28. King Tut

My girlfriend Lisa’s father got tickets to see the King Tut exhibition at the Metropolitan. It was the hottest ticket in town. I’d read the articles in the New York Times and even our local paper about how impossible it was to track one down. “How’d he manage that?” I asked.

“He said the elevator man at his office had some kind of connection. Do you want to go?”

“Really?”

“Sure. He told me to invite you. He ended up with extras, I have no idea how.

As you know, he likes to be mysterious. I’m surprised he even told me about the elevator man.”

Lisa and I had been going out for about 8 months. We’d met at a National Honor Society dance in the spring. I was a member, Lisa wasn’t, but I never took the NHS very seriously anyway. I’d only gone to the dance because they made me volunteer to help set up.

Lisa was the one who asked me to dance. She was also the one who started the kiss, after we’d danced together four dances in a row, including a slow one. Her face tasted bitter. It was the first time I’d kissed anyone like that, full tongue, and I wasn’t sure if maybe that was the way such kisses tasted. She told me later it must have been her acne medicine.

Lisa was my first girlfriend, and I approached the task with the same focus and attention to detail I would an assignment at school. I bought her gifts to commemorate milestones like our first and second and third month together. I wrote her a poem about how she shimmered like light refracted through a prism. I was determined to fall in love with her and eventually did.

I think she started out a little in love with me—she’d mentioned a few times things about “having my eye on you for a while”— but my intensity scared her. I wrote a poem about that, too, her cruel detachment, but she was unmoved. “It’s too much,” she kept saying. Then she went away on vacation for a week to Virginia Beach and when she came back she was as in love with me as I was with her. “What changed?” I asked, not able to leave well enough alone.

“The moon on the beach was so big,” she answered, and wouldn’t say anything more. Her father wasn’t the only one prone to mysterious pronouncements.

We’d had sex for the first time the weekend before she told me about the King Tut tickets. It was something of a technicality, since we’d done everything but over the summer, yet it still felt momentous to me. Back seat of the car parked at the circle at the end of the street where Lisa lived, only as much clothes off as necessary, quick the first time and nicer the second. “Are you okay?” I asked afterward, conditioned by the teen novels I claimed not to read for tears, regret. “Okay?” Lisa said. “I’m great!” That’s when we started our second try.

“So do you want to go to Tut or not?” Lisa asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s the hottest ticket in town, right?”

Her father drove us down: me, Lisa, her mother, her two sisters. Her older brother Neil didn’t want to go. Lisa’s father drove a big car, a Lincoln, but it was still crowded with three of us in the back seat and three in the front. It was mid-January, so we were all wearing heavy winter coats, which made it even more of a tight squeeze.

During the ride Lisa’s father made each of the girls tell a story about something that had happened to them during the week. Lisa had told me he often did this. He worked long hours during the week, and there were many evenings he didn’t see them at all. Julie, Lisa’s younger sister, told a story about a friend who’d copied from her on a test. Karen, Lisa’s older sister, told a story she’d heard that one of her teachers was on an extended leave of absence because he’d gone into rehab. Lisa told about how I’d driven over to her house on a Thursday night just to help her with her homework.

I really had done that, and really just to help her with her homework. It wasn’t because I’d expected us to have sex again. I knew we would, sooner or later, but I wanted to make sure Lisa knew I would still do special things like that for her without the expectation of sex.

“How romantic,” Lisa’s father said, which embarrassed me, although I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was being sarcastic. He really was an inscrutable guy.

At the museum, Lisa and I quickly split off from the rest of her family. The place was a zoo. There were so many people you could barely walk. You had to wait in the crowd for five minutes to even get a glimpse of the exhibits. And once you did get there, what you mostly saw was gold. Piece after piece, room after room, until it was almost too much of a good thing, until you lost track of how valuable it all was.

“I guess expecting more like, ancient rocks and sarcophaguses and stuff,” I whispered to Lisa.

“He was kind of into jewelry, huh?” Lisa answered.

What impressed me much more than the exhibit was the people. They were so stylish, so clearly rich and sophisticated and powerful. I even thought I recognized Lee Leonard, who hosted the midday talk show on Channel 5 that my mother and I liked to watch during the summer.

I could see myself in crowds like this, going forward into the future. The high society of New York City, the elite, the best and the brightest. I picked out a young couple, the woman dark-haired and beautiful, the man in a green turtleneck sweater. They looked confident, relaxed, in love, and most importantly like they belonged here, like it was their due. Lisa and I would look like that someday.

“It says King Tut died at 18. They called him the boy king,” Lisa said, while we waited to look at yet another showcase full of gold.

“I read that. But he was only king for a couple of years, did you see that?”

“I guess his people must have really loved him, if they gave him all this stuff, right?”

“Or else they were just sad because he’d died so young.”

“Maybe.”

“Probably better for him that way, too. Didn’t get a chance to screw things up, right?”

Lisa smiled. “Step up. It’s our turn to look.”

We stayed a long time at the museum. There were so many rooms, and then we had a hard time finding Lisa’s family. By the time we got back to the car it was past midnight. We squeezed back in and Lisa’s father turned the heat way up. Before we even made it to the Thruway, Lisa had fallen asleep holding my hand, and by the toll booths Karen and Julie and Lisa’s mother were out too.

“Look at you back there, Chris,” Lisa’s father said, glancing in the rear view mirror in tollbooth light. “Sleeping with all the Pratt girls.”

One them at least, I thought, and smiled. I had no gold. Gold would come, or it wouldn’t. But there was more than one way to be a boy king.