had also blown his book deadline, having been so caught up in registering voters
that he’d managed to turn in only a partial manuscript. We got home from
California to learn that the publisher had canceled his contract, sending word
through his literary agent that Barack was now on the hook to pay back his
$40,000 advance.
If he panicked, he didn’t do it in front of me. I was busy enough shifting
into my new role at city hall, which entailed going to more zoning board
meetings and fewer senior citizen picnics than my previous job had. Though I
was no longer working corporate-lawyer hours, the city’s everyday fracas left me
spent in the evenings, less interested in processing any stresses at home and more
ready to pour a glass of wine, switch my brain off, and watch TV on the couch. If
I’d learned anything from Barack’s obsessive involvement with Project VOTE!,
anyway, it was that it wasn’t helpful for me to worry about his worries—in part
because I seemed to find them more overwhelming than he ever did. Chaos
agitated me, but it seemed to invigorate Barack. He was like a circus performer
who liked to set plates spinning: If things got too calm, he took it as a sign that
there was more to do. He was a serial over-committer, I was coming to
understand, taking on new projects without much regard for limits of time and
energy. He’d said yes, for example, to serving on the boards of a couple of
nonprofits while also saying yes to a part-time teaching job at the University of
Chicago for the coming spring semester while also planning to work full-time at
the law firm.
And then there was the book. Barack’s agent felt sure she could resell the
idea to a different publisher, though he’d have to get a draft finished soon. With
his teaching gig yet to begin and having obtained the blessing of the law firm that
had waited a year already for him to start full-time, he came up with a solution
that seemed to suit him perfectly: He’d write the book in isolation, removing his
everyday distractions by renting a little cabin somewhere and drilling down hard
on the work. It was the equivalent of pulling a frantic all-nighter to get a paper
done in college, only Barack was estimating it would take him roughly a couple
of months to get the book finished. He relayed all of this to me one night at
home about six weeks after our wedding, before delicately dropping a final bit of
information: His mother had found him the perfect cabin. In fact, she’d already
rented it for him. It was cheap, quiet, and on the beach. In Sanur. Which was on
the Indonesian island of Bali, some nine thousand miles away from me.