Chapter Text
When Benny thinks of Beth, the thing that comes to mind most often was the night she’d beaten him at speed chess. The streets of New York were slick with rain, and the sound of falling water joined the usual cacophony that was the background to city life. He’d taken the bet fully expecting to win, as he’d done that night in the student union. But no, she’d cleared out his wallet and managed to make him question everything surrounding his feelings for her as she sat cross-legged on the hard concrete floor and looked up at him from underneath mascara-covered lashes.
After Russia, he hears that Beth has gone home to Kentucky. He does not call, but he sees her at a few tournaments and they make polite small talk about chess. His disinterest in her personal life is feigned, and he thinks with a pang in his chest that hers may be real. Harry Beltik shows up with her a few times, and Benny wonders about the nature of their relationship with barely concealed jealousy. One day, he no longer has to wonder because she sits down to play him and he sees the ring on her perfectly manicured finger. She wins in twelve moves, and although she extends a hand, he does not shake it.
Benny likes to think that if she had come back to New York after Moscow, they would have picked up exactly where they left off before Paris, but the cynical part of him knows better, and Beth probably knows better too, which is illustrated by what happens when he finally decides to give her a call. The phone rings and rings with no answer, and before he knows it he’s in his car headed south on interstate ninety-five.
When he finds Beth’s house in Lexington, he nearly runs up the steps, and after knocking three times a confused-looking middle-aged woman opens the door. Her confusion only grows when he asks after Beth.
“She sold this house to us four months ago.” Says the woman.
Benny asks if she left a forwarding address, and she shakes her head sympathetically. He shuffles back to his car, metaphorical tail between his denim-clad legs. Obviously she has enough sense to know when to let sleeping dogs lie, a skill Benny had always lacked.
He sees her again at a tournament in Atlanta, waiting in line to check into a hotel with Harry at her side. He leans down and whispers something to her, and she poorly masks a laugh. At that moment, Benny wants to march straight over to Beltik and open-palm slap the man, or maybe break his nose, but she smiles as he grabs her hand and Benny realizes that he’s been replaced. They play, and she wins, as usual. This time she does not extend a hand.
When he gets back to his apartment, he angrily kicks one of the cushions in the ‘living room,’ and notices something when it shifts. He picks it up, and it’s one of the scarves that Beth used to wear in her hair. He’s torn between holding it and not letting go, or throwing it away. It’s one thing to see her at tournaments now and then; she’s become a different person, someone he doesn’t know anymore, or maybe she was always this person underneath the pills. Now, she doesn’t wear scarves in her hair. But the small piece of silk he holds in his hands is a reminder of the Beth he knew, the Beth that slipped into his life for a month and a week, the Beth he loved.
And he’d thought loving her was hard then, but being left alone with a silk scarf and the ghost of a woman he’d known once was, without a doubt, much worse. At the US Open in 1971, she forces him into a position he knows there will be no way out of, and he looks her dead in the eyes, making sure she knows he’s talking about more than just chess.
“I resign.” He says.
They shake hands, and after that, they don’t speak again.