Chapter 17: ch.17 [The Theorist?!]

Ingrid had told them about the clip on Sunday night, standing up, in four sentences.

Forty seconds. A teenager with a phone. No name attached.

The comments called her the lady in the wig, and someone had started a fund to buy the wig a hat.

She had not mentioned the second buzz.

She held that one until Tuesday, on the steps of the tailor.

? ? ?

Abelard & Daughter filled three floors of a narrow stone building that had been dressing the Federation since before Ingrid was born.

A brass bell over the door.

A smell of steam, chalk, and old wool.

Astrid went up the steps first and put a hand on the door.

"I have decided we are going to the gala," she said, to the street.

"Therefore we are going to the tailor."

We.

She had made the decision alone, somewhere between a park and a Monday, and announced it to the pavement.

Seth, who had ticked a box on Saturday and told no one,

kept his mouth shut.

"Before you go in," said Ingrid.

She had stopped on the second step.

"The federation booked one tailor for the gala. One afternoon."

"Yes."

"Your fitting is at two."

"Yes."

"So is Lina von Schach’s."

The hand went still on the brass.

Seth stood one step below, in the navy emergency blazer,

with the gray hoodie folded in the bag at his hip.

The name went through him like a dropped tray.

Everyone who had ever loved chess knew that name.

"The Lina von Schach?"

"There is only one," said Ingrid.

"She’s number three."

"She has been number three for ten years," said Astrid, to the door.

Flat.

It was not a number she had looked up.

"She has been upstairs since one," said Ingrid.

"She arrives early to everything. The federation wants a photograph of its champion and its likeliest challenger. Someone thought a joint fitting was charming."

"A photograph."

"There is a photographer on the second floor."

"You knew Sunday."

"That was the second buzz."

Ingrid held the tablet flat against her chest.

"At home, you would have found a reason not to come."

Astrid did not deny it.

"One more thing."

Ingrid looked past her, at Seth.

"The reply card went out yesterday morning. I post those myself. You ticked a box."

Seth’s stomach turned over.

"I do not read other people’s mail," said Ingrid.

"I read this one. Will attend."

On the door, Astrid’s fingers pressed once into the brass.

"You answered."

It was not a question, and it was not for Ingrid.

"You gave me the pen," said Seth.

Silence.

She had slid a card across a table and not once looked at it.

She had never in her life not looked.

"Neither of you asked the other," said Ingrid.

"I thought someone should say it before a stranger did."

Astrid pushed the door open.

The bell rang once, bright and unconcerned.

She walked in like a woman walking onto a stage with the wrong set.

? ? ?

The fitting room was on the third floor.

Three tall mirrors stood angled together at one end, like the wings of a screen.

A low platform.

A velvet bench.

A tray of pins on every flat surface.

Someone was already on the platform.

She had her back to them.

A long dress of dark green silk, pinned at the waist and the hem.

A pile of pale gold curls, loose and a little unruly, the way hair is when it has never once been told to behave.

A pen was stuck through the curls at the back, holding up the entire arrangement.

She was sorting tailor’s chalk on the windowsill.

Not tidily.

By length. Shortest first. Left to right.

And talking to it.

"No. You are out of order. You. There."

Seth stood in the doorway and tried to remember how breathing worked.

He had spent a month imagining the other side of the Champion’s world. Cold. Marble. A woman who looked at people the way she looked at a board.

He had not pictured someone arriving already busy.

She finished the row.

She turned.

Blue eyes. Very blue.

Eyes that looked as though they had been awake for a long time and were quite happy about it.

"Ah," she said.

She smiled at Seth first.

"Mr. Pawn."

She let the name sit half a beat.

Then she stepped off the platform, silk whispering, and crossed the carpet with her hand already out. Halfway, she plucked the pen from her curls, and the whole pale mass fell down over her shoulders.

She capped the pen without looking.

Click.

Behind him, Seth felt rather than heard Astrid’s weight shift.

"Lina von Schach. I’m so glad. I’ve wanted to shake your hand for a month."

He took it.

Warm. Dry. Very steady.

She held it one second longer than a handshake needed.

He had watched the Candidates Final three times at four in the morning: a sixteen-year-old with white hair, a nineteen-year-old with blonde curls, and a handshake held as if she might lose something by letting go.

"M-move twelve," Seth heard himself say.

"I’m sorry?"

"The exhibition. That’s what you were going to say."

Her smile widened.

