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9

s 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