Maybe because he was due back at Harvard in a month, we wasted no time being casual. Not quite ready to have a boyfriend sleeping under the same roof as my parents, I began spending nights at Barack’s apartment, a cramped, second-floor walk-up above a storefront on a noisy section of Fifty-Third Street. The guy who normally lived there was a University of Chicago law student and he’d furnished it like any good student would, with mismatched garage-sale finds. There was a small table, a couple of rickety chairs, and a queen-sized mattress on the floor. Piles of Barack’s books and newspapers covered the open surfaces and a good deal of the floor. He hung his suit jackets on the backs of the kitchen chairs and kept very little in the fridge. It wasn’t homey, but now that I viewed everything through the lens of our fast-moving romance, it felt like home.
Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicorn—unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.
With no air-conditioning, we had little choice but to sleep with the windows open at night, trying to cool the sweltering apartment. What we gained in comfort, we sacrificed in quiet. In those days, Fifty-Third Street was a hub of late-night activity, a thoroughfare for cruising lowriders with unmuffled tailpipes. Almost hourly, it seemed, a police siren would blare outside the window or someone would start shouting, unloading a stream of outrage and profanity that would startle me awake on the mattress. If I found it unsettling, Barack did not. I sensed already that he was more at home with the unruliness of the world than I was, more willing to let it all in without distress. I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father?
“Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered.
He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.”
This, I was learning, was how Barack’s mind worked. He got himself fixated on big and abstract issues, fueled by some crazy sense that he might be able to do something about them. It was new to me, I have to say. Until now, I’d hung around with good people who cared about important enough things but who were focused primarily on building their careers and providing for their families. Barack was just different. He was dialed into the day-to-day demands of his life, but at the same time, especially at night, his thoughts seemed to roam a much wider plane.
The bulk of our time, of course, was still spent at work, in the plush stillness of the Sidley & Austin offices, where every morning I shook off any dreaminess and zipped myself back into my junior-associate existence, returning dutifully to my stack of documents and the demands of corporate clients I’d never once meet. Barack, meanwhile, worked on his own documents in a shared office down the hall, increasingly fawned over by partners who found him impressive.
Still concerned about propriety, I insisted we keep our blooming relationship out of sight of our colleagues, though it hardly worked. Lorraine, my assistant, gave Barack a knowing smile each time he surfaced in my office. We’d even been busted the very first night we’d been out in public as a couple, shortly after our first kiss, having gone to the Art Institute and then to see Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing at Water Tower Place, where we bumped into one of the firm’s most high-ranking partners, Newt Minow, and his wife, Josephine, in the popcorn line. They’d greeted us warmly, even approvingly, and made no comment on the fact we were together. But still, there we were.
Work, during this time, felt like a distraction—the thing we had to do before we were allowed to charge back toward each other again. Away from the office, Barack and I talked endlessly, over leisurely walks around Hyde Park dressed in shorts and T-shirts and meals that seemed short to us but in reality went on for hours. We debated the merits of every single Stevie Wonder album before doing the same thing with Marvin Gaye. I was smitten. I loved the slow roll of his voice and the way his eyes softened when I told a funny story. I was coming to appreciate how he ambled from one place to the next, never worried about time.
Each day brought small discoveries: I was a Cubs fan, while he liked the White Sox. I loved mac and cheese, and he couldn’t stand it. He liked dark, dramatic movies, while I went all-in for rom-coms. He was a lefty with immaculate handwriting; I had a heavy right-hand scrawl. In the month before he went back to Cambridge, we shared what felt like every memory and stray thought, running through our childhood follies, teenage blunders, and the thwarted starter romances that had gotten us to each other. Barack was especially intrigued by my upbringing—the year-to-year, decade-to-decade sameness of life on Euclid Avenue, with me and Craig and Mom and Dad making up four corners of a sturdy square. Barack had spent a lot of time in churches during his time as a community organizer, which had left him with an appreciation for organized religion, but at the same time he remained less traditional. Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
I don’t remember introducing Barack to my family that summer, though Craig tells me I did. He says that the two of us walked up to the house on Euclid Avenue one evening. Craig was over for a visit, sitting on the front porch with my parents. Barack, he recalls, was friendly and confident and made a couple of minutes of easy small talk before we ran up to my apartment to pick something up.
My father appreciated Barack instantly, but still didn’t like his odds. After all, he’d seen me jettison my high school boyfriend David at the gates of Princeton. He’d watched me dismiss Kevin the college football player as soon as I’d seen him in a furry mascot outfit. My parents knew better than to get too attached. They’d raised me to run my own life, and that’s basically what I did. I was too focused and too busy, I’d told my parents plenty of times, to make room for any man.
According to Craig, my father shook his head and laughed as he watched me and Barack walk away.
“Nice guy,” he said. “Too bad he won’t last.”
* * *
If my family was a square, then Barack’s was a more elaborate piece of geometry, one that reached across oceans. He’d spent years trying to make sense of its lines. His mother, Ann Dunham, had been a seventeen-year-old college student in Hawaii in 1960, when she fell for a Kenyan student named Barack Obama. Their marriage was brief and confusing—especially given that her new husband, it turned out, already had a wife in Nairobi. After their divorce, Ann went on to marry a Javanese geologist named Lolo Soetoro and moved to Jakarta, bringing along the junior Barack Obama—my Barack Obama—who was then six years old.