eatery called Blue Hill. As we motorcaded the last stretch of the journey from the helipad in lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village, I noted the lights of the cop cars being used to barricade the cross streets, feeling a twinge of guilt at how our mere presence in the city was mucking up the Saturday evening flow. New York always awakened a sense of awe in me, big and busy enough to dwarf anyone’s ego. I remembered how wide-eyed I’d been on my first trip there decades earlier with Czerny, my mentor from Princeton. Barack, I knew, felt something even deeper. The wild energy and diversity of the city had proven the perfect hatching place for his intellect and imagination years back when he was a student at Columbia.
At the restaurant, we were shown to a table in a discreet corner of the room as around us people tried not to gawk. But there was no hiding our arrival. Anyone who came in after we did would have to get swept with a magnetometer wand by a Secret Service team, a process that was usually quick but still an inconvenience. For this, I felt another twinge.
We ordered martinis. Our conversation stayed light. Four months into our lives as POTUS and FLOTUS, we were still retrofitting—figuring out how one identity worked with the other and what this meant inside our marriage. These days, there was almost no part of Barack’s complicated life that didn’t in some way impact mine, which meant there was plenty of shared business we could have discussed—his team’s decision to schedule a foreign trip during the girls’ summer vacation, for example, or whether my chief of staff was being listened to at morning staff meetings in the West Wing—but I tried in general to avoid it, not just this night, but every night. If I had an issue with something going on in the West Wing, I usually relied on my staff to convey it to Barack’s, doing what I could to keep White House business out of our personal time.
Sometimes Barack wanted to talk about work, though more often than not he avoided it. So much of his job was just plain grueling, the challenges huge and often seemingly intractable. General Motors was days away from filing for bankruptcy. North Korea had just conducted a nuclear test, and Barack was soon to leave for Egypt to deliver a major address meant to extend an open hand to Muslims around the world. The ground around him never seemed to stop shaking. Anytime old friends came to visit us at the White House, they were amused by the intensity with which both Barack and I quizzed them about their jobs, their kids, their hobbies, anything. The two of us were always less interested in talking about the intricacies of our new existence and more interested in sponging up bits of gossip and everyday news from home. Both of us, it seemed, craved glimpses of regular life.
That evening in New York, we ate, drank, and conversed in the candlelight, reveling in the feeling, however illusory, that we’d stolen away. The White House is a remarkably beautiful and comfortable place, a kind of fortress disguised as a home, and from the point of view of the Secret Service agents tasked with protecting us, it would probably be ideal if we never left its grounds. Even inside it, the agents seemed happiest if we took the elevator instead of the stairs, to minimize the risk of a stumble. If Barack or I had a meeting in Blair House, located just across an already closed-off part of Pennsylvania Avenue, they’d sometimes request that we take the motorcade instead of walking in the fresh air. We respected the watchfulness, but it could feel like a form of confinement. I struggled sometimes, trying to balance my needs with what was convenient for others. If anyone in our family wanted to step outside onto the Truman Balcony—the lovely arcing terrace that overlooked the South Lawn, and the only semiprivate outdoor space we had at the White House—we needed to first alert the Secret Service so that they could shut down the section of E Street that was in view of the balcony, clearing out the flocks of tourists who gathered outside the gates there at all hours of the day and night. There were many times when I thought I’d go out to sit on the balcony, but then reconsidered,