nonstop at Princeton and Harvard—I hurled myself, early and eagerly, into the role. I oohed and aahed at wedding dresses and helped plan the bachelorette activities. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to help make the anointed day merrier. I was far more excited about the prospect of my brother taking his wedding vows, in other words, than I was about reviewing what constituted a tort.
This was in the old days, back when test results arrived via the post office. That fall, with both the bar exam and the wedding behind me, I called my father from work one day and asked if he’d check to see if the mail had come in. It had. I asked if there was an envelope in there for me. There was. Was it a letter from the Illinois State Bar Association? Why, yes, that’s what it said on the envelope. I next asked if he’d open it for me, which is when I heard some rustling and then a long, damning pause on the other end of the line.
I had failed.
I had never in my entire life failed a test, unless you want to count the moment in kindergarten when I stood up in class and couldn’t read the word “white” off the manila card held by my teacher. But I’d blown it with the bar. I was ashamed, sure that I’d let down every person who’d ever taught, encouraged, or employed me. I wasn’t used to blundering. If anything, I generally overdid things, especially when it came to preparing for a big moment or test, but this one I’d let slip by. I think now that it was a by-product of the disinterest I’d felt all through law school, burned out as I was on being a student and bored by subjects that struck me as esoteric and far removed from real life. I wanted to be around people and not books, which is why the best part of law school for me had been volunteering at the school’s Legal Aid Bureau, where I could help someone get a Social Security check or stand up to an out-of-line landlord.
But still, I didn’t like to fail. The sting of it would stay with me for months, even as plenty of my colleagues at Sidley confessed that they, too, hadn’t passed the bar exam the first time. Later that fall, I buckled down and studied for a do-over test, going on to pass it handily. In the end, aside from issues of pride, my screwup would make no difference at all.
Several years later, though, the memory was causing me to regard Barack with extra curiosity. He was attending bar review classes and carrying around his own bar review books, and yet didn’t seem to be cracking them as often as I thought maybe he should—as I would, anyway, knowing what I knew now. But I wasn’t going to nag him or even offer myself as an example of what could go wrong. We were built so differently, he and I. For one thing, Barack’s head was an overpacked suitcase of information, a mainframe from which he could seemingly pull disparate bits of data at will. I called him “the fact guy,” for how he seemed to have a statistic to match every little twist in a conversation. His memory seemed not-quite-but-almost photographic. The truth was, I wasn’t worried about whether he’d pass the bar and, somewhat annoyingly, neither was he.
So we celebrated early, on the very same day he finished the exam—July 31, 1991—booking ourselves a table at a downtown restaurant called Gordon. It was one of our favorite places, a special-occasion kind of joint, with soft Art Deco lighting and crisp white tablecloths and things like caviar and artichoke fritters on the menu. It was the height of summer and we were happy.
At Gordon, Barack and I always ordered every course. We had martinis and appetizers. We picked a nice wine to go with our entrées. We talked idly, contentedly, maybe a little sappily. As we were reaching the end of the meal, Barack smiled at me and raised the subject of marriage. He reached for my hand and said that as much as he loved me with his whole being, he still didn’t really see the point. Instantly, I felt the blood rise in my cheeks. It was like pushing a button in me—the kind of big blinking red button you might find in