Work Text:
Beth had never much liked the FIDE galas until she went to one with Borgov. It isn’t that she dislikes parties—in fact, she rather delights in them with the right people—but FIDE’s are usually populated either by unimaginative players who paid to be there or by the once-champions she’s made an art of handily beating, so they are at best boring and at worst awkward. She supposes that being World Champion has its upsides—better parties, and better company.
Borgov has spent the past twenty minutes tranquilly telling her about caviar harvesting, and he has done a marvelous job of warding off the assortment of self-important Swiss amateurs who would ordinarily be trying to lecture her about why the Queen’s Gambit is a poor opening, actually, hasn’t she read Benny Watts’s columns in Chess Review? Beth would take Borgov’s array of sturgeon facts over that any day. Of course she’s read Benny’s stupid columns. He’d written them in the first place to argue with her columns, and she had in turn written several responses, and in the end after allowing the debate to go on for three consequent issues Chess Review had issued a moratorium on publishing anything by either of them for at least one calendar year.
Benny had been living in Budapest then. Beth had been in Nice. That had been as close to correspondence as she’d gotten from him, for a while. Or maybe it had been as close as she had given him. Or maybe it had been a little bit of both.
And now…
“Of course Beluga Sturgeon makes for finest caviar,” Borgov says.
Beth blinks, jolted back into the present moment, and looks over at him guiltily.
“Hm?”
“Beluga,” Borgov repeats with his usual gravitas. “You are distracted. This does not interest you?” He takes a pensive drink from his martini glass of orange juice. “That is to be expected. You are the champion of the world. We can speak about the London System, if you like. I would be intrigued to hear your thoughts.”
“Pointless,” Beth says, purely reflexive. Then she lets out an embarrassed laugh and ducks her head, thumbs gripping the edge of her snack plate. She still has a smoked salmon canapé left, and some Greek olives. She’s sure she’s hungry, but she can hardly pay attention to it. “I’m sorry, Vasily. It was very interesting, I was just… thinking about—”
Cutting her off, there’s a great commotion from the skittles room—or, rather, the parlor that has become a skittles room, whether the Ritz likes it or not. Beth shudders to imagine the hostile takeover that must have been, and the downtrodden look on the attending bellboy’s face only serves to confirm her suspicions.
A handful of years ago she might have rushed to investigate, always hungry for the sight of some play she hadn’t seen before, searching for the next defense to sunder. But she’s seen quite a lot of these remarkable plays, now, and at this point she doubts that anything could surprise or thrill her enough to shout like that about it—not that anything ever had.
Of course, she had come close, once. But this isn’t the canteen at the University of Ohio, and it isn’t two in the morning, and it isn’t cheap coffee she’s drinking. It’s Martinelli’s. Still, she’s heard that kind of clamor before. But it couldn’t be, could it? No—
“Please, do not let me keep you,” Borgov says, and only then does Beth notice she’s been craning her neck toward the doorway for the past several seconds. “In a dress like that, you should be celebrating. Not listening to an old man talk about sturgeon.”
“You’re hardly even forty,” Beth retorts, but grins, reaching over to squeeze his hand. “I’ll come back for you.”
Borgov lifts her hand in his and kisses it. “Make them weep.”
Beth makes her way through the party with her snack plate, dispensing a polite nod here and there to the greetings and congratulations. She’s glad that Borgov had noticed her dress, a glittering Halston Frowick gown with a knotted belt and a neckline that Alma would have found outré. The color is not quite silver, not quite blush. She can see tiny shards of reflacting light on the walls when she walks.
There’s a small crowd gathered in the skittles room doorway, all of them boys of or near college age who look like they’d been put in their suits by force. Beth glimpses a name tag on one of them—Club d’échecs du Sorbonne. Beth can comprehend the majority of their passionate whispers about whatever game they’re watching—vitesse, technique, maître, yeux de lynx. Beth stands on her toes to see over the blockade of hunched shoulders and cigarette smoke, but all she sees are more spectators.
She huffs. “Pardon.”
Once the boys recognize her they leap apart like the Red Sea before Moses. Her name ripples through them—Harmon, Harmon, c’est Harmon!—and she’s granted unimpeded passage.
In the parlor, three tables have been pushed to the center of the room, and set on each of them is some folding wooden chessboard or another, no doubt smuggled in someone’s coat pocket. Beth can hear the clatter of plastic pieces, the slapping of clocks; onlookers mill about with champagne glasses and unlit cigarettes, riveted to their respective games, but most of them are gathered by the leftmost table, and there, hunched over the board at the leftmost table—
“Benny,” Beth says, and a hush plunges into the room.
