Archive of Our Own

When you were born
I was a small child in a city
and even if somebody had brought me news of you
I would not have believed them

— W.S. Merwin, “Being Early”

Beth is wearing white when she comes back to Lexington. While she waits in the baggage claim, a small girl in corduroy comes up to her and asks for her autograph. She signs it, in pencil, on one of the paper napkins from the airplane. 

Mr. Booth breaks off at the Arrivals gate with the promise of a debrief call come Monday with his superiors in the State Department. Ultimately she had agreed to the meetings at the White House and at Georgetown in the coming week, and in spite of his stolid expression she knows that he is pleased with her. He shakes her hand, firmly, and then leaves her be. When all is said and done, Beth gathers up her suitcases from the carousel and steps out into the crisp Kentucky winter a champion.

And Benny Watts is standing on the sidewalk. 

“You missed your flight,” he says, without preamble. 

Beth stops in her tracks. Benny’s Volkswagen Beetle is parked behind him, and he’s leaning coolly against it like it’s a Corvette convertible. She is jet-lagged and painfully thirsty and has spent the past few weeks reasonably certain that he had never wanted to see her again, and it is this combination of handicaps that she will blame for her taking several seconds to realize what he means. 

“You waited,” she says.

Benny shrugs. “Only twenty hours.”

He looks no different than Beth remembers; it’s only after she observes this that she wonders why she’d expected otherwise. His posture is still careless, his hair still blonde. His black wool scarf is wrapped tightly around his neck, but the first four buttons of his shirt are undone. She folds away a smile.

He pushes himself off of the car, tugging the door open as he goes, and then bows, with a flourish. Beth walks past him, placing her bags in the back seat. 

“Spasibo,” she says, lips pursing. 

He holds his pose until she slips by him and into the passenger seat, the closeness of their bodies producing one brief murmur of heat in the late February air. Only then does he straighten up again and swing closed the door.

“Radio?” he asks when he’s buckled in, hunching forward to get the key in the ignition. 

Beth shivers, wringing her gloved hands together. “Heater.” 

“No dice.” 

She turns to him, appalled. He doesn’t make eye contact, peering out at the passing traffic in search of an opening. 

“Thing’s been busted since I bought the car,” he explains. “You’ll get used to it.” 

He merges into the lane and clicks on the radio. “Over You” by Gary Puckett, appropriately. 

“Where are you taking me?” she asks once they’re onto the highway.

Benny looks thoughtful in that way that Benny always does, like thoughtfulness is a modern art form. His mouth thins, his eyes flit to one side. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, one by one. 

“Home, I guess,” he answers.

So Beth settles back into the worn leather seat, and lets Benny Watts take her home. 

“Boy came all the way from New York City,” Jolene says, deadpan, “just to drive you home.” 

Beth works her toothbrush a little more urgently against her back molars, and nods. Jolene is staying with her for the weekend, and had pulled up just an hour after Benny had driven off back toward the Interstate. Now that squash has worn out its novelty Jolene has picked up an appreciation for going on long hikes; tomorrow they will drive to Raven Run and walk for hours. Beth has yet to see the appeal, but for Jolene, she’ll try. 

“I don’t have to tell you it takes fifteen minutes to drive from LEX to Lansdowne,” Jolene goes on incredulously, giving Beth what is no doubt a look of searing judgment. “I don’t gotta tell you that, do I?” 

“I was in the car, Jolene. You don’t have to tell me that.” 

“So he drove twelve hours,” Jolene says, nailing the proverbial coffin shut, “to drive you twenty minutes.” 

Beth spits out her toothpaste and straightens up to face her flushed reflection. “There was commute traffic,” she says primly. “It took twenty-five.” 

After Moscow, and after the photos with the President, people want to ask Beth questions. It seems people want to ask her questions everywhere she goes. How did you do it? Flash. What comes next? Flash. Did the Soviets make any attempts to entice you to defect? Flash. Then Margaret, at Ben Snyder, with something between jealousy and sadness on her face: Don’t you ever plan to settle down?

That’s a term that Beth has found springing up in her vicinity more often than before, usually from the kind of people Alma would call “dull and unimaginative.” Settle down, as if it’s some kind of comfortable inevitability, as if to reject it would be tantamount to anarchy. Beth does not necessarily hate the idea—she no longer scorns the dreams of people like Harry Beltik, who flirt with passion gently and then find contentment in community colleges and grocery stores—but despite her best efforts, to hear people talk about it feels like listening to a language she can’t speak. When Margaret says settle down Beth thinks of Alma and her Gibsons and her piano, and pieces together a smile. Someday, she answers. When I’m dead. 

Margaret doesn’t talk to her again after that. 

She keeps the house, changes out the wallpaper. She gives Jolene the black dress, and the purple one, and whatever other dresses she wants. She buys a frame for the photograph of her and Mr. Shaibel, and puts it on the mantle. She replays Morphy games in the afternoons and goes to all the interviews that the USCF wants her to, and she even gets up the guts to contact Mr. Spencer and ask if he could be persuaded to invite her to any future tournaments that might have the space for her. By way of an apology she tells him that she won’t be needing aspirin, and by way of an acceptance he tells her that he won’t be offering it. 

On Tuesdays she has brunch with Annette Packard on West Vine Street, and then rounds the corner to attend her 11:30 AM appointment with a psychiatrist who wears blue jeans and uses words like addiction, trauma, abandonment, all of them mythic, all of them sad. She keeps in touch with Townes—who travels all over the world now and still finds the time to tell her in that gentle way of his to take a break, she’s earned it—and with Matt and Mike, who still coordinate tournaments statewide; and one morning Borgov calls her from Budapest to ask her how she is, if she is eating well. 

But she doesn’t hear from Benny again. He drives her home, and then he’s gone. He recedes—artfully, without fuss—as if to say, White to move. 

“You’re a marvel, you know,” Harry tells her one Sunday evening on the porch, his long limbs crossed comfortably in his usual iron chair. “Well, of course you know, you’ve always known.” Beth could laugh. She has not always known. “I don’t think Lexington knows what to do with marvels, though.” 

