by Ann Regentin
(12/04/02)
Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen sit opposite each other, assessing, wondering where their game of cat and mouse will end. She rises suddenly, walks over to a chess set and looks down at it speculatively.
"Do you play?" he asks.
"Try me," she says.
And so they play. A finger caresses the curve of a bishop, plays with a lip, runs up and down a bare arm, fidgets with a tie, brushes a knee under the table. They smile, exchange glances as the fire crackles in the background.
Check.
He stands, his back to the board, to her, then turns and looks the game over. He did not expect this. It's his move now. He pulls her to her feet. "Let's play something else!"
This chess game in the 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, along with the kiss that follows, is one of the great seduction scenes on film. The movie
itself is about the collision between a rich, spoiled bank robber and a beautiful, intelligent insurance investigator, and is only otherwise memorable for some tricky production techniques. But the chess game does its double duty splendidly, providing both a metaphor for the battle of wits between the two
protagonists and a perfect arena for a long, slow dance of mutual temptation.
I love chess. I was introduced to it by my father and uncles, who played constantly at every family gathering. I learned pinochle the same way, but I've
never eroticized that. Pinochle is associated in my mind with peanuts and kidding, but chess is another story entirely. I've never been particularly attracted to my uncles, but I am very attracted to chess.
The language of chess is very sexual. I mean, what are you supposed to think when somebody declares that they're going to mate you in five moves so you
might as well surrender now? Things get taken in chess. They can also be pinned and skewered. If you're going to nab the queen, you have to move in
carefully, obliquely, much like a tricky seduction. It's a traditionally masculine game but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she is the most powerful piece on the boards and calls many of the shots. A knight, if he's careful, can take her without putting himself in harm's way. He just has to make the right moves.
I'm not a particularly gifted player. I can think ten moves ahead, but I usually forget the first three, and I can get so invested in a plan that I fail to see clearly what my opponent is doing. Sometimes I get impatient and careless. But I play ruthless material chess and I win at least as often as I lose. I love the challenge of the game. I like pitting my wits against someone else's. I like the tension of the endgame, when every move counts and there is no room for error. My heart pounds and I fidget, waiting on tenterhooks for my opponent to make his move and then sitting there staring at the board for ages, trying to anticipate him. That's part of what makes chess so erotic. In order to play well, you have to read your opponent's mind, get into his head the way you do when you're in bed and trying to figure out what will please this particular lover best.
In both chess and sex, you use that intuition to break the other down, bring
them to their knees in one way or another, whether it's defeat or ecstasy. Chess
is a sort of acid test for me. I once beat a man who was foolish enough to think
that he could sacrifice his queen and still win. He was wrong, and I never slept
with him. When my ex-husband and I played, the tension was so high that a house
full of out-of-town guests bailed like rats off a sinking ship. I won, but it
wasn't worth it. I still married him, but that wasn't worth it, either. I played
with a woman who was trying to seduce me out from under him and I won both games.
I played with a good friend, a close game that I lost due to the aforementioned
carelessness, and wished that things were different and going to bed with him
was a reasonable proposition.
I once dated a man who beat me consistently at chess. The games drove me insane.
I'm extremely competitive and although I'm usually a good loser, I'm not happy
about losing all the time. I started to get reckless on the board, just like
he was reckless in bed. Actually, "in bed" is a bit of a misnomer here. He liked
a lot of different places, like playgrounds, stalls in communal showers, deserted
buildings, and wooded areas. He did things to me that no one has ever done before
or since, things that I have missed like hell even though he never took them
quite far enough. But on the chessboard, he pushed me harder, backed me into
corners, mated me, and I grew addicted to that.
This, I think, is where the heart of my attraction to chess lies. I like the chase. I like to take and be taken. It's not a physical thing, although I'm not averse to a good wrestling match, nor is it quite BDSM, although I'm not averse to the judicious use of restraint. What I like is to play with power. I like to win. I like to mate someone or, failing that, tell him that if he moves I'll stop and then make it impossible for him not to move. But I also like to lose, especially when the game is very close. I like to surrender, but only after a good fight.
It's the men's game that is taken seriously, but there have been some excellent
women chess players. Russian-born Vera Menchik was the women's world champion
from 1927 until her death in 1944 during a bombing raid in Kent. Hungarian Judit
Polgar, the reigning women's chess champion, became a Grandmaster at the age
of fifteen years and four months, beating the record previously set by Bobby
Fischer, and is currently ranked the 23rd best player in the world, male or
female. In 1998, she beat Anatoly Karpov, then the FIDE World Champion, in a
rapid-play match. But perhaps the most memorable game played by a man and a woman
at least from an erotic point of view was between Jacqueline Armand and Robespierre.
During the summer of 1793, mere nobility was a capital offense, and that was to be the fate of Jacqueline's fiancé, a duke. In desperation, she cut off her hair so she could enter the men's-only café where Robespierre liked to play chess. When the seat in front of him became vacant, she took it, asking a special favor if she won, offering money if she lost.
Legend has it that he knew the real stakes from the very beginning, but one wonders when Robespierre realized that his opponent was a woman. Was it a
slim, manicured finger hesitating over a piece? The beardless chin resting on a clenched fist? The hint of curve under her shirt or a mouth that was too soft
and too round? But as the story goes, he said nothing until the end of the game, which he lost in spite of a material advantage. What did he think when she requested as her prize the life of a fiancé instead of a father or a brother? Would he have taken her money if she had lost or would he have asked a special favor of her, perhaps offering the life she wanted in return? In any case, he honored his word. Her lover went free.
I have never played tournament chess, but I imagine the stakes would be too
high to be thinking about anything but the game. In the casual matches I've
played, however, if there's the slightest attraction between me and my opponent,
the temperature starts to rise whether there is an active seduction going on
or not. If there is, the game becomes much more than a game and the closer it
is, the hotter it gets. About halfway through the game with the woman I mentioned
earlier, I knew that if she won, I would go to bed with her if she asked, even
though it was the eve of my wedding and when she lost, she knew that it would
never happen. But we never said a word. We just played chess.
