Morehead, Kentucky, 1955
Beth sensed it before she reached the trailer; she's never quite been able to put into words the "how". But walking down the beaten-dirt path towards it, bookbag jouncing on her hip, it's there. It's there in the trailer door that isn't fully closed, the darkness at the bedroom window, the scratch across the siding of the trailer that is just barely visible in the afternoon light. All of them adding up to a slowness in her steps, until they're dragging as though through molasses. A deepening pit in her stomach.
Alice was head-down in the bedroom closet when Beth tentatively opened the trailer door. She kept her thumb over the latch as she closed it behind her, until it had clicked into place with only the faintest sound.
Alice heard it, though. There was a thud as she tossed something out of the closet and it bounced off the trailer wall. Her voice was perfectly steady and balanced on the point of a needle when she said, "Beth?"
Beth eased her bookbag off her shoulder and pushed it quietly under the couch with her foot. "Yes, Mama?"
"Beth, come here and look at this, please."
Alice was pointing at a cardboard box, a brown one, filled with papers, some white, some pink, some green. Most of them are printed and much folded.
Beth looked at them. She let them fill her senses. She kept looking.
"Look at them." Alice's voice held just the slightest note of tremor. "You see it, don't you? You see what they are."
Beth fumbled sideways for Alice's leg, and then crept her hand up it until she encountered Alice's on her hip. She curled her fingers around Alice's and squeezed, listening for the answering squeeze, the easing of tension. But Alice's fingers felt like the steel wire in the suspension bridge upstate. Beth felt a chill.
"I see it, Mama," she said quietly.
"I knew you would. I could hear them earlier. I could hear it. We'll have to take them now." Alice worked her arms around the box, grimacing, then hefted it from her knees. "We have to get the matches. Go out back."
Beth went to the kitchen and dug the long-stemmed matches out of the drawer with the forks and spoons. Alice kept the knives in a separate cupboard, since January. The three blunt dinner knives, and the one sharp one. She cracked the box and put her nose to it, breathing in the comforting sulfur smell.
Alice was stiffly carrying the box through their cramped kitchen/den and to the trailer door, holding it as far from her body as the weight would allow. She stepped down from the trailer onto the concrete block by the door, and walked along the path through the crushed weeds to where the neighbors had once gathered to cook sausage links and fry bacon on a grill. She tipped the papers onto the bare, blackened spot, and began to pile twigs and sticks on top of them.
Beth kept her fingers locked around the matches, poised by the trailer door.
When Alice had weighed the papers down to her satisfaction, she turned back toward the trailer. She was just in through the door, and reaching her hand towards Beth, when she stiffened, like a hunting dog after a squirrel.
"Your bookbag," she said.
Beth could scarcely breathe. "Mom…"
"Get your bookbag. It's here, isn't it?"
"Mom," said Beth, through barely parted lips. "Please."
Alice leveled her gaze, as cold and steady as a weapon, and Beth flinched. "You bring contamination into my home," she said, her voice just a single key higher. "You bring in filth, full of their disgusting ideas, and you expect me to tolerate it? Get me your bookbag. Now."
Not daring to move, Beth hooked her foot through the strap of the bag, and slowly drew it out from under the couch.
Alice scooped it up with one hand. "Good," she said. "We won't be trapped into this again. Let's go."
Beth followed her down the dirt path, watching the bag swing from Alice's hand. Two pencils. An eraser. The shiny, new, stiff-spined copy of A Home for Sandy, with the puppy on the cover, and the little girl in the blue-checked dress and ribbon. She had been going to read it tonight, in bed, or with Alice if Alice were in a good mood. The card that Susan Dodson had made her, just pencil on a piece of cheap folded paper, that said "your so prity can i sitt with you tomoriw?"
Alice dropped the bookbag by the pyre, and then opened the matchbox. She touched the first flame to the corner of a green sheet of paper, and then lit a piece on the other site, white, densely covered with looped handwriting Beth couldn't read. "The lies," she said, almost to herself. "They cover them with lies and snakes, and they think they can keep truth in them, and they want us to keep them in our houses…" She touched the match to a third paper, and then dropped it as it smoked up to her fingers.
Beth stood still as the burning edged inward from three directions, and then stepped back as the flames licked around one stick with a crack.
Alice lifted the bookbag and upended it into the middle of the pile.
It seemed like a long time later when Beth came back to herself. Alice was still watching the flames, with a breathing air of satisfaction, even as they started to dip and die back. The sun was low on the horizon, and Beth's bare arms were beginning to stipple with goosebumps.