Beth shrugs one shoulder, arms folded at her chest. Harry had swept her up into a hug when he’d come by the house after Moscow, lifting her off the carpet to spin her around, and she had never laughed so freely in her life. They had drunk Shirley Temples in the moonlight and listened to A Love Supreme, and talked about music and cross-pin tactics, and Beth had been so glad to see him she could have burst. 

“Yeah, probably not,” she replies. “My neighbor Mrs. Clinkenbeard thought I was playing checkers all this time. ‘I do declare, dear, I hadn’t the faintest them So-vi-ets even played.’”

Harry snorts, covering his mouth with one hand—a residual habit, she supposes, from when he’d been self-conscious of his teeth. 

“So how long do you think you’ll keep it up for?” he asks. “Here, I mean.” 

“You mean when am I going to stop playing chess?” she retorts, a bit curt—the way she always is with Harry, and the way he always seems to forgive. “Why is everyone so interested in that, all of a sudden? I’ll stop when I stop.” She slumps back in her chair, folding her arms. “And then I’ll be as ordinary as everyone seems to want me to be.” 

“Oh, you can stop playing chess anytime, Beth,” Harry says, with a note of surprise. “But you’ll be a marvel forever.” 

“May I ask you something, cherie?”

Every now and then Cléo calls Beth from wherever it is she’s stopped to land for a while—Hamburg, Seville, Venice—quite often when the house seems darker and larger than usual and the sound of another voice can shrink it down again, makes it less lonely. Cléo has always had a nicer voice than most, husky and melodic in the way that a cello is, thrumming in the dark. She never once asks Beth about chess. 

It had been difficult to weather that voice the first few times. It had evoked the taste of pastis, the wheeling of light, the numb and splendid haze of being dead fucking drunk. What a night that they had had in Paris; so glittering, so lonely. What a wretched morning had followed. 

Beth’s strategy, with the psychiatrist’s urging, is to remember the mornings. 

On this particular April night it’s raining outside, and Beth has most of the lights off, and she’s curled up in Alma’s bed with a copy of Dr. Lasker’s Chess Career open on her chest and the phone cradled between her ear and the pillow. 

“I don’t know,” she mutters. “You can be pretty forward with that stuff.” 

Cléo laughs in a breathy way that signals to Beth she’s having a cigarette. “I have no need to be forward, now. You have told me all of your secrets. I can shock no more out of you.” 

Beth laughs, too. “Surely not all of them.” 

“Oh, all the important ones.”

“All right, fine. You may ask.” 

Cléo is quiet for a while, and through the phone Beth can hear distant voices, and the occasional honking of cars. 

“What is it that you wish to do?” Then a quiet sip. Beth’s stomach aches. “With the whole of your life. What calls to you?” 

Beth thumbs the corner of the book jacket. The answer takes just a second longer to come out than it usually does. 

“That’s—easy. Chess.” 

“You are so like Benny. He answered this the same way. I see no fault in such an answer, of course. To have a passion is an obligation that few can comprehend, no? For as long as you are living, it owns you.” 

Beth’s smile falters. “Chess doesn’t own me. Anyway, this is just the beginning. Steinitz was coming up with new positional styles when he was 37.” 

“Bof, you are like Benny in this way as well, the way you speak of these people as if I will know them,” Cléo says. “Vous dormez sur un échiquier, tous les deux, c’est incroyable.” Beth can always tell that Cléo is annoyed because she will start speaking French, almost vengefully. “So, c’est ça, you will play chess until you die. That is not so bad. Will it bring you satisfaction?” 

Beth sighs, adjusting herself on the pillow, already losing her patience with this conversation. “What else would bring me satisfaction?” 

“Art. Music. Lovers.” 

“Oh, please.” 

“Modeling?” Cléo suggests, wryly. 

Beth laughs, and switches off the light. 

“Mama,” Beth asks, “did you love Daddy?” 

Her mother is sitting by the window, stitching what will eventually become the petals of a bluebell. “Sure I did. For a while. Or maybe I just wanted to, the way we want to love the things we think can save us.” Her face armors itself up, her eyes like flint. “But it’s all a big old lie, anyway. What nobody tells you is, if you end up the kind of person who needs saving, you’ve already lost. You remember that, you hear? Nobody saves you. Nobody.” 

It’s nearly May when Benny calls. The telephone rings just after ten o’clock, and she recognizes him by the breath he takes before he speaks. She had learned its outline in New York, the things that it unfolded for—a particularly wild tactic; an exchange or a sacrifice. Once, in the dark, her mouth on his throat. Now it catches in her speaker like a muted flame. 

“Taking a gap year, Harmon?” 

Joy the texture of champagne fizzes quietly through her. She leans her shoulder against the wall beside the telephone, tucking her free hand behind her elbow. 

“Haven’t seen you in anything these days, you know,” he goes on. “Not even a peep in Chess Review.” 

Beth wants to tell him that he can’t get away with just reading about her forever. But she doesn’t. Benny would retreat from that kind of thing.

“Tournaments aren’t everything,” she replies. “Besides, I just won fifteen thousand dollars. Not like I’m strapped for cash.” 

Benny is quiet for a moment. Beth knows this part. This is the part where he asks her to come to New York, and this is the part where she says— 

“I miss you,” he says instead, which is much worse. “Every day.” 

Beth does not know what she is meant to say to that, so she says nothing. She rests her head against the wall and listens to Benny breathing. 

“I never thanked you,” she murmurs. “Not really.” 

“For what?” 

“New York. Moscow. Everything. The king-rook pawn. Opening up the file. I just—”

“Well, better late than never,” Benny says, obviously smug. Then, softer: “You’re welcome.” 

Even with states upon states between them, Benny’s presence seems to fill up her house. Beth lets the silence spread itself out again. It’s comfortable, unassuming; it demands nothing. She could do with more silences like these. 

“I never said I was sorry, either.” 

This time, Benny’s voice is more measured. “For what?” 

Beth’s mouth opens, but no words come out. She glances down at her bare feet, her crossed ankles. Suddenly that silence feels less like a refuge and more like a suture that hasn’t been closed. 

“I’m,” she says, “not sure where to start.” 

“Great sign.” 

