was quick sex with her, and then off to the boys. He had probably planned it that way for a week. Tactics and strategy. She could have killed him.
72%
She called Benny from Kennedy Airport and told him she had lost the final game, that Borgov had outplayed her. Benny was sympathetic but a little distant, and when she told him she was going to Kentucky for a while he sounded irritated. “Don’t quit,” he said. “One lost game doesn’t prove anything.” “I’m not quitting,” she said.
74%
But what could Benny teach her now? What could any American teach her? She had moved past them all. She was on her own. She would have to bridge the gap herself that separated American chess from Russian.
74%
The effect on her tense stomach was remarkable; everything about it was rewarding. She finished it slowly, and the deep fury in her began to subside. She ordered another. Back in the shadows at the far end of the room someone was playing a piano. Beth looked at her watch. It was a quarter to twelve. It was good to be alive.
75%
She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.
77%
What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo—and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper.
79%
Jolene was carrying something in a manila envelope, which she set on the table in front of Beth. Beth picked it up. It was a book, and she knew immediately what it was. She slipped off the envelope. Modern Chess Openings. Her old, nearly worn-out copy. “Me all the time,” Jolene said. “Pissed at you for being adopted.”
79%
Beth looked at Jolene’s good, beautiful face with all the remarkable hair and the long black eyelashes and the full lips, and the self-consciousness dropped away from her with a relief that was physical in its simplicity. She smiled broadly. “It’s good to see you.” What she wanted to say was, “I love you.”
80%
There was a cool breeze. She took a long time over the drink, letting the breeze blow into the kitchen window, fluttering the curtains, blowing through the kitchen and living room, clearing out the air inside.
83%
The flowers in her hand glowed crimson, her new jeans and cotton sweater felt fresh on her skin in the cool San Francisco air, at the bottom of the street the blue ocean lay like a dream of possibility. Her soul sang silently with it, reaching out toward the Pacific.
85%
Beth felt no grief for the dead man, no sadness that he was gone. The only thing she felt was guilt that she had never sent him his ten dollars—she should have mailed him a check years ago.
85%
Behind the place where she used to sit to play was a kind of rough partition made of unplanned wooden boards nailed to two-by-fours. A calendar used to hang there, with scenes from Bavaria above the sheets for the months. Now the calendar was gone and the entire partition was covered with photographs and clippings and covers from Chess Review, each of them neatly taped to the wood and covered with clear plastic to keep it clean and free of dust—the only thing in this dingy basement that was. There were printed games from Chess Review, and newspaper pieces from the Lexington Herald-Leader and the New York Times and from some magazines in German. The old Life piece was there, and next to it was the cover of Chess Review with her holding the U.S. Championship trophy. Filling in the smaller spaces were newspaper pictures, some of them duplicates. There must have been twenty photographs.
87%
What she really needed was Benny Watts here with her. If she hadn’t been such a fool, giving back that money, taking a stand on something she hadn’t really cared about. That wasn’t so. It wasn’t being an asshole to refuse to be bullied, to call that woman’s bluff. But she needed Benny. For a moment she let herself imagine traveling with D. L. Townes, the two of them staying together in Moscow. But that was no good. She missed Benny, not Townes. She missed Benny’s quick and sober mind, his judgment and tenacity, his knowledge of chess and his knowledge of her. He would be in the seat beside  ...
90%
When she came to the place where she had offered him her bishop she would say zap! aloud, or pow! It was wonderful. She had made no mistakes—or could find none. There were no weaknesses. He’d had that nervous way of drumming his fingers on the table and scowling, but when he resigned he looked only distant and tired.
93%
child peering into the adult world. Who was she to presume? She needed help. She hurried past the room and to the elevator, feeling awkward and terribly alone.
94%
He seemed lost in thought, as though he had been reading philosophy and had just set down the book to contemplate a difficult proposition. His face was gray now, with tiny wrinkles reticulating the dry skin. He bit his thumb again, and she saw, shocked, that his beautiful manicure of yesterday had been chewed ragged. He glanced over at her with a brief, weary glance—a glance with great weight of experience and a whole long career of chess in it—and back one final time at her rook pawn, now on the fifth rank. Then he stood up.
99%
But she saw no way to move the pawn that final square without having the black king snip it off just before queening, like an unbloomed flower.
99%
When she set the knight down, there was complete silence. After a moment she heard a letting-out of breath from across the table and looked up. Borgov’s hair was rumpled and there was a grim smile on his face. He spoke in English. “It’s your game.” He pushed back his chair, stood up, and then reached down and picked up his king. Instead of setting it on its side he held it across the board to her. She stared at it. “Take it,” he said.
99%
her whole body, feeling her cheeks redden with it and then go hot and wet as the thunderous sound washed away thought. And then Vasily Borgov was standing beside her, and a moment later to her complete astonishment he had his arms spread and then was embracing her, hugging her to him warmly.