Read Playing for Love at Deep Haven for Free Online

you stupid bastard, she’ll be back.
    He glanced out
the window again at the darkness, taking another sip of Scotch as he remembered
the day they met.
    It was
mid-August, the first day of sophomore pre-orientation for a small group of
returning internship students, and Violet was moving into a dorm room down the
hall from him. Her dark brown eyes behind glasses had peeked into his dorm room
as she rapped lightly on the open door.
    “Um . . . Hi.
I’m Violet,” she’d said, taking a step forward to lean against the doorway in
Birkenstocks, too-tight jeans over wide hips, and a low-cut peasant blouse that
showed off the swell of her ample breasts.
    Zach knew
exactly who she was, and his hormonal, adolescent body had trembled lightly to
see her so close, suddenly standing at the threshold of his room like a present.
He’d sought her out at a poetry reading last year after he’d read her poems in The Yale Literary Magazine . Wait, read them? Nah. He’d memorized them.
They were like nothing he’d ever read before, pieces of lyric truth, unstyled and wrenching. One had even inspired a song, not
that he’d ever played it for anyone—not that he had anyone to play it to.
    “Hey. I’m Zach,”
he answered, looking up from the keyboard he was trying to plug in behind the
built-in desk.
    “Zach, my, um,
my trunk is stuck and I don’t think there’s an RA here yet. Do you have pliers
by any chance? Or, um, scissors?”
    While she spoke,
his hands sweated and he lost the battle of keeping his eyes focused on her
face. They dropped to the shadow of cleavage between her breasts, visible just
above her low-cut blouse.
    When he looked
up, she grinned at him playfully, looking down at her breasts, then back up at
him. “See any scissors in there?”
    He’d flushed,
fumbling in his pocket for his Swiss Army knife, and gestured for her to lead
the way. He cracked open the lock, and she insisted he share half of the pizza
she’d just ordered. Mostly she did the talking as they ate, telling Zach about
her summer and asking about his. He’d spent most of his cooped up in student
housing at Juilliard or playing guitar or piano in one of the many windowless
practice rooms and studios. She’d spent hers running barefoot on the beaches of
Maine where she lived with her mother, reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
and embracing her hippie soul. They talked until dawn, until Violet, who had
curled up on his floor with a borrowed blanket, nodded off midsentence.
    It turned out they’d
both returned to Yale two weeks early for special programs: she, for a poetry
seminar, and he, for an orchestral internship. Further, they were the only
students living in the massive Gothic Revival dorm, which Violet declared was
creepy, and the next night, without asking, she slept on his floor again. When
he woke up, she was there, the shape of her body, under her sleeping bag,
curled toward his bed. When she showed up with her sleeping bag the following
night, too, he was surprised to realize how glad he was to see her, and a
pattern started.
    Violet more or
less lived with him in his single dorm room throughout August and September,
into October. They ate every meal together, met up before every campus event, found
each other after classes, went to parties, got drunk, watched movies, shared
their work, and inspired each other. She’d lie on his bed writing poetry as he
sat at his desk writing music in companionable silence every night until dawn.
Sometimes she’d let him write music for one of her poems, and those nights,
surrounded by his music and her words, were the most ground-shifting of his
life. Suddenly all those hours spent practically chained to the piano in his
parents’ home and in solitary confinement at Juilliard meant something: he had
every musical tool he needed to make her words come to life. Not that they
needed his help.
    It wasn’t like he had anything emotionally meaningful
to offer anyone at that point in his life.