Mexico City, 1966
Alma drew the curtains together when she came out of the bathroom in her robe, and then twisted the knob of the pinkly-shaded lamp by the dressing table. She turned her back before she began to wriggle into her underwear under the robe; she still never gets totally undressed in front of Beth. (Her best underwear, too, Beth noted sourly, the shell pink.) Beth supposed it made sense; they had been adult and nearly adult when they came together, and for all that Alma was truly Mother now, some things couldn't be substituted.
Beth turned on the Anglepoise lamp on the table nearest her armchair and bent it down over her book, with pointed movements.
"Did you find new insights for your endgame today?" Alma wore a half-smile even as she shuffled to the closet in her feathered mules to fetch her slip.
Beth turned a page, keeping her eyes fixed on it. "Apparently."
"Darling, please, don't be like that. I want you to be happy. I want me to be happy, too. You liked the show, didn't you? You had fun with Manuel." She shed her robe on the stool, and began to pull her slip over her head, with effortful grunts. One curler came a little loose; she pushed it back into place absentmindedly before straightening the slip and sitting back down. "Call down for a drink, we can have one together. It's a happy night." She leaned into the mirror and hummed as she began to pull the curlers out.
Beth picked up the phone on the side table. " - A margarita, for 603? No, make it two. Thank you."
"Thank you, sweetheart." Alma patted the end of the bed nearest her dressing table. "Please, tell me about your day."
Beth closed Five Modern Endgames with a slight sigh and left it on the table. She perched on the bed. "I played Morgan-Jones, you were there for that. I took a walk around the hotel earlier. Analysed some of the matches between Tal and Botvinnik. Botvinnik has this scientific attacking strategy… I was taking notes."
"I worry about you, is all." Alma pushed the skin at the corners of her cheeks up with her fingers, held it there for a moment, sighed, and let it drop. "You're still a young girl, and I want you to have all the experiences a young girl should have. Falling in love, dancing until dawn, feeling a man's arms around you…" She tossed her head back, and laughed like a woman in a play. "I feel like a girl again."
Beth crossed her hands across her lap, like a charm. "I'm glad."
Alma reached for her discarded stockings, pulled one as high as the knee, and made a face as she saw the long run descending from the top. "Whoops. Guess I went a little hard on these ones last night." She tossed the balled-up nylon towards the laundry bag, and shook out a fresh pair from the drawer. Beth watched the soft frail beige fabric being drawn up, over the mottled blue of protruding veins and the the dark finger-bruises on the thigh. "There's just something about a man. The smell, and the size… they're so real. "
Beth rolled her eyes. "Where do you even do it? The car?"
Alma slapped half-heartedly at Beth's leg, but her smile had only brightened. "Elizabeth, that is no way to speak to me."
"Sorry, Mother ," said Beth, poking at the quilted bedspread. "Do we have to have the talk about birth control?"
"Stop teasing your mother. Is that margarita here yet?"
"You can hear the door as well as me. Unless your hearing is going, at your advanced age."
"Beth." Alma sighed, and began to dust powder onto her skin. "Let me have this. I waited long enough."
"So is that what it feels like, to be with the right man? Like being a girl again?" Beth rested her chin on her knees, and watched Alma's black eyes in the mirror as she edged them with kohl.
"I suppose that's the closest. Like being alive in every part of you. Like knowing why you were born. Or not knowing, and not caring." Alma finished the line above her eye and blinked carefully before setting the pencil down. "Six nights now. A whole week, and maybe more... That's something, isn't it? That has to be something."
"What will happen tomorrow night?" Beth let her gaze wander towards the window, to her book and her chessboard still on the end table.
"Who knows until then?" Alma fixed her gaze to the ceiling as she angled her mascara wand carefully. "When I die," she said, curling them up meticulously, "I want to know I really lived. I've spent so much of my life not living. That I felt the blood rush in my veins, and I took a chance…"
Beth was bored. "Isn't there something more to take chances on than a man?"
"I suppose. For you. But I never found anything that felt like it."
