Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.
“Do you know what she asked me?” he said the next day, turning up in my office, still slightly incredulous. “She asked if I liked to go riding. She meant on horseback.” He said they’d discussed their favorite movies, which also hadn’t gone well.
Barack was cerebral, probably too cerebral for most people to put up with. （This, in fact, would be my friend’s assessment of him when we next spoke.） He wasn’t a happy-hour guy, and maybe I should have realized that earlier. My world was filled with hopeful, hardworking people who were obsessed with their own upward mobility. They had new cars and were buying their first condos and liked to talk about it all over martinis after work. Barack was more content to spend an evening alone, reading up on urban housing policy. As an organizer, he’d spent weeks and months listening to poor people describe their challenges. His insistence on hope and the potential for mobility, I was coming to see, came from an entirely different and not easily accessible place.
There was a time, he told me, when he’d been looser, more wild. He’d spent the first twenty years of his life going by the nickname Barry. As a teen, he smoked pot in the lush volcanic foothills of Oahu. At Occidental, he rode the waning energy of the 1970s, embracing Hendrix and the Stones. Somewhere along the way, though, he’d stepped into the fullness of his birth name—Barack Hussein Obama—and the complicated rubric of his identity. He was white and black, African and American. He was modest and lived modestly, yet knew the richness of his own mind and the world of privilege that would open up to him as a result. He took it all seriously, I could tell. He could be lighthearted and jokey, but he never strayed far from a larger sense of obligation. He was on some sort of quest, though he didn’t yet know where it would lead. All I knew was that it didn’t translate over drinks. Next time happy hour rolled around, I left him at the office.
* * *
When I was a kid, my parents smoked. They lit cigarettes in the evenings as they sat in the kitchen, talking through their workdays. They smoked while they cleaned the dinner dishes later at night, sometimes opening a window to let in some fresh air. They weren’t heavy smokers, but they were habitual smokers, and defiant ones, too. They smoked long after the research made clear that it was bad for you.
The whole thing drove me crazy, and Craig as well. We made an elaborate show of coughing when they lit up. We ran sabotage missions on their supplies. When Craig and I were very young, we pulled a brand-new carton of Newports from a shelf and set about destroying them, snapping them like beans over the kitchen sink. Another time, we dipped the ends of their cigarettes in hot sauce and returned them to the pack. We lectured our parents about lung cancer, explaining the horrors that had been shown to us on filmstrips during health class at school—images of smokers’ lungs, desiccated and black as charcoal, death in the making, death right inside your chest. For contrast, we’d been shown pictures of florid pink lungs that were healthy, uncontaminated by smoke. The paradigm was simple enough to make their behavior confounding: Good/Bad. Healthy/Sick. You choose your own future. It was everything our parents had ever taught us. And yet it would be years before they finally quit.
Barack smoked the way my parents did—after meals, walking down a city block, or when he was feeling anxious and needed to do something with his hands. In 1989, smoking was more prevalent than it is now, more embedded in everyday life. Research on the effects of secondhand smoke was relatively new. People smoked in restaurants, offices, and airports. But still, I’d seen the filmstrips. To me, and to every sensible person I knew, smoking was pure self-destruction.
Barack knew exactly how I felt about it. Our friendship was built on a plainspoken candor that I think we both enjoyed.
“Why would someone as smart as you do something as dumb as that?” I’d blurted on the very first day we met, watching him cap off our lunch with a smoke. It was an honest question.
As I recall, he just shrugged, acknowledging that I was right. There was no fight to be put up, no finer point to be argued. Smoking was the one topic where Barack’s logic seemed to leave him altogether.
Whether I was going to admit it or not, though, something between us had started to change. On days when we were too busy to check in face-to-face, I found myself wondering what he’d been up to. I talked myself out of being disappointed when he didn’t surface in my office doorway. I talked myself out of being too excited when he did. I had feelings for the guy, but they were latent, buried deep beneath my resolve to keep my life and career tidy and forward focused—free from any drama. My annual reviews at work were solid. I was on track to become an equity partner at Sidley & Austin, probably before I hit thirty-two. It was everything I wanted—or so I was trying to convince myself.
I might have been ignoring whatever was growing between us, but he wasn’t.
“I think we should go out,” Barack announced one afternoon as we sat finishing a meal.
“What, you and me?” I feigned shock that he even considered it a possibility. “I told you, I don’t date. And I’m your adviser.”
He gave a wry laugh. “Like that counts for anything. You’re not my boss,” he said. “And you’re pretty cute.”
Barack had a smile that seemed to stretch the whole width of his face. He was a deadly combination of smooth and reasonable. More than once in the coming days, he laid out the evidence for why we should be going out. We were compatible. We made each other laugh. We were both available, and furthermore we confessed to being almost immediately uninterested in anyone else we met. Nobody at the firm, he argued, would care if we dated. In fact, maybe it would be seen as a positive. He presumed that the partners wanted him to come work for them, eventually. If he and I were an item, it would improve the odds of his committing.
“You mean I’m like some sort of bait?” I said, laughing. “You flatter yourself.”
Over the course of the summer, the firm organized a series of events and outings for its associates, sending around sign-up sheets for anyone who wanted to go. One was a weeknight performance of Les Misérables at a theater not far from the office. I put us on the list for two tickets, which was standard behavior for a junior-associate adviser and her summer-associate charge. We were supposed to be attending firm functions together. I was supposed to be ensuring that his experience with Sidley & Austin was bright and positive. That was the whole point.
We sat side by side in the theater, both of us worn out after a long day of work. The curtain went up and the singing began, giving us a gray, gloomy version of Paris. I don’t know if it was my mood or whether it was just Les Misérables itself, but I spent the next hour feeling helplessly pounded by French misery. Grunts and chains. Poverty and rape. Injustice and oppression. Millions of people around the world had fallen in love with this musical, but I squirmed in my seat, trying to rise above the inexplicable torment I felt every time the melody repeated.