"I was going to say your first game was very brave. But move twelve is better."

The sound that came out of him was the goose.

He pressed his lips together, too late, and his ears took the news.

"I like him already," said Lina, to no one.

She turned, still holding his hand.

"Astrid."

"Lina."

Two words.

Seth looked for cold in them and could not find it.

It was worse than cold.

It was the stillness of two people who had once played a game so close that neither had ever entirely left the board.

"You look the same," said Lina. She sounded sorry about it.

"I have changed a great deal."

"Not your face."

Seth, who had watched that face crack at a kettle, laugh into a sleeve, and fall asleep on a chessboard beside a pot of burnt rice, said nothing.

It was not his to say.

Lina let go of his hand at last.

She turned to the small, serious man in the corner who had been waiting for all of them to finish.

"Mr. Abelard. We were rude."

"Ms. von Schach was early," said the tailor, to the carpet.

"Ms. Lind is on time. I am satisfied."

He was perhaps seventy. Glasses on a chain.

He did not appear to look at anyone’s face.

He looked at shoulders.

At hems.

At the exact place where a body disagreed with its clothes.

"Ms. Lind," he said, to her left shoulder.

"Mirror, please. Be a coat rack."

? ? ?

Astrid was measured first.

She stood very straight in the middle of the angled mirrors, arms a little away from her sides, while Abelard went around her with a tape and a stub of pencil, murmuring numbers to no one.

Seth sat on the velvet bench.

He had never seen anyone touch her.

A stranger’s hands moved along the shoulders of a woman who flinched at a handshake, and she did not flinch.

Of course.

This was not touching. This was measurement.

She had been trained for it since she was nine.

There were three of her in the mirrors, all very white, all very tall, all perfectly still.

Under the high collar of the pinned black linen, a small pulse knocked in her neck.

He did not need to count it.

It was somewhere near a hundred.

"Black," said Astrid.

"It is a gala," said Abelard.

"It is black."

"There is midnight. There is ink. There is a silver that is not silver, but the light deciding to be silver."

"Black."

Abelard sighed.

He slid a pin into the shoulder as though closing a book.

"Breathe out, please."

Astrid breathed out.

"Ms. Lind. You have stopped. I am pinning a lung."

From the platform, very softly, Lina laughed.

It was not an unkind laugh.

It was the laugh of someone who had stood there once, on a different morning, with a different tailor, and also forgotten to breathe.

Astrid heard it.

The pulse in her neck went up another notch.

She did not look.

Abelard turned a page in a small gray file.

"For the record," he said, to his pencil.

"Bust, a hundred and one. Waist, sixty-nine. Hip, ninety-eight."

"You may stop reading them aloud." said Astrid.

"I may not. They are the only honest thing in this building."

Seth looked at the carpet.

It was a pattern of small repeating diamonds.

He counted eleven across.

He kept his eyes on the eleventh until the numbers had finished being a fact in the room.

His ears took the whole cost.

In the mirror, Astrid’s eyes had gone to him.

Not to the tailor.

To where he was looking.

She watched him count diamonds.

Her shoulders came down a millimeter.

She looked away, and neither of them mentioned it.

? ? ?

"Mr. Pawn. You will be a coat rack too."

"Yes, sir."

"Pockets. Everything."

Seth emptied them onto a small silver tray.

A key.

A folded receipt.

His phone, the chipped rubber queen swinging from the strap.

An index card, soft with handling.

His hand went to the other pocket.

It closed around a small round weight, and stayed there.

He did not take it out.

Abelard did not look at the hand.

He looked at Seth’s shoulders.

He wrapped the tape around Seth’s chest and pulled it snug.

"Eighty-seven."

"Eighty-four," said Astrid.

Seth turned his head.

She had not moved from her mirrors.

She was looking at his shoulders, not his face.

"First Sunday. Eighty-four."

"You measured me?"

"Every second Sunday. By the wall bar."

"I thought you were fixing my posture."

"I was also doing that."

"Shoulders," said Abelard, to the tape.

"A hundred and six."

"A hundred and four," said Astrid.

"Then."

"Upper arm. Twenty-eight."

"Twenty-six."

Ingrid shut her eyes.

"She has a ledger," she told the ceiling.

"It has a column for his resting pulse."

"It is a training log."

"It has a column."

Abelard’s pencil had stopped.

"These are not a boy’s numbers," he said.

"They are not yet a man’s. They are a good start."

