Then Barack’s tone turned almost hostile, or ugly. “When I see you, the palpitations of the heart don’t boil to the surface,” he told Alex. “I care for you as yourself, nothing less but also nothing more. Does this anger you?” Again, “Does this anger you? When I sit down to write I no longer feel the need to bleed for brilliance on the page.” Years later, McNear does not know why Obama’s attitude had changed so starkly during these two summer months in Honolulu. “Here was someone who I felt that I cared a lot about. I loved him, I enjoyed seeing him,” but his interest in her had somehow waned. “I trust the strength of our relationship enough that I can show myself with rollers in my hair,” Barack wrote before again asking, “Does this anger you, Alex? It shouldn’t. Friends feel weary sometimes. When I said that we will ever want what we can’t have, I missed nothing.” He referenced “the bitterness that plagues my grandparents,” a comment McNear later said contradicted everything else she recalled him saying about them.
“I seek something in myself using the clues of this wind, that boy, my mother, your pain, perhaps the world,” Barack wrote, returning to his prior form. “Yes, this requires a monumental arrogance, and of late I feel it whittling away. If my arrogance (which has always been confessed—run back the tapes) angers you, then my last letter, our last meeting, should douse it. It is precisely the arrogance, the sense of destiny, that has been absent. I no longer feel compelled to try to shackle you in my abstruse dreams.” Addressing something Alex apparently had written, “When you doubt my honesty, you give me more credit in the past than I deserve. As though I calculated to deceive you in some way, represented myself as something I didn’t believe I was. You judge me badly; I think I have been as upfront about my doubts and demons as I knew how to be.”
Barack’s defensiveness was more than evident. “And when you question my sincerity (a word much abused, like democracy and justice) … you haven’t been listening very well when I spoke of myself.” He closed the letter by saying, “my plans are still uncertain right now” and that he had been “typing up letters to perspective [sic] employers for the last two hours with maniacal tidiness.” But “unless a job of some interest pops up soon, I’ll be flying back to New York at the end of this month” and will stop in Los Angeles. Almost three months would pass before Barack wrote her again.
Sometime in the first half of October, Obama left Honolulu for New York. If he stopped in Los Angeles, he did not contact Alex. Arriving in New York, he stayed for one week with Wahid Hamid, who now had a job with Siemens, in a second-floor apartment in suburban Long Island. He then returned to the familiar confines of 339 East 94th Street #6A, where he crashed on the living room couch of Sohale and his new roommate. “I felt a slight longing to move back into the known quantity,” Barack wrote Alex a month later, but “the howling and drinking and haze of my short stay smothered any productive impulses I may have had, so that moving to a new situation came easily.”
Obama next found a room in a three-bedroom apartment at 622 West 114th Street #43. He told Alex that out on Long Island he had spent his days “in seclusion sorting through various letters and timetables, spying on the damp, A-frame life of suburbia, wandering along the shoulders of roads” that lacked sidewalks. Wahid was “absorbed with his work” but retains “his integrity and curiosity for the strangeness of life, and I left his apartment certain that our friendship can straddle the divide of our different choices.” His time at Sohale’s had presented “cash flow problems” that had hindered getting his “job hunt in motion” as one week he was unable to pay for postage to mail out résumés, and “the next I have to bounce a check to rent a typewriter.” To remedy that shortcoming,
I took a one week stint supervising a project to transfer the files of the Manhattan Fire Department into a new facility, a fascinating experience affording me a taste of the grinding toil of low-rung white collar jobs, as well as the ambivalent relationships established between employers, employees, and personnel agencies with their shifting mix of loyalty, manipulation, abuses of power, rebellion and concession. The workers, an odd assortment of lower income kids, elderly women and unemployed liberal arts majors, struck me as some of the best people I’ve met; as the 12 hour shifts (uh-huh) wore on I watched much subtle straightforward contact being made and greater political perception than I had expected (although rarely framed in political terms). I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three-fourths of the workforce there) than I had felt in a long time, and it strengthened me in some important way. My role as supervisor clouded the relationship between myself and them, however, since I felt that the company was using it as leverage to extract cooperation from the people for sometimes unreasonable demands. I tapped a feeling of community that comes in people acting in concert on a certain process; yet I felt frustrated that the project was imposed from above, structured according to bids and contracts and the bookkeeper, without lasting benefit beyond the pint-sized paychecks for the workers involved.
At 622 West 114th, “I occupy a room in the apartment of a woman in her late twenties,” Dawn Reilly, who was “a dance instructor and taxi cab driver. The arrangement is fine for now. The place is large and warm, we see little of each other and when we do we maintain a pretty good patter. I suspect I may move if and when the opportunity for a lease arises, though, simply because the rent is a bit steep, and I feel obliged to keep the kitchen clean and air out the living room when I smoke.” Since salaries in “community organizations are too low to survive on right now … I hope to work in some more conventional capacity for a year, allowing me to store up enough nuts to pursue those interests the next.”
He closed by remarking that “I feel lonely yet surefooted, and hope all goes well for you … Get in touch when you get a chance, or impulse. Love, Barack.” A month earlier, Alex had begun seeing a new young man, and she believes she did not reply. Six months would pass before she next contacted Obama.42
Within days of mailing that letter, Barack saw a posting at the career office of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs for a job at Business International Corporation, an international finance information and research firm founded in 1956 that published numerous analytical and data service periodicals from its offices on the seventh floor of One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on the west side of Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets in midtown Manhattan. The job had been posted by BI’s Cathy Lazere, a 1974 graduate of Yale who had earned an M.B.A. at New York University before joining BI’s Global Finance Division eight months earlier, in February 1983. Lazere was responsible for a bimonthly newsletter entitled Financing Foreign Operations—Interest Rate & Foreign Exchange Rate Updater, a four- or five-page publication that cost $900 to subscribe to annually but helped BI pull in a tidy profit as one of a bundle of services that major corporations purchased through individual client programs. In November Lazere was being promoted by division vice president Lou Celi to oversee both FFO and its sister reference publication, Investing, Licensing & Trading (ILT), which was edited by Beth Noymer, a 1983 graduate of Franklin & Marshall College who had joined BI just four months earlier.
Lazere had a roommate at Yale who was from Hawaii and had graduated from Punahou, so when a résumé arrived listing that as well as Columbia, Lazere invited him for an interview. Obama impressed her as “articulate and bright,” and knowing he had attended Punahou, “I assumed he came from a privileged background.” Cathy introduced Barack to Beth Noymer and telephoned Lou Celi to get his approval before offering Barack the position. Obama’s salary would be about $18,500—a respectable sum for a newly minted B.A. in 1983—and he would be expected to write for the finance unit’s flagship newsletter, Business International Money Report (BIMR), as well as to do the research and copyediting necessary to churn out each issue of FFO. A few years later Barack would tell