Alice wrapped her arms around herself, and hugged tightly. "Good," she said. "That was good. You're a good girl, Beth. No more of that place, though. It isn't safe. They're sending missiles, incendiary packages, home with you. It's prison propaganda. It won't divide, but it's not a prime. I can't make it add up."
Beth looked at the embers. She could still see most of one of her pencils, half-charred, under a pile of ashes. "Yes, mama."
Alice pulled Beth in with the reach of her long arms, pressed Beth's face against her belly in her yellow cotton dress. Her arms were tight and real and strong and they smelled of smoke and salt flesh. "You're my good girl, Bethy. I don't know what I'd do without you. How I'd know what was real. I love you."
Beth closed her eyes and squeezed back, her heart a swirl of joy and relief and safety over a gnawing drag of hunger. And pride, that her thin white sticks of arms could anchor everything that was Alice to the earth, could make the world real for her again. "I love you, mom."
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There's no way around it. No one else. She has to call. Has to.
Beth paces the kitchen. Tries hard not to think about how simple a few slugs of vodka would make everything. She can't, and she has to, and that's all there is to it.
If only Alma had never gotten a phone in the first place. If only Beth had had the sense to rip the cursed thing out of the wall, when it became her house. If only.
She'd crept into the back of the church hall, the one they told her when she called the number on Benny's small crumpled piece of paper. Someone was speaking behind a lectern at the front, and people of all ages and shapes were eager or sheepish or uneasy in a circle of wooden chairs. She sat out beyond the circle in a broken pew, and when the man at the front had invited the circle to stand up and speak, she'd fled.
They all looked so ordinary, she'd thought. Ordinary and flat and colourless.
Just pick the handset up. Just one number. Just one.
She has the letter still, with the number written on it, even though she's been staring at it so long that she's long since memorised the string of digits.
The phone's in her hand. She can do this. Beth dials in the three-digit Cincinnati code, and then in a headlong burst, the whole ten.
Buzzing. Click. A gruff man's voice. "Da."
Beth swallows bile and saliva and her own pride. "Mr. Vladychenko?"
"Who is this?" says the voice irritably.
"Mr. Vladychenko, it's Beth Harmon. The chess player."
He snorts, an outgust of breath that crashes down the line and into Beth's ear. "Oh, the chess player. Miss Harmon. How do you do, Miss Harmon?" He drags just a little on her surname; she can hear the ghost of Borgov's kh.
Beth swallows again. "Um. Mr. Vladychenko. I wanted to say that… I think perhaps I was hasty at our last meeting."
He exhales. "Oh, you do."
"Yes. I, well, it wasn't a good day for me, and I wasn't ready to listen to you. And I thought maybe I could come to you this time, and we could talk about my chess." Beth holds her breath.
A long pause. "You don't want Demyan. You want someone to tell you, you are already immortal. Is that not so?"
Beth is still breathing. After everything, she's still breathing, in and out. Her heart is slowing to a gallop. "No. That's not what I need. I need someone… to make me stronger. I need help with my chess. For the world championship."
Demyan is silent for two beats, a faint scratching noise audible. Writing something? "We meet one time. Not at my place, we go to coffee place. I bring the board. We talk one time, and you listen this time. And maybe, we play a game. Yes?"
"Okay. Yes. Okay." Beth is already wondering what board he will bring. Will it be decades old, fine wood or stone, the pieces worn smooth from years of slick fingers? Cheap cardboard and plastic? Hand carved?
"I give you address. Good place in Cincinnati. You be there tomorrow at noon. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Okay. You got a pencil? I give you the address."
Beth fumbles for the pad on the kitchen counter.
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That night seems darker and colder; a chill seems to have leached back into the air, even as it keeps carrying her inexorably towards the date that's been etched into her memory since she beat Benny in Ohio, in that crappy university lecture hall.
For once, she doesn't want to look at a board. A movie doesn't help; it's just chatter, bouncing emptily off the walls.
It's still early enough; he might be awake. Beth dials. The right voice again.
"Allo."
"Borgov, it's Beth."
"Miss Kharmon." Borgov sounds looser and more at ease tonight. "Dobryy vecher. Good evening. How are you?"
Beth feels lighter. "Dobryy vecher. We could speak Russian. I need to practice. Ya plokho govoryu po russki."
"Your Russian is not so bad. I need to practice English. I will answer your Russian. Your night, it was good? When we spoke. The time. You were, what is the word... P'yanyy." Borgov laughs.
Beth feels her heart sink back into her shoes. "Borgov. Please. Ya prosil tebya.