"Well." Beth deliberately looked away from the ghost of a hand on Alma's leg, thick fingers, spread grip. "I hope he turns out to be worth it, Mother."
A knock.
"Oh, there's my drink, honey. Get the door."
Beth rose.
000000000000
"So."
"So."
Beth's life seems to have been altogether too full of awkward doorstep moments lately.
"Thanks for coming," she says to Townes, awkwardly.
Townes has got a hand on the back of his neck, and is shifting from foot to foot. "If you need me, Beth, I'm here. I promise."
She smiles lopsidedly. "I know. ...Aren't you going to come in?"
"Uh, of course." He ducks his head and enters the house, and his smell, tobacco and leather and something fine and green, moves past her like a wave, a physical thing. "But I need to… can I use your phone?"
Something twists and knots itself in Beth's stomach as she watches him dial a number hurriedly from memory. He turns around towards her as he lifts the receiver to his ear, and she retreats in a rush to the door of the kitchen and turns her back. He's holding his hand over the mouthpiece, but she can hear just enough: "a friend… won't make dinner… explain later… I'll tell you tonight, okay? Me too. Bye."
"I hope," she says when he turns around, feeling her cheeks stiff, "that I'm not causing you trouble at home." She feels a flash of bitter joy when his mouth tightens.
"It's fine," he says, roughly.
"Townes," she says, already tasting regret, "I'm sorry. That was…"
He brushes it off physically, a flick of the hand. "It's fine."
There is another painful silence, until Beth feels she might burst.
"Townes," she says, feeling the traitorous tears already creeping up, "I asked you to come because I have to… I have to…"
"Beth, Beth, it's okay, come on. Sit down." He guides her to the couch. "You can tell me." He's across from her, only a foot away. His hair is falling over one eye; his dark eyes, so intent.
Beth sucks in a breath, up and up, hoping some ghost of courage, of Alice and Jolene and even brave, lost Alma, is beside her and within her. "You remember when I went to Paris?" she asks, clutching two handfuls of her skirt and twisting them equidistantly until they form a rope. "And lost to Borgov, and the articles they wrote about it? What they said?"
"I remember." Townes looks puzzled; this evidently isn't what he was expecting. "There was a lot of analysis, of the strengths of your game, and his."
"Do you remember what they didn't say?" She's twisted the fabric as far as it will go; she lets go and starts to twist the other way.
Townes is lost. "What they didn't say?"
"How I went on a bender the night before. How I was hungover. I know there were rumors. You must have heard them." Beth's eyes are burning, hot and heavy; she won't let herself close them, but she can't look at him square either. From the corner of her eye she can see his hands, loose and helpless in his lap.
He exhales. "I might have heard something, I guess, but I didn't really think much of it. Is that what you wanted to tell me? That you lost to Borgov because you got drunk?"
It's on the tip of Beth's tongue to blurt out, what else she did that night in Paris; how he isn't the only one who can do things -
She bites her lip to blood. "It's more than that. I can't… When I start drinking, I can't stop. I couldn't stop that night in Paris, and for weeks afterwards. I stopped before Moscow, but then when I went to Milan, they offered me a drink. And I took it. And then…"
Townes reaches one of his hands across to her lap, and takes hers. Beth lets her eyes close and the wetness come, waiting for the noise, the pain, the eruption -
"So," he says. His voice is as warm, as perfect, as ever. "You drink too much."
"I drink too much," she repeats, and when the words come out of her mouth, they shudder and set, like jelly, hard and heavy but clear; she's been carrying them around for so long. Now she can put them down. She feels her shoulders ease back.
Townes chuckles.
Beth feels her jaw drop; she cuffs him loosely on the arm. "Excuse me? I say this to you, and that's what I get?"
He sobers up rapidly. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I thought it was going to be some kind of problem I could never understand, something only a genius like you would struggle with, and I was thinking, how could I even know what to say… and it was just funny, for a second. Beth, you aren't the first, and you won't be the last."
She squeezes his hand, without words. Nods.
"So New York. Not pleasure?"
