“Here’s what I know, Kid—I love your mom for how she just does certain things without any forethought, because if you truly love someone, you have to love everything about them. Even the things that hurt,” Molly said. “As for a beard, it’s a hateful word the way your hateful aunts use it—in their eyes, a beard is all about the deceit. But two beards are better than one, Kid,” the night groomer assured me. “Your mother and the snowshoer aren’t deceiving each other. They love each other, in their own way. It doesn’t have to be the same way your mom and I love each other,” was the way Molly put it. “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.” All through the night, we’d held on to each other, and I thought of the honeymoon my mom and the snowshoer were having in Maine—how they were looking at that cliff together, how my mom had told Elliot to keep hold of her.

When there’s an event that changes your life forever, you know how the afteryears go by—how some people change, and some don’t. As I lay in the night groomer’s arms, I was hoping that this precarious triangle—that these three beloved people—would never change. Not Molly, not my mom, not the snowshoer. Please stay on the cliff, I was praying—to all three of them, for all four of us. Please keep hold of me, and of one another, I prayed.

ACT II THE HONEYMOON ON THE CLIFF

19. “I SAW ME IN YOUR EYES”

For another thirty-five years, I wouldn’t go to Aspen; I didn’t set foot inside the Hotel Jerome. “You couldn’t get me to go there for breakfast,” as Molly said. But you should be careful what you purposely put off doing; over time, the importance of doing it grows. I also put off falling in love and getting married. At first unconsciously, then consciously, I chose unmarriageable girlfriends. Naturally, most of my girlfriends didn’t know I thought they were unmarriageable. You should be careful about that, too.

I was almost fifty when I first got married; my much younger wife was only thirty-four. In my years of unmarriageable girlfriends, I’d learned to avoid younger women; they were more likely to be marriageable. When you make a point of not looking for the girl of your dreams, this has consequences. When you go out of your way to avoid any woman who looks like she might lead to a serious relationship, you get used to lying to yourself. I got used to being attracted to girlfriends who didn’t attract me.