He touched the seam at the collarbone with the end of the pencil.

"I will leave you a half-centimeter."

"For what?"

"For whoever you are in a year."

Seth’s throat went tight.

On the platform, Lina looked across the room at Astrid.

"You keep records," she said.

She said it kindly.

It was not a compliment, and it was not a jab.

It was the smallest, truest thing in the room.

Astrid could measure him to the centimeter.

She could not say why.

Seth knew it, and she knew he knew.

He kept his eyes on his own shoulder in the mirror.

"Color?" said Abelard.

Navy. Black. Something with a faint stripe.

Behind the swatches, folded over the back of a chair, was the gray hoodie.

DAD’S FISHING TRIP 2019.

He had worn it under his coat to the door and had not been able to leave it in the car.

"Gray."

"Charcoal," said Abelard.

"Gray."

"Charcoal is gray with a degree."

"Then that."

Ingrid closed her eyes with the weary calm of a woman who understood exactly what he had just done.

Astrid’s mouth moved a very small amount.

She was the only other person in the room who knew.

? ? ?

Seth was on the platform, pinned along both shoulders and one sleeve, when Lina picked up the silver tray.

She did not do it rudely.

She did it the way a person picks up a book someone has left open on a table.

She looked at the index card.

In the mirror, Astrid’s head turned.

Seth saw it from the platform, and he saw all of it.

It was not the look for cameras. It was not the look for sponsors.

It was level. Red. Unblinking.

It was the look an arbiter gives a hand that has touched a piece it does not own.

He had seen the beginnings of it once, in a park, when a cabdriver’s hand had landed on his shoulder and she had watched it for exactly one second too long.

This time she did not look away.

Lina felt it.

Her fingers paused on the card for half a breath. No more.

Something moved behind her eyes.

It was not fear.

It was recognition.

She read on.

Checks. Captures. Threats. Loose.

The fourth word was in different ink.

"Loose," said Lina.

"It’s a habit," said Seth.

"Who gave you that one?"

"A man in a cardigan. In a park."

"He’s right."

She turned the card in her fingers.

"It is also not theory. It’s housekeeping." She heard it.

She winced, quite sincerely.

"I’m sorry. That sounded unkind, and I don’t mean it. Housekeeping is how everyone begins. It keeps you alive until the theory arrives."

"Okay," said Seth.

"I’m very bad at this," she told the card.

"At what?"

"Saying a kind thing without a little knife in it. I’ve been told it’s a habit."

She said it so ruefully that he almost smiled.

Then she looked up.

Not at him.

Across the room, at Astrid, who stood unmoving between her three mirrors with a pin in her sleeve.

"Be careful, Astrid."

Her voice was warm.

"I might take your student."

Nobody moved.

Even Abelard’s pencil stopped.

"One of us," said Lina, gently.

"Can teach him theory."

Silence.

Astrid’s pulse was visible from where Seth stood, a small bright thing beating against the black collar.

It was faster than he had ever seen it.

"He is learning," said Astrid.

"I know. I watched." Lina set the tray down.

"I watched your exhibition until I couldn’t tell you which move I’d started on. Everything you did to him was beautiful. Everything

he did back was a mistake. It’s a very good game."

She tucked the pen back through her curls, absently, as if she had done it ten thousand times.

"I’ve read everything you’ve ever said about how you see," she said. "Every interview. There are eleven sentences."

"Lina." said Ingrid, very quietly.

"I counted. I’m not criticizing. I think it’s the most honest thing anyone has said about the game, and there are eleven sentences."

Her voice did not harden. It softened.

"There are girls in my club in Hamburg who play because of you. When I was nineteen, there were six. Now there are over three hundred. I’d like you to know that."

Astrid’s jaw moved once.

"I would give a great deal," said Lina, "to hear a twelfth."

In the middle of the mirrors, Astrid did not speak.

She stood in a black column of pinned linen, hands at her sides, and the silence was exactly as long as she let it be.

Seth knew why.

A basement.

A cold gray morning.

I cannot tell you.

It has never been asked.

She had said it to him alone, in the voice she kept for the truest things.

She could see the shape.

She had never learned to say it.

And everyone in the world knew, except the woman who had come closest to taking it from her, who had studied that shape for twelve years and could not see it at all.

Seth said nothing.

He kept his face very still.

He did not say she can’t.

It was not his to say.

Astrid’s eyes found his in the mirror.

She had understood exactly what he was not saying.

