never get the knight moves right. So he kept trying and trying to get me to move the knight correctly, but I wouldn’t learn that. I could tell it was very important to him, so I didn’t try to do it. I think I could have done it.”
“And now you know how to do it.”
“Now? Why yes, of course, now. I know all about it. Don’t I?” Her voice trails off as if the question weren’t quite a question but rather a short-term meditation on the apostrophe in the phrase.
“Yes. Well,” I answer, “perhaps we could go through the moves and you demonstrate to me what Daddy taught you so long, long ago.”
“I’m not that old.”
“Of course not. What is this?”
“Bishop. It moves on the diagonals only. You have two—one for the black diagonals and one for the white diagonals. I bishop pair is very powerful, do you know why?”
But I have begun a quiet, seething meditation. So this is the perfect revenge from A & P How perfect indeed! Spending my time learning little moves on little diagonals on little black and white boards.
“Do you know why? You can figure it out, can’t you?” Her voice sounds like some echoing incantation toward self-improvement, some weird conscience spin-off flailing through the thick, heavy, dusty, hot air in Ward Five of the Tampa Memorial Hospital. To become irreplaceable for her would mean answering such questions forever. Chalking off the weeks, years, decades of answered questions. Yes, the bishop pair is powerful for the obvious reason, the obvious reason—what was it?
Pam was saying, “For the obvious reason that all the squares are covered—sort of, at least—the black and white diagonals are covered.”
“What’s the point of the game?”
“To capture the king, to checkmate the king, so he has to surrender.”
“I know that. I mean what is the point of the game? Why do people play it?”
“My father said it was wonderful to kill a whole afternoon and evening. It made time pass so quickly that almost any rainy day went by lickety split,” Pam answers.
“That’s why people play it—to kill time?”
“That’s why Daddy plays it, I think. But it is a good question. We should ask him. I will ask him when he comes.”
“He comes often?”
“Oh, oh yes,” Pam says, not convinced of it herself, “whenever Dr. Coffee says he can come, he comes. Unless he’s staying out at the ranch.”
“Can we go through the moves some more?”
Pam pushes the rooks and the king and queen through their paces. She avoids the knights.
“My book says the knight moves one up and two over or two up and one over,” I offer as a lead to a sensitive area.
“Your book?” she asks evidently hurt that I have outside references.
“Learn Chess Fast,” I answer. “Waldo got it for me at the library, 794.81R.”
“They write books about chess?” she says slowly, evidently impressed.
“Do they ever. Some fellow named Reinfield must have written fifty.”
“Reinfield,” Pam repeats, ever softer. “Reinfield.” The sound intrigues her and I realize the chess lesson is over for the day. She sits back on the bed, begins to fool with the peculiar yellow nubbins of the spread. It’s not the hospital spread, I decide. A little redecoration possible for, or by, long-term patients, little markers that the room is more than a way station, a kind of home away from home, is that it? She begins to clap her hands together, eyes lifting over her fingers toward the windows, partially cranked open. Steel netting in front of the jalousie bands.
“You are thinking of rhinestones?” I ask with calculated diffidence. In truth I am fascinated by these little leavings of hers. At some level I maybe envy her them.
“Rhinestones,” she says after a while. “I used to wear rhinestones, not many, just one or two on dangling earrings. It was tacky with all that glitter, but I remember the first time I wore them. I remember exactly my father’s wonderful guffaw across the dining room. I came down during the dinner with lots of people—probably someone important, someone Daddy wanted to impress. I remember there was candlelight and then I came down the stairs and then there was this wonderful guffaw. It was all so clear, as if it . . .” She seemed to lose the thread. More toying with the yellow nubbins. Then the alluring slithering across the satin or polyester, or whatever it was the spread was made of.
She stops at the edge of the bed, looks at me. “You were the first it happened with, you know.”
“Happened?”
“You know. You noticed. You asked, ‘What’s going on?’ when it happened.”
“I’m not sure I follow this.”
“You were the one. It has only happened with you.”
“No one else?”
“Right.”
“No one else so good, eh?”
“Maybe. Maybe so,” she says looking down at the spread. “Anyway, you knew when you asked, ‘What’s going on?’”
“Just once?”
“Just once.”
“What is going on?” I ask.
“What is going on?” she answers.
Chapter 5
“Where’d you get the technical data?” Waldo asks, evidently pleased.
“There’s chess magazines that annotate the games.”
“So it’s not your prose, then?”
“Maybe not, maybe so. It all passes through the extraordinary prism of my mind.”
“Of course!” Waldo says, pretending to applaud. “And you are learning the game.”
“Learning the game, Waldo. Learning the game. Pam finds me a good listener, brother confessor. Maybe a well-meaning but ignorant therapist. . . . maybe.”
“Let me tell you a thing or two. Actually two. Let me tell you two things this afternoon before we go out for a little dinner and some political talk. Two items of interest to you. Two items to think about through the long, hot Florida night. The lonely Florida night.”
Sometimes Waldo begins to embellish on a residual theme, some private vision that been formulating through most of the empty morning at the paper, and he, like Pam, seems overcome by the deliberate texture of the thing, sidetracked by consciousness of whatever it was he was going to say. “Two items. Item one: about marriage—“
“Jesus, Waldo, give me