“Lexington is nice in spring,” she blurts out. “I’m told people come here just for the trees.” 

Benny’s silence moves into her like a drill bit. She mouths, Fuck.

“The trees, huh?” 

Beth softly bangs the back of her head against the wall. 

“Weeping cherries,” she says impatiently. 

“Weeping cherries.” 

“That’s what I said.” She wonders if Benny can hear her heart beating, if he can hear her fingers curling and uncurling. If he can feel how desperately she wants him in her bed right at that moment, his pale body bent underneath the ugly floral quilt, his soap-and-leather smell on her pillowcase. “I don’t know. Think about it.” 

“All right,” Benny answers, in a tone so loaded Beth can’t begin to probe into it. “You doing Cincinnati again this year?” 

Beth stares at the opposite wall. 

“If I want to,” she replies, incredulous. “If I feel like it.” Then her flimsy patience dissolves. “So will you come or not?” 

Benny laughs disbelievingly. “I thought you said you wanted me to think about it.” 

He falls silent. Beth thinks, Now or never. 

“Well,” he says at last. “I’ll bet a weeping cherry is something to see.”

Benny in Lansdowne is like a knife in a teacup. The neighborhood ladies are appalled. One of those New York beatnik anarchists, have you seen him, clothes of a grave robber, mouth of a longshoreman. Beth fucking loves it. The street had seemed riotous on the day he arrived—Harry had picked him up from the airport—drizzly and vibrant, the first balmy rainstorm of late spring. He had shown up on her doorstep with one threadbare duffel bag to his name, and before she had greeted him at all he had pointed to her with a crooked smile and narrowed eyes and said, “Hey, aren’t you Beth Harmon?” And Beth had never wanted to hold something so tight, so close. She had opened the door all the way. 

“Christ,” he’d said when he stood in the living room, craning his neck to take in the ceiling. “You’ve made out pretty well for yourself, huh?” 

“There, there,” Beth had said, arms crossed to prevent any stupid gestures like tugging at his collar. “All this furniture must be a shock, I know.” 

Then in a moment of boldness she had plucked his hat off of his head and gone to hang it on the coat stand. His ruffled straw-colored hair had fallen down over his forehead; Beth had known this because he had turned to watch her move, his mouth slightly open, his eyes slightly dark.

“Let’s play chess,” he’d said in a strange, heady voice, and so they had. Draw.

He takes her old room, the same one that Harry had slept in—at night Beth lingers on the last stair to gaze at the strip of light underneath the door, and the small shadows of Benny’s movements rippling across it. He makes himself at home, reading her books, drinking her coffee—sharing a frankly ridiculous number of disparaging comments about the wallpaper. They don’t discuss how long he’ll be there. 

“He’ll be there til you don’t want him no more,” Jolene tells her archly over sandwiches, when Beth takes the bus to Louisville to see her. “He’s that type.”

Beth contemplatively stirs her lemonade. That type. Such devotion might have sickened her, once. She would have wanted nothing more than to destroy it. Now, what she does not know how to tell Jolene, much less herself, is that she had come down the stairs this morning to find Benny standing by Alma’s piano, dusted in pale light, with one finger pressing softly down on a key, and this had filled her with an emotion too powerful to name. 

“What’s next for you, anyway?” Jolene asks—that rote, inevitable question; but it doesn’t sound so bad coming from her. She steals the pickle off Beth’s plate. “You don’t have some kinda, like—chess-style victory tour, or whatever? Not that I don’t love your company, but Lexington ain’t exactly Paris, you know what I’m saying?”

Beth had asked Harry the same thing, back in January, and he’d given her a litany of practical and realistic answers. Traditionally, you’d seek out a coach. Probably a PR agent, too. Plan your annual schedule. Make room for exercise. Study. Limit yourself. Remember the love, no matter what. 

“I don’t really know,” she says, and, as recompense, she steals Jolene’s parsley. “For now I’m just doing what I feel like.” 

Jolene snorts into her Coke and says, with a kind of sharp affection, “Cracker, when haven’t you?” 

“When’s your next tournament?” Benny asks her after a week, perched on one of the barstools facing the kitchen, and Beth thinks: Ah. There it is. She’s heating up some chicken dinners in the oven, and her head feels heavy in that way that it does after a particularly satisfying game, even though all she’s done all day is read. 

“I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it.” She takes two plates down from the cabinet; two glasses, one chipped. “And anyway, playing too many opens… it can only hurt me, you know?” 

She feels foolish for a second, wondering if he’ll even remember that line—but he scoffs behind her and says dryly, “Cute. Very cute.” 

She turns to see him scratching absentmindedly at his cheek, and because his gaze is downcast she can follow the motions with her own, the subtle bending and unbending of his fingers. She shies away from telling him the truth: that she hasn’t considered her next tournament, or even her next meal—she hasn’t considered her next move at all. 

As in chess, so in life: she’s waiting for the moves to come to her. 

She approaches the kitchen island, setting the plates down in front of him. She’ll go back for the glasses in a minute. Benny’s black t-shirt looks even blacker in the dim light of the kitchen, and his knuckles less defined.

“You’re the first person who isn’t acting like my career’s already over,” she says, and smiles wanly. She props her elbows up across from him, eyes wandering over the burls in the mahogany surface. “It’s like everyone thinks I was playing this whole time just for Moscow. And not because I like playing.”

“You like winning,” Benny corrects her.

Beth lifts her head haughtily. “That’s playing.”

Benny makes a face at her—exaggerated, skeptical—and she tucks aside a laugh. “Oof, big talk from an international Grandmaster.”

“I know. It’s amazing what beating Vasily Borgov will do to your ego.”  

“You’re the sorest winner I’ve ever met, you know that?” Benny says, squinting at her. 

Beth props her chin up in her hands. “Better than a sore loser.” 

“Yeah, well,” he drawls, “you’re that, too.” 

Beth can’t argue with that. They eat their chicken dinners side-by-side, their shoulders stopped just shy of touching, Benny absently thumping one bare foot against the leg of the stool. 

“You remember in Paris,” he says when his plate is clean, “when Borgov said he’d probably die with his head on a chessboard?” 

