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passed through a huge doorway into the Egyptian wing and turned right, and the noise from the atrium immediately dropped off. Carter said, “Let’s go straight to the Temple, and then we can look at these displays on our way out, if you’d like.”
    “Okay,” I said, even though I would have liked to have stopped and looked at the huge sarcophagi he led me past. I had read about ancient Egyptian burial practices, of course, but I had never seen the grave goods in real life: the elaborately carved figurines, the coffins big as bathtubs. I wanted to pause for a while and think about the people who had made these things, and why, and why they had stopped.
    But Carter was on a mission, and he had said we could linger on the way back. I could wait. He took my hand and guided me through the winding hallways, the series of nested rooms, and I let myself be led along. It was nice, in a way, to let him take over. I didn’t have to make any decisions or try to figure out where I was going. I could just let him do all the work. It was freeing.
    At last, we came out into a huge room with windows all along one side, and Carter said, “There it is.”
    It didn’t look so big as we walked toward it, skirting the reflecting pool; but then we climbed the steps onto the low dais where the temple sat, and I realized that only the cavernous size of the room made the temple look small.
    “Wow,” I said.
    “They shipped it over from Egypt in the ‘60s,” Carter said. “The whole thing, block by block. It was going to be flooded when they finished constructing the Aswan Dam.”
    “Can we go inside?” I asked. People were lined up to do that, and I wanted to go into the inner sanctum and see the carvings on the walls I could barely glimpse from the outside.
    “Of course,” Carter said, and we got in line.
    It moved quickly. People were being courteous, maybe, and not spending too long inside. As we approached, I noticed the graffiti carved on the outer walls: a name, halfway eroded, and “1891 OF NY US.” I pointed it out to Carter, and he grinned.
    “There’s actually quite a bit of graffiti,” he said. “Testosterone makes a person do strange things.”
    We got inside, finally, into the tiny innermost chamber of the temple, and I looked straight up through the open ceiling, at the hazy light filtered through the glass. It was lovely and peaceful, even with all the people waiting to come inside. I could have stayed there for hours, looking at the carvings and the tiny headless statue, trying to decide if it was meant to represent a man or a woman. But I didn’t want to prevent other people from getting inside the temple, and so I said to Carter, after just a few minutes, “I guess I’m ready.”
    “Okay,” Carter said. He ran one hand through my hair and kissed me, and then said, “We can sit outside and look at the map.”
    We took a seat in front of the reflecting pool and spread out the map. The museum was huge and more overwhelming than I had realized. There was no way we would be able to see everything in one day. Some of it I had little interest in, like “Arms and Armor” or “European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.” I wasn’t even sure what “decorative arts” entailed. I liked old things, and things that had meant something to people, that they had made not to put in a museum but to use in their lives, to celebrate or go to battle, or to put someone to rest.
    “What do you think we should see?” I asked. I didn’t know where to begin.
    “We can see anything you’d like,” he said. “I took the afternoon off. If you want to spend the next four hours sitting in front of Monet’s water lilies—well, I might fall asleep, but I’ll sit there with you.”
    I wasn’t sure how I felt about a billionaire skipping work to spend the afternoon escorting me around an art museum. Flattered, and happy, but also guilty. There were other things he could be doing that were far more important than keeping me