Three years ago, Beth had played Benny at the Interzonal in Seville. After an arduous match in the semifinals, which had run for nearly eighty moves, Beth had pinned his king with two rooks and a pawn. He had shaken her hand across the board. She would go on to play Petrosian for the right to challenge Spassky.
Afterwards, they had walked together through the temperate Spanish night, watching the brassy light spill from the restaurants into the streets, and ruthlessly discussed each other’s missed wins, of which, it turned out, there were suspiciously many. The match, and its length, had not mattered. Beth had never felt more awake.
“Admit it,” Benny had said, and he had looked so like himself just then, his features made sharp and delicate by the nighttime, that Beth had had half a mind to reach for his face in the dark and kiss it. “You like playing me.”
Beth had turned to him on the cobblestone, the careful breeze tousling her hair. She had thought about what it had been like to learn from him, and what it had been like to fuck him and kiss him and hold him, and how none of those had really compared to what it’s like to play him.
“I like playing chess,” she had said, and she had meant it. “Don’t get any ideas. You just play it well.”
The next day, they had both flown back to the U.S. together. She had not seen him since.
Benny loses nearly twenty seconds on his clock staring at her, and the room stares with him. Beth takes in the sight of him—his combed hair and his smart tuxedo, the soft lines at the corners of his eyes; the crooked open fingers of his hand, hovering over the pieces. He looks different on the surface—no duster, no moustache, and no infuriating hat—but moves the same; Beth indexes the indelible, familiar gestures. The slight squint and the huff of laughter. He moves his rook without looking at the board, and—
“Jesus,” his opponent exclaims. “Is that—”
“It is, in fact, mate,” Benny says loftily, and stands up, and only then does Beth register that he’s smiling. “Good game, kid.”
When he comes out into the main hall, Beth has to crane her neck to maintain eye contact. He’d always been a lanky son of a—
“Your Majesty,” he says, by way of a greeting.
Beth frowns at him, unsure of whether or not she’s being made fun of.
“Christ, what a look. You want me to say your full title? Elizabeth Harmon, FIDE World Chess Champion? That’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here.” In Beth’s attempt to keep her voice calm, it emerges from her cold, almost a warning. Benny doesn’t shrink away from it like most people would, but she glimpses a flash of uncertainty in his eyes, like he’s miscalculated something.
“I came to see you,” he replies, casual and even.
“What did you—no, thank you,” Beth says brusquely to the waiter who offers her another canapé, “what for?”
“I’ll take one of those,” Benny calls, and plucks a canapé from the silver tray. “Merci. Look, um—oh, damn, this is good—what is that, salmon?”
Five minutes in his company and Beth has already lost all patience for it. “No one told me you’d be here.”
“Well, yeah. It’s one of those things that’s called a surprise in some cultures.”
“Then why did you—why were you playing blitz chess in the skittles room?”
“Because blitz chess is fun.”
“Benny Watts—”
“And I wanted to earn the money to buy you a soda,” Benny adds, and produces a ten-franc note from his coat pocket. “Plane tickets cost an arm and a leg these days, and don’t even get me started on the tux. Ginger ale, right?”
Beth looks at the money—a crumpled, unfamiliar thing in an achingly familiar hand—and then looks up at him.
“You didn’t come to Kentucky,” she blurts out.
Benny shrugs. “You didn’t come to New York.”
That’s familiar, too. Four years they’ve spent perfecting the art of retreat and yet here they are, throwing the same punches. Beth senses a dull pain all the same, like the old bruise is still tender.
“And no, I didn’t come to Kentucky,” Benny goes on, folding away the bill between his fingers, “but I came to Paris.” He softens. “To buy you a ginger ale.”
Anger and longing swell in Beth’s chest in equal measure—all at once she wants to ask him about Budapest, and all at once she wants to make a mess of his hair with both hands; and all at once she wants to watch him set up a chessboard, pawn by pawn, in a quiet parlor by the seaside, miles and miles from anybody else.
“Make it two,” she says, and expertly swipes the money from his hand. “And clear us a table.”
Benny gives her a lopsided smile, happiness hesitating at the edge of his mouth. “For the sodas?”
Beth laughs, pretending to be shocked. “Of course not. For a game.”