one of the few times I decided to stop thinking and just live. It was a warm summer evening in the city that I loved. The air felt soft on my skin. There was a Baskin-Robbins on the block near Barack’s apartment, and we got ourselves two cones, taking them outside to eat, finding ourselves a spot on the curb. We sat close together with our knees pulled up, pleasantly tired after a day spent outdoors, eating our ice cream quickly and wordlessly, trying to stay ahead of the melt. Maybe Barack read it on my face or sensed it in my posture—the fact that everything for me had now begun to loosen and unfold.
He was looking at me curiously, with the trace of a smile.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
And with that, I leaned in and everything felt clear.
Becoming Us
9
As soon as I allowed myself to feel anything for Barack, the feelings came rushing—a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder. Any worries I’d been harboring about my life and career and even about Barack himself seemed to fall away with that first kiss, replaced by a driving need to know him better, to explore and experience everything about him as fast as I could.
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