for a reading? Okay. Okay. We’ll leave item one. Item two: you need to dwell not on the technical stuff so much, but on the human interest side of the game. Personality profiles. Higher reader identification stuff. Gossip. Human interest stuff. Your pieces are competent. Everybody thinks you know the game well. But nobody wants to read the column as it is presently constructed. Except maybe some of the trailer park aficionados.”
“Human interest stuff?”
“Precisely. Gossip. Innuendo. Contemplation of the tensions in the matches, that kind of thing. The human side of the game. Have you read this?” Waldo reaches under his desk, pulls out a copy of a book, Reinfield’s The Human Side of Chess. “Fascinating stuff. Only a few games in the back by way of illustrating personality quirks. They were all nuts. Absolutely bonkers. Every one of them. Wonderful read!” Waldo says proudly. He holds the book up. “I’ve got a theory.”
I accept the book and don’t follow up on the offer of a theory. But Waldo is remorseless. “Why don’t we take off a bit early this afternoon?”
“Suits me.”
Waldo has already stood up, begun the assembly of a letter folder to be put inside the leather attaché case he always carries ceremoniously out of the office, down through the rank and file, to be deposited until the morning on the backseat of Hillary’s blue Mercedes. “I’ve got a theory,” he repeats in the leather interior of that car. “It occurs to me that there is a distinctively national component to these champions, or at least a distinctively American style, versus the European one—and I include Russia in that European rubric.”
Kentucky Fried Chicken, Arby Roast Beef, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Dunkin’ Donuts whiz by on the Tamiami Trail as we head south to the club. The cement pavement, like the bay on the right, sparkles in a glare that shimmers heat at the air-conditioned chamber of the car. Waldo accelerates, swivels in his specially vented wicker seat on the leather upholstery. “The American champions are much younger. They burn out faster, and they’re much loonier. Aggressive, given to all sorts of combinations and hostile actions at the board and away from it. Nearly all religious quacks. Sexually hung-up freaks. Did you know that Paul Morphy, the first American world champion supposedly— I don’t think the title was awarded then—ended up his days kneeling naked in a semi-circle of women’s shoes?”
“I’d like to try that.”
“It’s drafty,” Waldo answers evenly. “Why not do something on the last days of the American champions? Crib whole sections from Reinfield, if you need to. This fellow Fischer is very much in the American mold. Maybe you could get an interview with him. Where does he live anyway?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, maybe I’ll make it my business to find out and we’ll try to get you to talk to him.”
“Not for a while.”
“Why not? You afraid?”
“Sure. And I won’t be suckered into another absurd possibility argument. I won’t.”
“Sensitive fellow,” Waldo remarks. “Ready for item one?”
“No. Not really.”
“Neither am I. It cuts too close to the bone. We need G & Ts for that.” “For everything.”
“Yes,” Waldo laughs, “for everything.”
The road to the club from off the trail bisects a large black neighborhood filled with graying tin-roofed shacks, and rusted-out Buicks. Tape recorders stud the tops of the wounded cars. Kids in grey underwear run off and onto the porches that slope down to the littering palm leaves browning in the dirt before the shacks. A few old men in glistening white short-sleeve shirts sit in rocking chairs and move almost imperceptibly on the porches. They pat their foreheads with sand colored handkerchiefs.
Waldo eyes this scene avidly. Every time we come, it is as if the feast of this litter pumps him for the cool, gripping hold of the Gin and Tonic at the bar. He remarks, as he always does, while the Mercedes plumes through the watching envy, “Hmmn, such American choices. Such American choices.”
Then the ironwork of the trellised archway to the club grounds looms up, and we are safely in. Harry, the black retainer in a white linen suit, bows enough to bring a smile back to Waldo’s temporarily disturbed visage.
“The first few sips, the first few slugs of a G & T have got to be the most refreshing liquid in the history of the planet,” Waldo says, sinking more easily, more pleasantly, into the deeper blue shag carpet in the bar. The yachts are mostly out. Grey and white docks stand tranquil and receptive through the polished, floor-to-ceiling glass at the far end of the bar.
“The Americans—young and nuts,” Waldo continues, putting both hands now around his glass. The lime half bobs to the surface. He pokes at it with his right thumb. “You need to find a new champion, Snelly. Someone on the way up. Younger and nuttier even than Fischer. Make him the center of your column—become an expert on him. Expertise is the path to fortune in this land. Isn’t that so?”
“I thought rich women were,” I answer, having finished more than half of my drink. There is a perfect thirst-quenching shuffling of interior props about midway down a good G & T. You need middling gin with a good bite to it, and Schweppes, nothing else, for tonic. And a full half a lime that impedes the drinking even as it shuts the ice away from your lips and speeds the liquidification of your brain.
Waldo orders two more. “Somebody out there just like you, only with chess talent. Do you have any?”
“Why don’t you ask me next year at this time?”
“So it’s not such a bad long-term arrangement, then?”
“I’ll stay through the Interzonals.”
“The Interzonals, they sound wonderfully exotic,” Waldo remarks contemplating the second drink set before us. “Wonderfully official. The Interzonals. . . . The Interzonals of the mind.”
“In Manila.”
“The Interzonals in Manila. Very expensive, Very, very expensive.”
“Very far away,” I add.
“Very lonely,” Waldo says softly. “Very lonely.”
That’s all there is to the negotiation. We adjourn to the dining room for Crenshaw
Mellon, escargot, filet mignon, hearts of palm salad again, and chocolate crepes for dessert, with Waldo’s private bottle of Drambuie.
On the second round of that sweet, sad liquid, Hillary joins us. She is a tall, leggy woman, imperially thin with a shock of thick blonde hair that has just the trace of curve as it hits the back of her neck. Very tan, very fit, very shrewd all at once.
“Hilly!” Waldo shouts, standing up so quickly that his legs dump a bit of the table toward my lap. “I didn’t think you were coming tonight.”
“And so you waited,” Hillary says smiling, nodding toward me, as I fight my way to a standing position against the lip of the table. “Please, please. You’re having such trouble. Simply give it up on my account,” she says half-laughing.
“Hilly, what happened? What are