That was…"
"You like the drink. Vino. As you said. What do I say wrong?" Borgov sounds confused.
Beth grits her teeth. "Please. Borgov. I want to talk about the championship. I'll see you. Uvidimsya v Moskve."
"Yes, in Moskva. Moscow. My home, my city. I will be pleased to see you. The chess is long and hard. I will be proud to play you, Leezabeth."
Beth smiles down the phone, in fierce triumph. At last.
"And you will fit Moscow. Krasivaya zhenshchina. All the zhenshchiny. You make the city bright." Borgov laughs again; she hears something that sounds suspiciously like ice clinking.
"Please. Borgov. Ya khochu pogovorit' o shakhmatakh. Just chess. I want to talk to you about the chess."
"Why you not want to hear you are beautiful? It is all… legkiy. Easy. For a beautiful woman. Everyone want you. All easy…" Borgov trails off; his breathing has deepened.
Beth's, on the other hand, has become tight shallow puffs of rage. "I don't want to hear it," she says tightly. "Ever. You understand me? Ever."
He sighs. "Ya vas ne ponimayu, Leezabeth."
Beth slams the receiver back into the cradle.
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The board is already set up in front of Vladychenko when she slips onto the high stool beside him. The cafe is a lively din around him, chinking cups, steam, and conversation, but he is moving pieces slowly and methodically on the board, on both sides.
The board is just a board, wooden pieces, mass produced, just like the first one she bought with her pocket money in Lexington. Beth feels the disappointment sink in; already she's beginning to wish she hadn't come.
"I thought - " she begins.
He holds up a single finger.
"I wanted to - "
The finger again.
"I can't just sit - "
"No talking." He methodically shifts a black knight to queen's rook three.
"You can't seriously expect me to - "
The finger.
Beth huffs out her breath hard. It would be easy, so easy, to lift her purse and walk away from this madman, this surly, rude, obnoxious stranger who presumes to think he could show her something about chess she doesn't already know. But what then?
Demyan shifts white's bishop to queen's knight two and looks at her pointedly. Almost against her will, her hand steals to the black queen, proudly isolated on queen one, and shifts her forward.
Demyan moves a pawn forward.
Beth shifts her rook to king one.
He shifts his queen forward by two.
Beth shifts her pawn forward to queen's bishop five.
"Stop."
She slouches in her seat, irritated almost beyond measure. "Oh, so you're the only one who gets to talk?"
"If you will not listen, we will do this without talking. Stop and go back."
"Or what?"
"Or I will show you what will happen to you."
"So show me." Beth rolls her eyes, and shifts to catch a waiter's eye.
"I will not. Stop and go back."
With bad grace, she shifts the pawn backwards a square.
"What was in your heart when you moved the pawn?"
Beth actually stutters. "What was in my what?"
"Your heart. Tell me your move."
"Are you crazy? This is actually crazy, isn't it. I'm sitting with a crazy person. What was in my heart was strengthening my attack against you. Strengthening my position."
"And what was in my heart?"
"Probably that you wanted to win. And maybe moving that pawn on the right out. How should I know?"
"Now look at the board. Look until you see it."
Beth stares at the pieces, fuming quietly, until they diffuse themselves into messy spots. How dare he, patronising her, and holding that goddamn finger up to her, and -
Her jaw drops open. "Oh," she says, very quietly.
"You see it?"
"Yes." It's all there, the advantage she'd be giving him, the way his pieces can spread outwards, over time, from that concentration of power, the fatal chink in the armour she'd given him, to gain a short advantage -
"Good. Now tell me again, what was in your heart."
"I wanted an advantage. I thought - "
"You thought you would show me. You thought Demyan would not see. You thought garbage."
Beth stares at the pieces, shamed, her cheeks boiling.
"Now. Again. Change it."
She moves the pawn at queen four instead; he shifts his knight in response.
"You do not know yourself. You do not know the pieces. I am just an old man," and he glances at her for the first time, with a flash of mirth - "no world champion, but I know the pieces. And they know me."
"Why aren't you a champion?" she asks, moving her knight back to queen's knight one, ready to reposition him, to fine-tune his attack. "If you can play like this, if you can see it all - why didn't you use it?"
He shifts his own rook sideways towards his king. "Because I did not need it."
"But why would you not - "
"Because I did not need it!" His voice echoes, for a second, above the chatter and the steam; the waiter glances in their direction, then turns back to his coffeepot.
"Why should I do this with you?" Beth says, in an undertone into which she funnels as much skepticism as she can. "If you never became a champion, if you didn't even compete -"
He closes his fist over his queen and glares. "I did not compete because I did not compete. You accept that, or we go no further."