"I was drinking so much. Everything seemed to be slipping away… I ran to Benny."
"And he sent you right back." His eye is assessing.
"I guess." She looks towards her kitchen. "But he was right too. I couldn't stay. And I've been so afraid to tell you… I was afraid everyone knows, in chess. And it all started to feel hopeless."
"How can I help, then? What did you hope I'd say?"
Beth chokes on a sob. "That you knew how I could stop. That you'd know the words to say, the spell, like you know what I should say to the reporters…" Like a child, the hope still hasn't completely died.
He fumbles inside his jacket pocket and extracts a notebook and pencil; Beth laughs herself, through another sob, as he flips his notebook open and poises his pencil above it, assuming his serious reporting face. "Let's do our research then, Miss Harmon. How did you stop before?"
"Before Moscow?" Beth lets go of his other hand to wipe her eyes, and lets herself really think about it for the first time. "My friend came to me, Jolene, she stayed with me. And I didn't want her to see me drunk, and I didn't feel so… It was easier." She snorts as he diligently jots a few lines.
"And when you started again?" He poises his pencil and looks at her seriously.
"I felt so… alone," she says, the words dragged out of her from somewhere dark and unwilling. "I didn't understand anyone there, they were all so beautiful, and, and sophisticated… and it wasn't going well here, not really. I've been so afraid..." She draws her knees up and hides her forehead against them.
"Of what?"
"That I might win," she says, muffled, against her knees. "What do I do if I can't beat him again? And what do I do if I can? What do I do after that?"
Townes looks at her steadily.
"I played this boy, years ago," she says, remembering Georgi, his solemn tie and his world of straight lines where hers had always curved. "In Mexico. He said he'd be world champion by the time he was eighteen, but he couldn't imagine a world after that. What he would do the next day, and for the rest of his life. And I think sometimes I can't either. What do I have to live for, after that, if I beat him? Why would I get up in the morning and not just drink all day? Or worse..." She rests her cheek against her knees and stares into her jaunty pink kitchen, her dusty tile and wilted flowers.
Townes clears his throat; she looks at him, heart in her mouth.
"My mother used to read me the story of the Snow Queen, when I was a boy," he says, reaching out gently to brush her hair back behind her ear. "She was beautiful, but she couldn't help but make everything cold, all she could see was puzzles, and she wanted to put them back together… I always thought she must have been so lonely."
Beth stares. "Townes…"
"I'm just saying… you don't have to live in that world, Beth. I came when you called. Your friend Jolene, she came to you. You can have more than the puzzles. It doesn't have to be so cold…"
"You could bring him here some time," Beth says suddenly. "He. You know. Who you called. I'm sorry. I'd like to…"
He snorts, lightly, and starts to pull his arms out of his sleeves. "Sure. Maybe one day. Thanks."
Beth lets him settle the jacket around her shoulders, and turns up the corners of her mouth in a fragile smile.
000000000000
The phone rings when she's cleaning the kitchen in the morning, and concentrating very hard on the smell of cut grass from the open window and not the smell from the trash.
"Hello?"
"Miss Elizabeth Harmon?" Another officious male voice.
Beth feels her heart sink. "Yes, this is she."
"This is Darius Mendelsohn of the Russia desk at State. I've been assigned to support you. We'd like to start briefing you ahead of your upcoming trip to Moscow."
"But isn't it a little early?" she says, hurriedly. "It's weeks until we go yet."
"We expect the security challenges to be greater on this trip. We'd really like to get started sooner." There's the creak of Mendelsohn leaning back in his chair, and then, she swears, the crack of chewing gum.
"I'm very busy with preparing for the championship," Beth says, in a headlong rush. "Maybe we can talk in a few weeks? Goodbye."
When her heart rate has slowed down again, she looks at the telephone in its cradle ruefully, and then leaves it hanging at the end of its long cord.
000000000000
Jolene steps in through the door and blinks. "You have a party in here?"
Beth brushes past her hurriedly and moves to open the living room window. "I'm sorry. It's clearing."
