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The day after the big match, Benny’s phone rings.
“Hello?” He asks.
The response is crackly, with lots of background noise. “Hey.”
“Beth? Where are you?”
“Russia,” she says, as if it’s obvious.
He’s ready to spring from the chair. “What time does your flight land? I’ll meet you at the airport. Even if you’re flying into Kentucky, I can make the drive.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“What? Like, ever?”
Through the white noise, he can hear her inhale, then sigh. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” He’s staring at a wall in incredulity.
“I mean just what I said.” Her tone is sharper.
“Why did you call me?” He knows anger is creeping into his voice now, but he’s too shocked to calm down and ask the questions that really matter.
“To say thank you for the phone call, yesterday. It meant a lot.”
“Then why are you still in Russia?”
“Because, Borgov, and Luchenko, and all the best chess players are here. We don’t use cheap, plastic boards or cheap, plastic pieces. If I want to be the best, I should be where the masters are, and there’s nothing calling me back to the states.”
Benny explodes. “What about me?!”
“What?”
“You heard me! What if I want you back here?”
“Do you?”
“Of course. Why else would I be asking? Fuck. I never should have called you. Maybe if I hadn’t called you would have lost, and you would have come back-”
She cuts him off, repeating a line he’ll forever be ashamed of. “Maybe is a loser’s word.”
In a last-ditch effort, he tries the only thing he can think of. “Beth, I lo-”
There is a click, and the line goes dead. He holds the phone in his hand, white-knuckled, for at least a full minute before finally putting it down. She’s gone .
She’s gone.
Running away is a quintessentially Beth thing to do, in regards to anything that isn’t chess. In chess, she attacks decisively and mercilessly, but in life, she flees at the slightest scent of danger, like a startled doe. The night they’d shared a bed, he remembers watching her as she slept next to him with her makeup smudged and hair messy. The next morning, he woke up alone, the bed next to him cold. And she’d just done the same thing, only this time, instead of a flimsy bedroom door, they’re separated by an ocean.
After her fateful call to him, Beth doesn’t contact Benny again. In fact, it seems like she’s disappeared completely. Her name is never so much as mentioned in an article or television interview, and the world appears to have all but forgotten Beth Harmon.
Benny goes over their last conversation in his head, again and again, analyzing it as if it were a chess game, and each time, it ends with him in checkmate.
He defends his title as U.S. Champion; they strip Beth of the title when it becomes obvious that she’s either died or defected in Russia. The chess scene is the same as it was before; male dominated and bleak. There is no challenge for him anymore, and most of his games are over in minutes instead of hours.
Beth wins the world championship a year later. One day, it’s silence on that front, the next, the press is booming with talk of the first female chess world champion. Chess Review puts her on the cover , along with a host of other magazines and newspapers. He buys them all, and watches every interview, though he’s ashamed to admit it.
She is the same in some ways, different in others. She’s grown her hair, but her clothes are as fine as ever. She says that she lives in a small apartment in the heart of the city. He tries and fails to imagine what her life must be like now; the image of Beth going about her day somewhere that isn’t his apartment is impossible for Benny to conjure up in his mind.
It hits him then that all of his fantastical ideas of what they could’ve been were doomed from the start. He’d imagined life with Beth so many times; chess champions by day, lovers by night, but now he realizes that he doesn’t even know her at all. Her time in New York had been filled with chess, and any moment of personal connection was fleeting, if not entirely imagined.
He doesn’t know what her life was like in Kentucky or Moscow or on the goddamn moon, he only has memories of five weeks that seemed like both forever and no time at all. Memories that have grown hazy in the months since they were formed. Because he’s starting to forget things, like the way the light caught her hair, or the exact shade of her eyes, and he doesn’t know if he’s terrified, relieved, or perhaps a little of both.
As US Champion, Benny is once again asked to play at the Moscow invitational. Levertov is his second, and while he’s good, he’s not the best. Benny doesn’t make it through the first day, which means he doesn’t make it far enough to play Beth. Since he has time, he looks her up. Or rather, he attempts to look her up. His Russian is functional at best, and he thinks maybe he made an error in his translations, but he doesn’t find anything about her. He tries ‘Elizabeth Harmon’, ‘Beth Harmon’, and ‘Liza Harmon’, as the Russians call her, but nothing. Even her last name alone yields no results, and eventually he gives up because he has to go home.
One perk of FIDE is that they kept the information and whereabouts of all the top chess players worldwide, and if Benny wanted to, he could pick up the phone and find Beth with relative ease. More than once, he stands with his hand hovering an inch above the phone, going back and forth in his mind about whether he should call them or not, whether he even wanted to know. Eventually, he does bite the bullet and call. He tells them who he is and who he’s looking for, and the man he speaks to gives him a telephone number and an address in Paris.
He calls at seven in the evening, half-hoping she won’t be awake, and that she won’t answer. But someone does pick up and it’s a moment before he hears a voice he knows. It’s Cléo.
“‘Allo?” She asks.
Benny is too confused to speak. What are Beth and Cléo doing together? His question is answered when he hears a faint voice that is unmistakably Beth’s presumably coming from somewhere in the same room.
“Who is it?” Beth questions.
“I am not sure.” Cléo answers.
“Well, come back to bed.”
“Oui, ma belle.” Cléo hangs up on him.
Benny is in shock. Beth is living in Paris. And sharing a bed with fucking Cléo. He’s angry, and confused, and more than a little hurt, even though he knows that really, things were over between them the minute she hung up and left to go play her match with Borgov. He does not try to reach her again.
There is a shelf, in Benny’s apartment. It is not large, just big enough to hold what he keeps on it. It sits around eye level, full of magazines and newspapers all pertaining to the current world chess champion, Elizabeth Harmon. Anyone who enters the apartment will see it, and most of the time they ask Benny if he knew Harmon, or if he trained her. His response is the same every time.
“Something like that.”
They are sorted in chronological order, with the earliest ones on the left, and the dates becoming more recent towards the right. In the magazine containing the first article ever written about her, tucked in between the front cover and the first page, is a sheet of paper. There are a few addresses and phone numbers written on it. First one for Paris, then London, with the most recent being Rome. He does not write or call, but he buys every paper, every magazine, and he has every television interview on tape. To others, it is simply keeping up with a former apprentice. To Benny, it is a memorial.