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