Beth sticks her fork into the last piece of chicken, registering the dull throb of humiliation in the pit of her stomach at the mention of that horrible, beautiful city. 

“I do,” she replies. 

Benny nods beside her, running his thumb along the rim of his empty glass. 

“Only thing I thought when I heard that was,” he mutters, “‘A-fucking-men.’”

Beth watches him for a long moment—the fearsome clever details of his face, so softly lit in her kitchen, suspended in time. 

This is from the Hebrew, Miss Lonsdale had told them in chapel. It means certainty, truth—today we use it to express our concurrence with the prayer. With it, we submit to the will of God. “Let it be so.”

She likes Benny’s heretical version better, and all that it conveys. Not quite agreement, and not quite surrender—something lonelier, more prideful, drawn up from a deep well inside of him where he keeps his being in a bucket. She had never thought it could be put so plainly. Then again, Benny had been the first to speak of such incommunicable things in this way; the first to show her that it could be done at all. It all goes, he’d said in Cincinnati, and you just push wood.

“Yeah,” she hears herself say, and perhaps Benny will know what she means while they sit here, on the edge of the kitchen that Alma still haunts. “Yeah.” 

Something Beth remembers: her mother in the lake, floating on her back in a white cotton slip. A mingling of grief and tranquility laid over her lovely face, a curl of water-darkened hair stuck to her cheek. “Moon River” on the radio on the drive home, and summer coming to Kentucky—whippoorwills and distant thunder, and the stuttering of sprinklers in the twilight. Her mother’s voice, stitched with loneliness and grace, filling up the quiet of the car: You’re easy to love, sweet girl. Too easy to love. And Beth, not understanding why this had seemed like the sort of thing she ought to apologize for—and not understanding why she hadn’t. 

Benny stays. Beth chooses not to examine it. Living with him in Lexington is comprised of the same small mundanities that it had been those five weeks in New York: the afternoon chess games, the taste of burned coffee, the turning of pages in silent living rooms. He always wakes up before her, and he always takes short showers. The only difference is that there’s nothing to prepare for this time, no lofty aspiration to hook herself to; in New York she had pored over middlegame strategies long into the night, tucked against a stack of pillows in the corner, but now the evenings are less urgent. Once or twice she walks along the sidewalk at dusk to feel the air, and once or twice Benny walks with her. 

He even walks with her to the drugstore. Beth knows this has less to do with keeping her company and more to do with—well. But she can’t bring herself to mind. He positions himself in her line of sight so that the liquor aisle is blocked, and it’s a small comfort for the unfulfilled pain in her gut, the itching of her palms—the film of sweat on the back of her neck, like the last gasp of a fever. 

“I saw your picture on Chess Review here once,” she tells him as they peruse the cereals. “I was fifteen. I didn’t buy it, though, or steal it. I didn’t like the photo.”

“Ouch.” Benny winces, but there’s a spark of mirth in his eyes. “What for?”

Beth meets his eye and shrugs, pursing her lips. “The chessboard was too small.”

Over time, her psychiatrist’s vocabulary starts to widen. Relapse phases, triggers, self-compassion. Beth likes self-compassion the least. “Practice forgiving yourself,” her psychiatrist says, in that clear and gradual way that she says so many things, “before you practice knowing yourself. Learn it until it becomes an instinct.”

Beth wants to tell this woman that she knows nothing of instinct—that she has never seen a rook beneath a tungsten bulb and known, somehow, that it only moved in straight lines. But she won’t. She doesn’t pay her twenty dollars a week to argue semantics. She pays her twenty dollars a week to get better, whatever the hell that means. 

By June the restlessness blows in, and the letters are accumulating on the coffee table: Interzonals, Olympiads; tournaments in Reykjavík, Monte Carlo, Amsterdam, Netanya; exhibitions, invitationals. Georgetown College and Campbellsville University want her to come and lecture. A man in Cincinnati writes to ask her to teach his three-year-old son how to become a “chess whiz.” Benny does not comment on any of them, except to say, go, and, don’t go—inscrutable, laid out on the blue couch reading up on Fischer, his silver dogtags catching the retreating light. 

“You want the money, go for the money,” he says. “You want the clout, go for the clout. The variety, the challenge, the risk, same thing. What’s it matter? You’re playing chess.” 

He says this reverently, and Beth feels a little thrill of agreement shiver down her back—and after it, guilt.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have asked him to come,” she confides to Jolene over the phone, lying on her back with her legs against the wall. “I’m sure he’s getting letters, too. And anyway, there’s nothing for him here. He probably only said yes because I—”

“Don’t start,” Jolene interjects. “Look, I don’t know about your boy, but I wouldn’t drive halfway across the country to live with somebody just because I felt bad for ’em. That’s just sad.”

“You came to live with me,” Beth mutters, “when I needed you.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Well, for one thing,” Jolene says, “it was only a forty-five minute drive.” 

Beth misses her, right then—in that fierce, raw way she has never learned how to miss anyone else. She shuts her eyes. 

“When do applications open?” she asks. “For your schools.”

“August,” Jolene answers, with a relaxed noise, like she’s stretching. “But first I gotta take the LSAT. That’s this month. If I get in I’ll be leaving you for Georgetown or Virginia Law next September, so get ready. I won’t be a forty-five minute drive away anymore.” 

There is a lump in Beth’s throat. She tries to swallow it back. Upstairs, Benny turns on the shower. 

“You can do your thing anywhere, you know,” Jolene says quietly. “Just like I can do mine. Ain’t nothing keeping you here but ghosts, Beth.”

“It’s the first place that was ever mine, Jolene,” Beth blurts out, “the first home I ever had, but it’s—” 

She trails off again, out of words. In Paris, she had told Cléo that there was nothing keeping her in Kentucky with such confidence and carelessness—but really, the truth had been that there was nothing calling her anywhere else, and that had seemed much more tragic to admit.  

“I know,” Jolene says, and Beth believes her. “Shit. You get used to having nothing, and anything else feels like some kinda trick, doesn’t it? Pretty soon you’re so scared of losing it you just throw it away before you can.”