"How about some coffee, then, Michelangelo?" Jolene settles herself on the couch and spreads her arms along the back. "I had to listen to this bitch all day, about how desegregation was ruining America, and where will it end. Some client's wife. I'd ask you for something stronger, but smells like you drank it already."
Beth swallows. "I can do coffee."
"Black, with sugar. Thanks." Jolene spreads her thighs in her cotton dress and taps her polished nails on them.
Beth busies herself in the kitchen; the meditative ritual of setting the water to boil, the spooning of grounds, the stirring. The chink of two cups into the ring of their saucers. The heaped spoon of tea-brown granules. She breathes in and out to the rhythm.
Jolene reaches her hand to the coffee as Beth offers it to her, greedily. "I was gonna tell you what Alan said about it all. Can you believe it, his name is Alan? Could he even have a whiter senior partner name? But now I'm thinking you already got something on your mind." She stirs with precise moments.
Beth settles herself in the armchair opposite and sets her cup down. "I guess I do."
"So." Jolene lifts the cup to her lips, and then regards her over the rim. "You did it again."
Beth sips her own coffee, then sets it down; she won't hide behind it, not again. "I did, yes. I drank. I got drunk. I screwed up." She meets Jolene's eyes squarely.
"And now you back here. Damseling at me." Jolene's gaze is curious; nothing more.
Beth breathes. In; out. "Not this time. I didn't call you here to save me. I know it won't work."
"But you called me here for something." Jolene looks bored suddenly, and irritated. She stirs her coffee and picks at the nails of one hand with the other.
"I just - I wanted to be honest with you. You deserve that," Beth says, feeling the shame close and warm around her heart. "I know it doesn't fix anything, but - "
Jolene laughs. "Like I didn't know already. I've known you since you were nine years old, Cracker. You think I don't know when you go off on one, and why?"
"It's more than I know," Beth says frankly, her body all relief. "It's like I can never see it coming, til it comes… I always think it'll be different this time, I'll have one, and that's all I need…"
Jolene makes a little exasperated sound in the back of her throat, and shifts sideways on the couch. "Okay, you told me. How 'bout we talk about something else for once? Maybe it'd do you some good to think about something other than yourself and your world domination shit. You ever think about that?" She looks slyly sideways at Beth, that look that always means she's got something in her back pocket.
Beth feels an honest laugh bubbling up. "If anyone can do it, it's you."
"I added some major detail to the radical plan. There's another lawyer up in California, in Bakersfield, and he's filed some test cases in state court, on housing issues, schooling. I got some plans for how we can replicate that down here, really push the boundaries. It's gonna take some capital…" Jolene looks at Beth suddenly, as though she's never seen her before. "Or maybe we should talk about your shit. What are you gonna do with the money?"
Beth stumbles in the middle of a sip. "The money?"
"Yeah. All the money. When you win world champion." Jolene narrows her eyes at her. "It's a lot of money, right? A lot."
The coffee she just swallowed is scalding its way into her stomach. "I guess," she says, swallowing it back and reaching for a napkin. "I never really thought about that part. The money."
Jolene's laugh is almost a bark. "Yeah, I bet you didn't. Jesus, Cracker. You're gonna sit on your ass and pity yourself some more, aren't you. Find a way to piss it all away. Did you ever think about how much that pisses me off? That the money is all a game to you. That you don't have a fucking clue what you're going to do with thousands and thousands of dollars."
"You have it," says Beth, on an impulse that feels right, in the moment. "You can use it. I don't need it. You have it."
"Yeah, right." Jolene drains her cup with a lavish slurp. "Like I'm letting you off that easy."
Beth watches her pull her skirts together and reach for her purse, all dismay. "You're leaving?"
"I think I better, yeah." Jolene avoids her eyes as she roots for her car key. "I'm thinking I've been here long enough."
Beth walks her to the door, in silence; Jolene shrugs her purse up to her shoulder and looks straight at Beth, her face set and serious. "Get a grip, Cracker," she says, and turns on her heel.
Beth closes the door.
Next: Time to get serious about chess, and a close encounter in a bathroom stall.