"Why should I even want to go further?" Beth says, and now her voice is the one that's rising. "You bring me here, and on the strength of one game you think you can make me - "
Demyan's fist crashes down on the board, and the pieces jump and skitter, the positions destroyed; one of the black rooks tumbles over the edge of the bar and onto the linoleum floor behind. Beth jumps; both her hands fly instinctively to her throat.
"You are fine chess player, Miss Harmon," he says quietly, "and so I tolerate things from you. I can make you know yourself, and the pieces, how they will know you, and come to your call… but this is the deal. This is how we play. You want to play with me, we play. You don't want to, I pack my board and go home, and you go to Moscow and good luck."
Beth squeezes her eyes closed. She's come this far. She beat Borgov on her own, she beat Benny, she's beaten them all. She doesn't need this man and his patronising and his conditions and his cheap board. She can leave, and go home…
And get up again tomorrow. In the quiet. And sit down at her board again, alone.
She's come this far. She meets Demyan's eye and nods.
"Good. We will play. Now fetch the rook."
Her face burning, Beth gestures to one of the waiters behind the bar, and asks him without words to retrieve the piece from the floor. He passes it to her cheerily, wiping spilled dark liquid from it with his apron; she swallows.
"Good. We will begin again." Demyan picks up the white queen and begins to re-set the board.
Beth resists the urge to spit violently onto the centre of it, and picks up the black king.
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There's a spring open tournament, in Connecticut, at the weekend, with a decent prize pot that makes it worth the flight. And after the session with Demyan - which spilled into a second game, and then a third, until the waiters' brows were drawing together and she was jolting with caffeine and adrenaline - she feels somewhat bruised, and in need of a bath of amateur chess.
The morning flight is as smooth as silk. She doesn't expect any issues, and it's not until she's done registering and politely fending off their questions that she runs into one, literally. His back is to her, surveying the tables being set up, and her thoughts are so largely preoccupied with the bathroom and with taking off her heels that she doesn't register the hat, the familiar dark leather back of him, until she stumbles over her case and her shoulder hits his.
"Oh, excuse me," she says reflexively, blushing already.
He's half-turned to catch her, but when he hears her voice, his hands drop away. "...Beth?"
"Hello." She could wish for this patterned carpet to swallow her up already. "I didn't think you'd come to this one."
He shrugs, with a sheepish half-smile. "I didn't have anything to do this weekend, and… you know. Rent was due."
"Oh. Yes." She drops her gaze.
"Not that you'd know what that's like, I guess," he says, with a little more edge.
"Benny, I didn't come here to fight with you," she says, very low.
He sighs. "I guess not. So. You know. How've you been?"
"Sober, since that's obviously what you're asking," she says, almost happy, almost relishing the chance to strike a few sparks off him. "I haven't had a drink since I saw you."
He shrugs his hands into his pockets, clearly ill at ease. "Good. That's good. So, you, uh, find someone to talk to?"
"I called those people. I went to their meeting. It - I - well, I'm working on it." Beth swallows; this particular road is not one she especially wants to go down with him.
"That bad, huh. Great. I can see that you're really trying," he says, snidely.
Beth sighs. "You made it really clear that you didn't want to be my keeper, so how about we talk about something else?"
Benny digs his hands deeper into his pockets and hunches his shoulders. "Fine. Let's. You see Harry lately?"
"He's busy being an engineer."
"In other words, he's no use to you." Benny laughs harshly. "Jeez, Harmon. Sometimes I forget how cold you can be."
The cold is with her, all around her, when she hears him form the word; Beth shrugs it off, reaches for Townes' words. "Benny, come on. I'm doing my best. I'm grateful for… I really didn't come to fight. Can't we just… be pleased to see each other, and play?"
Benny nods to the competition board, which the high school volunteers are pinning names to as they speak. "We got drawn on opposite sides, so… I guess it's you and me as the big show again."
"How cocky," she says dryly. "So sure you'll beat everyone else before we've even started. How do you know there isn't another Harmon out there?" She sweeps her arm across the carpeted hall, abuzz with tables.
Benny grins, his real grin. "Jesus, I hope not. One's more than enough for me."
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Six matches down; the usual high school and college prodigies, the semi-pros trying to get a foothold, the dogged, the genuinely talented, the not quite talented enough. Beth plays little games with herself, leaving a flank deliberately open, seeing how far she can push it before she has to mount a determined attack. Her favourites are the ones who can hardly believe she's been so obvious, who push their advantage immediately, who are willing to exploit every chink she'll give them. Four of the six are too overawed to push it; they play it safe, tentative pawn and knight advances, unable to believe that she doesn't have a hammer-blow up her sleeve.