On the eighteenth Benny announces over breakfast that it’s time he flies back east. He’s got his eye on a round-robin in Manhattan whose lineup is dappled with patzers but whose first-place prize is substantial, and, he says, he’s still got rent to pay. 

“I’m not the one with fifteen grand,” he tells her. “It’s back to the salt mines for me.” 

Beth is not alarmed by his departure—not shattered by it the way Alma would be—she knows better than to classify it as abandonment or cruelty. Despite all that she finds there is a subtle, tender ache in her chest, as if her heart is a fruit that’s been bruised. She is stricken anew by his face, his tousled strawlike hair, his shrewd eyes. She remembers what it had been like to kiss him for the first time: in the doorway to what could charitably be called a bedroom, in what could charitably be called an apartment, on what could charitably be called an impulse. His narrow body, his sudden inhale. Wet lips, warm palms, the aftertaste of champagne. Beth had tipped her head back as if to drink it right from his mouth, and he had let her. 

“I’ve still got that blow-up mattress,” he says around a bite of scrambled egg. 

Beth looks up, her fork stuck in a tomato slice. Benny is still stooped over his plate, as nonchalant as anything—but she knows better than to take it at face value. Like everything he does, this is calculated. 

Still, if Benny Watts is going to entice her to take up residence in his concrete imitation of an apartment again he’ll have to do a little better than that. She eats her tomato slice and says, with raised eyebrows, “Mm.” 

Benny stops chewing. Beth can feel him looking at her, watching for tells, even though he ought to know better. 

“New York’s nice in fall,” he tries again, his voice low with hope. “I hear people come just for the trees.” 

“Mm,” Beth says again. 

“Vernon Duke wrote a whole song about it. You heard Ella and Louis do it? Lovers bless the dark…” 

Beth sets her fork down. Benny’s voice—aggravatingly more melodic than it has any right to be—fades in the space between them, which seems suddenly so much smaller. 

Of course she knows the song. Autumn in New York is often mingled with pain. 

“I like being alone,” she declares. 

Something in Benny’s eyes flickers. “Okay.” 

“What I mean is,” Beth tries again, “I don’t mind it.” 

Benny nods; a slow, agreeable nod. “Neither do I.” 

“So you don’t have to worry about me, or feel sorry for me. Or think that if you leave me by myself I’m going to…” 

“Drink.” 

“Yes.” 

“No, I don’t think you will,” Benny concedes. He reaches for his glass, but doesn’t lift it, instead balancing his fingertips on the rim. “But I guess I can’t be sure. And you can’t either.” 

Beth shifts in her chair. The first few weeks after Moscow had been easy; she had hardly wanted a drink at all. But as time had worn on she had found its absence more difficult to ignore. Her psychiatrist on West Vine Street had predicted this. She had invoked Lawrence of Arabia. The trick is not minding. 

“No,” Beth says. “Harry says I’ll never be sure.”

Benny inclines his head. “Harry’s a smart guy.” 

Beth considers whether or not it would be appropriate to use this opportunity to talk about Harry, and not New York. New York, which hardly even feels like the name of a place anymore; New York, a synonym for loss, self-inflicted. In the geography of things she has the right to reach for again it might as well be the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Unknowable and gone. 

Benny makes another move before she can decide on hers—always quick, always sure. He says, with a stitch of a frown and a note of disbelief, “I don’t feel sorry for you.” 

Beth meets his eye, and holds it. There could just as easily be a board between them now, and in some ways she wishes that there was. His sharp, familiar shape is edged in the morning light through the curtains, a little disruption in space where he exists. 

In that moment his words come back to her, a hook to hang her heart upon. You’re the best there is. No trace of awe or disbelief, no jealousy, no distance. Only truth. 

“Then why do you keep asking?” she whispers. 

It’s taken her months to ask that question, and it takes Benny only seconds to answer. 

“I want you there, Beth,” he tells her, so soft that it almost sounds true. Then, with a windless laugh, “There, Christ. Cat’s out of the bag.” As if those simple and terrifying statements have ever come out of Benny with any fight at all. As if he doesn’t give them up freely, with both hands. “What we can’t quite seem to figure out here is what you want.” 

Beth opens her mouth around a word that doesn’t exist. What was it she had told Cléo? That’s easy. Chess. It’s a truth that fits on her tongue as smooth and edgeless as a river stone. Chess, a verb unto itself. Not to play it, but to become it. That’s what she wants. She’s never considered anything else. 

This answer, she thinks, has never been enough for anyone, but it would be enough for Benny. He would give her a slant admiring smile; he would shake her hand across the table. A-fucking-men. Yet she has the distinct feeling that to say it now would ruin them both. 

She thinks of Benny’s concrete floors, his bad instant coffee, his bare feet and his rumpled pillowcases, his narrow windows, his mismatched chess sets. She thinks of waking to sirens, and practicing center defense until dark, and on the long walks she has learned to take listening to Benny name the trees: linden, maple, pin oak. 

It’s too bright. I don’t feel sorry for you. Flash. Don’t call me again. Flash. 

“I just,” she says, helplessly, “I need time.” 

Benny shrugs. “I can wait.” 

“Not forever,” Beth mutters. 

Benny turns his head to stare down the light from the window, tapping his thumb and forefinger on the edge of the table. He shrugs again; his eyebrows briefly rise and then return. This gesture is wearier, more withheld. 

“Not forever.” 

So Benny takes a plane back to New York—leaves her on a Tuesday morning with his duffel bag in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other—and Beth, in blue Kentucky, takes her time. Summer dwindles. Dusk comes sooner. She annotates all of the matches that FIDE wants her to, lectures at the women’s colleges, plans out her exhibitions for the coming winter: Anaheim, Seattle, St. Louis. She even does an interview with Vanity Fair. 

Near the end of August, the phone rings. It’s Jolene, shrieking joyously, like a firework going off on the dull suburban street. 

“I passed the LSAT! I passed the fucking LSAT! Better not let Deardorff find out or she’ll fall over dead! You gonna miss me?” 

Beth laughs into the receiver, eyes wet, and answers plainly. “Yes.” 