It was the quietest thing he had ever done, and it cost him something he could not name.

"Mr. Pawn," said Lina, turning back. "May I write something?"

She held up the card.

It took him a second.

She was asking.

"Yes," said Seth.

He heard how steady it came out.

She wrote on the back, in the air above the tray, in a small firm hand and blue ink. When she was done, she capped the pen without looking.

Click.

Astrid’s hand flattened against her thigh.

It was the smallest of movements.

Lina handed the card back across the tray.

Under his four words, she had written:

Move twelve. Ask her why it lost. She will say "the pin." That is what. I can tell you why. — L.

And a number.

He looked at it for a long time.

"I haven’t said yes," he said.

"Good," said Lina. "Never say yes to the first person who is kind."

She meant it lightly.

It landed on both of them.

Seth thought of a pot of burnt rice, and a woman who had been kind first, and badly, and early.

He kept that to himself.

"I’d like to know why..." he said.

It came out simply.

Not for Astrid. Not against her.

For him.

Lina nodded once, as if he had played the right move.

"That is the correct answer."

? ? ?

Astrid crossed the carpet.

She did not hurry.

She walked as she always walked, shoulders level, chin up,

a very tall woman in half a black dress with a pin in one sleeve.

She stopped in front of the platform, and Seth had to look up to meet her.

Her hand rose.

She had wanted to do it since the first day, across a table in a hall full of cameras, when her fingers had twitched at a collar folded under on one side.

She did it now.

Two fingers. Very quickly.

She smoothed the fold flat, pressed it once against the base of his throat, and took her hand away.

Nobody said a word.

It was the first time she had touched him on purpose while someone was looking straight at it.

Seth stood there with every inch of him burning.

He had let her.

He did not know what it would have looked like if he hadn’t.

Lina watched, head a little tilted.

She did not look away either.

"Mm..." she said.

That was all.

She went to the windowsill, collected her coat, and took her time putting it on.

"I’ve told the photographer you aren’t dressed," she said.

"I thought you’d prefer it."

"That is kind," said Astrid.

"I know. I’m trying." Lina smiled.

"We’re at the same table on the fourteenth. Table One.

I hope you don’t mind. I wasn’t asked either."

"The seating is the federation’s."

"Then I suppose it’s no one’s fault."

She looked at Astrid one last time.

"I’m glad you came."

"I did not know you would be here."

"I know." Lina’s smile did not change.

"It was kind of you to come anyway."

The bell rang once, three floors down.

? ? ?

For some time nobody spoke.

Abelard stood with a pin between two fingers and studied a seam that did not need studying.

"Schach," said Ingrid at last, to the ceiling. "It is German for chess, She’s similar to you if you take in account that."

Seth laughed.

It was the goose, high and shocked, and it broke the room open like a window.

"The federation," said Ingrid.

"Has never recovered from its good luck."

Astrid did not laugh.

She had gone back to her mirror.

Abelard resumed pinning without being asked.

Seth stood on the platform in half a charcoal jacket, the card in his hand.

Words on both sides.

He turned it over.

Checks. Captures. Threats. Loose.

He turned it back.

Ask her why.

"Inside pocket," said Abelard, to his ribs. "Left or right?"

Seth did not look at Astrid.

"Left."

? ? ?

Three Astrids.

Three black columns of linen, three white heads, three pairs of red eyes, in three mirrors.

Behind them, a boy in a half-finished jacket slid a card into a pocket that did not exist yet.

She watched him do it.

Her pulse was somewhere above ninety-four.

She did not count it.

She had practiced a pen cap for weeks, alone, at a kitchen table, until she could do it without a witness.

The woman who had just left had never needed to practice.

Click.

She had heard that sound once before.

Twelve years ago, across a board, in a hall that had gone silent.

A nineteen-year-old had tipped her king, held out her hand a second too long, and then, quietly, capped her pen.

It was the last sound before the room came down on her.

Astrid had been sixteen.

She remembered every move of that game.

She had never once remembered the pen until today.

Twelve years she had been told she had the deepest instinct in the history of the game.

Twelve years nobody had asked her why.

And the first person to say it aloud was a woman she had beaten, who still carried her pen like a sword she had never been allowed

to draw.

She did not ask what was on the back of the card.

He did not offer.

In the mirror, Abelard’s chalk went on over the left side of the jacket, a short white bar, exactly where a heart would sit.

She watched it go on.

She did not turn around.