Then it's her and Benny, as she'd known it would be, from the moment she saw him here.
He walks to her, to where she's sitting with a semi-circle of fascinated kids behind her, with that half-grin on his face; Beth feels her own answering, and she stands. They shake hands, hard, fast, intimate and knowing. She's drawn white, and she can feel his relish of that from across the table.
Then he flips the slide on her clock and everything is poetry.
She moves her knight out for the Grunfeld defence, on a whim; he answers with his. They engage pawns. He castles. He takes her pawn bait at queen's bishop four; she swallows his pawn with her queen in retaliation. All is silent but the slide-and-click of the clocks and the breathing of fifty spellbound people.
He fianchettos his queen's bishop. Beth resists the obvious response, and checks his advance somewhat with a castling. There's an intake of breath; they think he has her. Think that black is going to take white, that the U.S. Champion is going to be beaten by her challenger, here in this hotel auditorium in Connecticut.
She gives up her queen; he fists it, rather than placing it by the side of the board, with a quirk of the mouth that says he remembers, and this is payback. He moves his knight in. He thinks that she might actually give this up to him.
But he hasn't seen her coming. His queen is trapped. He's beginning to see, finally; her bishop, her knight, her rook, all still coming, his king undefended and alone.
The grin crosses his whole face now, ear to ear. He picks up the king and offers it to her. The circle of onlookers breaks into breathless applause.
Beth's breathing is coming fast and short; her body is warm and limp. Benny reaches across the table for her hand again and meets her eyes, and a spark leaps the gap.
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When she's conscious again, her back is against the hard chipboard of the bathroom stall and both her hands are buried under his black shirt.
Benny makes a muffled noise into her mouth and fists both his hands into her full skirt, tugging it up and back.
Beth wrestles her mouth away and gasps breathlessly. "You utter - utter - bastard - "
"Shut up," he says, low and harsh into her neck, and Beth melts hard against him, everything in her center flowing and liquid, her legs rubber as they spread themselves of their own accord in her heels and Benny's hard hand slides down one thigh, hitching it up. Beth's head tips back of its own accord and Benny's mouth is there, at her throat, sucking urgently.
"Is this - " he says in ragged half-breaths, and she tugs his hair and says "Don't - talk - "
With one corner of her mind, Beth hears the bathroom door swing open and somebody or other intake their breath sharply, then the door is closed again and really it doesn't matter, nothing matters at all, except that Benny's belt buckle is pressing into her along with Benny, and she might actually die if it isn't further inside her, now now now -
Benny's mouth is moving lower across the neckline of her dress, ragged and discoordinated, and she says "Ah - ah - " and lifts her other leg helplessly, and he has her by a hand under both thighs, pressed against this cheap flimsy wall, and everything in the world will be absolutely fine so long as he doesn't stop
and her hands are fumbling his belt buckle, the zipper of his black jeans, encountering the cotton of his underwear, tugging that down and Benny Benny Benny, soft and hard and jerk and pulse and tremble and he's tugging too, his hands are moving, and he pulls her close and her legs clench around him and oh
and he's moving, hard and fast and she can see his teeth gritted, the sweat on his face and the tremble in his legs and she's so slick and he's beginning to lose it already and it's - not - enough -
and he's buried in her neck and groaning ragged and loose while his hips jerk haphazardly against hers, and really?
Benny shifts his hands out from under her legs, and her heels land on the floor on either side of him, awkward and sticky and still strung with tension. He looks at the floor while he tucks himself back in and zips his pants and rebuckles, and then he looks her in the eye and clears his throat.
"Uh. Thank you."
Beth feels nothing, absolutely nothing, so much as a crystalline, full-bodied outrage. "Thank you?"
Benny hesitantly straightens and re-tucks his shirt, with a deer in headlights materialising in his eyes. "Uh. Yes?"
Beth stomps hard on his foot with one heel, feeling gratification spike up her still-sprung spine as he yelps, and stalks out of the bathroom.
Next time: An unfortunate reunion, a battle of wills, a sad meeting of the mothers.
Russian Glossary
Ya plokho govoryu po russki - I don't speak good Russian
Krasivaya zhenshchina - Beautiful women
Ya khochu pogovorit' o shakhmatakh - I just want to talk about chess
Ya vas ne ponimayu - I don't understand you
Beth and Demyan meet in the Wheel Cafe, Cincinnati.