The State Champion from Indiana moves his knight to king’s bishop 6. It’s not a bad move, but it isn’t especially good, either—the kind of move that neither advances nor hinders the game; all it does, really, is prolong the inevitable. Beth purses her lips, castles queenside. In five more moves she has his pieces tied up handily. In four more moves, it’s mate. 

Afterwards, he holds out a spiral-ring notebook and asks for her autograph. 

“I know I didn’t have a prayer,” he says, “but it was an honor just to share a board.” 

Something about this eats at her even after he’s gone. Is that all she is now? Is that what she’s always been? A novelty? A holy grail for boys who take up chess on a whim, some myth to share a board with? Maybe she shouldn’t be insulted, but she is. After all, it hadn’t been an honor to share a board with Borgov. It had been something she had fought and howled for, fear by fear, square by square. 

She shakes her head and heads for the parking lot, shouldering the doors a little more roughly than she needs to. It will be a long, hot walk to the bus stop. Summer is opening wide; the air has a sultry green smell, and the sky is silver, and from every tree the cicadas are calling. She would die for a cigarette. 

The bottom of the stone steps leading up to Henry Clay High School are the last place on earth she would have expected to see Townes, and yet there he is, leaning against the banister—looking excruciatingly handsome, as per usual. He lifts his head when she comes out, and grins. He’s got on a white t-shirt and painter’s pants, and there’s a camera around his neck. 

“How was San Francisco?” she asks, fighting valiantly to keep a smile off of her face. 

Townes stands up, rocking on the balls of his feet. He’s wearing sneakers. Sneakers! 

“Foggy,” he replies. “Nice bridge, though, if you can believe it.” 

Beth can feign disinterest no longer. She rushes down the stairs and catches him in a hug. 

“Good to see you, Harmon,” he laughs into her ear. “Your hair grew.” 

“Yours didn’t,” Beth says, and pulls away. 

“What are you doing playing in a local tournament?” asks Townes with obvious amusement. “As I recall, you already won the Kentucky State Championship.”

“Mm, I’m attached to it.” Imperiously, Beth tilts her head. “Besides. Home field advantage.” 

“Strategic and sentimental,” Townes says. “You are still full of surprises.” He nods his head to the right. “Can I give you a lift?”

Beth walks with him to his car, a brown Chevy Impala parked near the football field. It’s in far better shape than Benny’s Beetle had ever been—not that Beth considers Benny’s Beetle the standard measurement of quality. Townes tells her the lot had been full-up that afternoon. He’d come too late to spectate. 

“I doubt I missed much,” he says as Beth clambers in through the passenger door. “You running the board, same as always. You’ve been keeping a pretty low profile these days, haven’t you?”

Beth slumps gratefully in her seat when he turns on the air conditioning, closing her eyes. “I’m not Bobby Fischer here, Townes.”

Townes laughs. Beth would have wanted to stop time for that laugh, once. 

“Thank Christ for that. One of him’s bad enough.” 

Talking with Townes comes naturally, as always—they chat animatedly on the drive along New Circle Road, swapping stories about his reporting, her training. Townes makes chess feel like dance music; she can’t help but come alive and move.

“I swear, this must be what talking to Da Vinci about art is like,” Townes exclaims, but his grin is wide, his dimples visible. “What are you going to do with all that genius, anyway?” 

Beth rolls her head toward him. “I don’t know. Be a genius.” 

“Must be lonely.” 

“Not really,” Beth says, and she means it. “I don’t mind being alone. Summer gets a little dull, though, in a big house.” 

“Ah.” Townes gives a slow nod. “I was sorry to hear things didn’t work out with you and Benny.” 

Beth laughs far too quickly. “What on earth does that mean?” 

They’ve arrived at her house. Townes glances at her over his nose, obviously calculating his next move with immense caution. He pulls up to the curb just under the shade of a beech. 

“I just know it was important to him to be there for you in Moscow,” he answers. “And after.”

“Did he tell you that?” Beth can’t imagine Benny telling Townes anything, considering Benny refused to call him by his name and instead referred to him exclusively as “sweater boy.”

Townes chuckles as he puts the car in park. “Well, no. But I’ve got a pair of eyes in my head, Harmon, no offense. Let me walk you to the door.”  

Beth does, although she gives him a dirty, commanding look throughout, even as she rummages in her purse for her keys. Trust Benny to annoy her through a third party. Trust that third party to be Townes. 

“He’s a good guy,” Townes comments out of nowhere. “You know. Despite appearances.” 

Beth scoffs, jamming her key into the door. “Townes, did you really come all the way back to Kentucky just to tell me Benny Watts is a good guy?” 

The corners of Townes’s eyes crinkle just slightly, in that way that they do. He ducks his head, almost sheepish, but maintains eye contact—not sheepish at all. 

“Ah, not exactly,” he admits. “It was sort of self-serving, actually. I came to see if the Herald-Leader could get a comment.”

Beth blinks at him. “A… comment on what?” 

Up twitches Townes’s mouth, caught between amusement and surprise.

“Harmon, don’t you read the news?” he asks her coyly. “Georgi Girev just announced his intent to claim your title.”

“You know it’s seven in the morning,” Benny says groggily, holding the door open with one hand and his silk kimono closed with the other. “You know that.” 

Beth’s legs are stiff from the flight and the taxi ride, and her arms are stiff from carrying her suitcases, and there are blisters on her heels. She’d had to walk twelve blocks in her brand new shoes, because she hadn’t for the life of her been able to remember the address of the building under which Benny lived. Despite all this, she still has some adrenaline left to spare, and seeing Benny standing in the doorway—barefoot and remarkable—brings it bursting to life again. 

What was it that Alma had said, long ago, on a plane to Mexico? It’s enough to make a person positively giddy.

“I think that I,” Beth says, “use people.” 

Benny’s eyes are squinted shut, his voice slurred. “Okay…” 

“I think that I use people, and that I used you,” she continues, breathless from the walk and something entirely different. “But I don’t want to do that again. All right? And came here to say that—that right now I need your help, I want your help, but that  if you don’t want to give it, that’s fine. Just say so.”

Slowly, Benny opens his eyes. Some of his hair is cowlicked on one side, and the rest of it grazes the bridge of his nose. 

“Girev,” he mumbles. 

