Manila Gambit. John Zeugner

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 a break. It’s the hottest part of the afternoon.”

      “That’s true enough. I’ve noticed them sweating out there inordinately today. Just how hot is it? Shall we call the radio station 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