Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful.
The strongest person is the person who isn’t scared to be alone.
And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man’s world. To hell with her; it wouldn’t be a man’s world when she finished with it.
Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.
Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess.
After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess.
I could have done this at eight.
Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.
Not all of us are insane.’ ‘But most of you are. Enough of you are – it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.
Benny, I like the way your hair looks.
What you know is not always important.
I am no longer a wife, except by legal fiction.
The waitress who handed her a menu was dressed in a black miniskirt and fishnet hose, but she had the face of a geometry teacher.
I didn’t see what he was doing,” Beth said, picturing the move where his queen took her pawn. It was like putting your tongue against an aching tooth.
For a moment she wanted to say something about the expensiveness of room service, even measured in pesos, but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six. The man answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large Coke to 713.
She had three thousand dollars in her savings account; she was no longer a virgin; and she knew how to drink.
You’ve been the best at what you do for so long you don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.
That night at eleven she was able to get undressed by being careful. She had found a pair of pajamas earlier and she managed to get them on and to pile her clothes on a chair before getting into bed and passing out. No one had come back by morning. She made scrambled eggs and ate them with two pieces of toast before having her first glass of wine. It was another sunny day. In the living room she found Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” She put it on. Then she began drinking in earnest.
Someone had said that when computers really learned to play chess and played against one another, White would always win because of the first move. Like tick-tack-toe.
It was a beautiful day, with fresh leaves on the trees and an impeccably blue sky. She felt herself expand, relax, open up. She was going to beat him. She was going to beat him soundly. The continuation she found on the nineteenth move was a beautiful and subtle wonder. It sprang to her mind full-blown, with half a dozen moves as clear as if they were projected on a screen in front of her, her rook, bishop and knight dancing together down in his king’s corner of the board.