Beth nods, breathing open-mouthed. “I wouldn’t have beaten Borgov without you—”

“You didn’t beat Borgov because of me, you beat Borgov because you’re the greatest chess player that ever lived,” Benny says frankly, in one breath. “Jesus, it’s seven in the morning—”

“Benny,” Beth whispers.

What an awful whisper it is, so tender and entreating, so undone. Everything she’s ever felt or feared or wanted, packed into his name.

I’m sorry. Take me home. 

Benny lifts his head until their eyes are level. From the city up the staircase Beth can hear sirens and horns and voices, life clamoring for autumn. His fingers curl against the door. 

Something shifts. Beth feels it like the tilting of the planet.

“You know I’d eat right out of your hand, Beth,” Benny says, a king laid down. “You know I would.”

“You might be great at something someday,” Beth’s mother tells her, braiding her red hair in the firelight. “And you might not be great at anything. Which one do you think is sadder?”

What throws Beth is the couch. It isn’t just any couch, either—it’s a rather nice couch. Mid-century, dark green, with teak feet. It stands flush against the south wall, just beneath the window.

“Should be big enough to sleep on,” Benny says, and tosses her a pillow from the closet. “No more air mattresses for you.” 

Beth reads more significance into the presence of this couch than it deserves. It’s obviously brand new, and not even slightly the style he would have chosen on his own—a worn-down leather Chesterfield, maybe, but this? It could pass for a Dunbar. On the first night, she falls asleep on it with her book on her face, and wakes up come morning with a blanket draped over her that definitely hadn’t been there before. 

The roster for the Moscow Invitational is certainly nothing to sneeze at: it will be her, Girev, Borgov, Botvinnik, and Nona Gaprindashvili, among others whose names Beth does not recognize. A man from Manila, and a Belgian. 

Benny wastes no time. They sit at the kitchen table in the mornings, studying opening variations and endgame positions. The afternoons are for prepared lines on the couch, one of Benny’s many chessboards balanced on the cushions between their knees. In the evenings they take the D line to Columbus Circle and walk in the park until sundown, arguing about tactics—on which Benny has a frankly horrifying number of opinions—under a riot of autumn leaves. 

Beth likes New York—she certainly gets to see more of it this time around, now that she doesn’t have to cram for Paris, and liking it becomes much, much easier. Benny knows his way around it, too; all the oddest and liveliest places. When Beth declares that she wants one of those Sassoon haircuts, he goes with her to Madison Avenue. 

He still knows her, and this will always be a strange and vexing miracle to her. He never tells her to slow down, never asks for humility or restraint. The bolder and more cruelly she plays, the more something in him seems to sharpen, a knife at the whetstone; quickening hands, darkening eyes. Although she learns plenty from replaying historical matches, she vastly prefers the games they play at the day’s end, when they can be as cutthroat as they like. It’s strange to see him reenact the moves of Morphy, or Alekhine, or Capablanca—strange to see him play in any way that isn’t Benny, down to the grain. 

It’s when she can just play Benny—when they’re lying on the floor in their bare feet, propped up on their elbows, moving pieces in the dark—that she sees him the most clearly, all the light and matter of him: the hunger and the need, the bright exacting cleverness, the well-kept joy. He has so much inside of him, Beth thinks. She could stay like this forever, watching it come out. 

“Fuck, I forfeit,” he groans, and collapses on his side, flicking down his king. “I’m gonna end up with my guts on the board if you keep playing like that.” 

“Sounds messy,” Beth says primly—and she flops down too, spent and satisfied. “You could have had me, in the middle.” 

Benny lifts his cheek just slightly, eyes glinting. “You could have had me at the end.” 

Beth knows she could have. She arches her eyebrows, looking over the ceiling. 

“I could have had you anytime,” she says. 

Benny doesn’t respond to that. Beth adjusts her position on the floor, getting comfortable—or as comfortable as she can manage on a rug on a concrete floor. It’s almost pitch-dark in the apartment; they’d been so absorbed in the game that they’d forgotten to turn on the lights. It wouldn’t be the first time. 

“What made you want to play chess?” she asks.

“What kinda question is that?” Benny scoffs, but he takes one look at her eyes and they seem to pry him open by an inch. “What makes anybody want to? I played it. And then I wanted to play again.” 

Beth nods, thinking of the shadows of the black locust’s branches on the ceiling at Methuen, thinking of her hunger and her loneliness and how maybe neither of them have left her. Thinking of Mr. Shaibel, and his slow deliberate hands.

“Who taught you?” 

“Nobody. I played all my early games against myself. People gave even less of a shit about chess back then than they do now.” 

“But surely someone introduced you.” 

“Some cousin in St. Louis. Had a fuckin’ toy set from a candy store. I was five. He got bored of it fast, so I got him to swap it for all my Rockette cars.”

Amusement tugs at Beth’s mouth. She rolls over, propping herself up on her elbows. 

“Rockette cars,” she repeats.

“God yeah. I had a Daytona Racer, y’know.”

Beth stares at him.

“Indy style,” he adds, gravely.

Beth tries to imagine Benny smaller, kneeling on a living room rug, silly and ordinary and not yet concerned with gambits and trades—moving tiny things in circles. It just won’t come together. 

“How long did that last?” she asks dryly. “Being a good boy who played with Rockette cars, I mean.”

There is a flicker of movement in Benny’s throat at the words good boy. The skin there is white, Beth notices, like boxwood, rook-smooth. She looks back up.

“Not very long,” he answers. 

“Clearly.”

“All right, what about you? What got you hooked?”

“I’ve told you before—”

“Yeah, I read the magazines, I know. The orphanage and the janitor. That’s a how, it’s not a why.”

Beth falters. Years ago she had been asked a similar question, and she had given an answer about beauty and control. Just sixty-four squares, she’d said admiringly, as drawn to them then as she had been in a chilly basement, beating erasers in the silence. That’s still true, in ways. But in the beginning... 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I guess I liked understanding it. It was the first thing I’d ever really understood like that.” Not needlepoint, not mathematics. Those she had learned, but had not known. “It might be the only thing I do.”

This is the sort of thing that she can only say to Benny—the sort of thing that only produces itself when it’s just him listening, like it’s been waiting to come right on out and curl itself up in his hand. She glances away, surprised at herself. 

That’s it, then. She’s afraid chess is all she’s good for. Well, it’s textbook enough. 

Still, that’s a truth that she would give to no one else. Not even Townes.

Benny watches her for a long moment, saying nothing. He looks beautiful in the dark like this, Beth thinks with an understated wonder, beautiful beside her. She doesn’t want to ever leave this floor—this cold, hard floor.

“The midshipmen in Brooklyn used to bet quarters on speed chess,” he says abruptly.

Beth blinks at him. “Okay.”

“I learned how so I could hustle them,” Benny goes on, and pushes himself up on his elbows. He gazes at the opposite wall, distant, clearly caught in a memory. “My family needed the money. We were dirt poor and hungry as hell. It started out small—a quarter on a game. Then a buck. Then five bucks. People ate it right up. I was seven. Pretty soon we had enough that my mom didn’t have to work. Word got around. Some guy showed up at our apartment, dragged me to the Manhattan Chess Club for a simultaneous. I creamed ’em all, they went nuts. Same day, they called up Najdorf. The rest is history.”

Beth blinks, processing it all—permitting each detail to latch onto her memory. She remembers the photograph she’d seen of Benny at thirteen, surrounded by sailors, his hand on a bishop and his eyes squinted against the sun. 

“But,” she says disbelievingly, “none of that’s in the—”

“No,” Benny confirms. “Not gonna find that in Chess Review.” He sighs, almost rueful. “Fuck. You know I haven’t told anybody that.”

The sincerity of this moment is lost on Beth. She dips her head closer over the chessboard and asks in a dry voice, “Because you don’t want to give them an edge?”

Benny is quiet for a long time, or what feels like it. His t-shirt is riding up over his stomach, just enough that Beth can see the appendicitis scar beside his navel, faded and pink. And she looks up at his face and his neck and his mouth and thinks, breath hitching, Maybe. 

Benny’s eyes slide up to meet hers. He wets his lips. Beth thinks, Maybe—maybe—

“It’s late,” he says in his typical unreadable way. “You should sleep.” 

And Beth imagines it: climbing past the chessboard, careful not to disturb the pieces, and straddling Benny’s slim, familiar body. Watching him watch her, unflinching, pupils blown; slipping her hands past the scar. Biting the gentlest line along his collarbone and using, using, using. 

“Scrambled eggs for breakfast?” Benny asks, and sits up, rumpling his hair with both hands. 

Beth exhales, waiting for the heat to leave her abdomen. Routinely, she starts gathering up the pawns still left on the board. 

“I want bagels,” she says. 

“Bagels!” Benny moans, and vanishes into his room. “You’re paying.” 

November comes, and with it, the rain. It’s totally unlike the rain in Kentucky—it’s cold, and constant, and miserable. It gathers up all the color and noise of October and washes it down the glinting streets. 

Beth doesn’t mind. She spends most of it indoors, and in addition to his shocking discovery of furniture Benny has also accepted the merits of television sets. On the weekends they stretch out on the couch under separate blankets, their bodies facing one another’s, legs parallel. So much of it reminds her of Alma, and their lazy afternoons in so many hotels, giggling over beers and falling asleep in their clothes. 

It’s hard not to want the beer, even at Benny’s. She settles for hop water. 

On the coldest night yet he has some of his New York Friends over, and to Beth’s delight Hilton and Cléo are among them. Immediately she and Cléo steal away into Benny’s room and stay there for the duration of the party, and laugh about nothing over a bowl of cherries, spitting pits into a paper cup. 

“It is so good to see you,” Cléo says, ruffling Beth’s hair with one hand. “Ma cherie douce, the patron saint of chess. How cool you look, with this haircut.”

Cléo always looks cool, and she looks cool now, in her stylish minidress and black stockings, not unlike she had when Beth had first met her. It’s like being called bright by a star itself. 

“You should have seen Benny these last months,” Cléo goes on, flopping back on Benny’s rumpled gray sheets, which smell permanently of sandalwood. “Buying this couch as if it will summon you to him. Disconsolate! He was no fun at all. Now, he is repaired.” 

Beth remembers this word—repaired—even after everyone has left for the night, and even as she and Benny tiredly clean up. He washes the dishes, and she dries. He seems a little buzzed, but not too. Periodically he sways on his feet when he passes her a glass, his elbow brushing up against hers as if tugged there by a rope, and if Beth leans just slightly into it, who cares? 

“Do you want to be my second?” she asks him suddenly. 

Benny’s response is delayed—he flips the plate over to scrub the bottom, blinks, and then turns his head. His eyes are narrowed, his brow pinched, like he hadn’t quite heard her properly.  

“What?” 

“I don’t know where to go from here,” she elaborates. “What happens. I don’t know theory like you do, or how to be patient. You were the only one who ever made me feel like there were things still left to find, to—to feel. Like it wasn’t all just tactics and prediction but it was also creation, and—”

Benny drops the plate into the sink. He lays his hand over her elbow, and anchoring himself to it he lets out a ragged gasping breath and kisses her. 

Beth inhales through her nose, swelling up into him. She throws the dish towel to the side and grips his head with both hands, fingers gripping his hair, pulling him closer, closer, as close as he can be without passing clean through her. Oh, how right and true it feels to kiss Benny, like a sentence finished, like a fallboard dropped and closed. How nice it feels to lead him to that couch he bought for her, in the end. 

How good it is, she thinks, looking down at him in the lamplight, to be home. 

She sells her house—Alma’s house—to a very nice young couple, before the year is out. They’re a bit starstruck by the whole thing. Beth Harmon’s house? People will be driving by here for years to come. Beth doesn’t argue. She knows they will. 

She thanks her therapist for her years of service. She sells what she can bear parting with, and keeps what she can’t. She leaves them the piano. 

Before she knows it, it’s February.

It’s a long flight to Moscow. Benny dozes for most of it, his sleep mask askew on his forehead, his hands folded over his stomach. In the seat beside him, Beth nurses her ginger ale and watches the black expanse of the sea through the window—and waits patiently to land.