Obama spoke excitedly about Genevieve during one phone conversation with Hasan Chandoo in London, yet in a “rather mumbled” one with his mother Ann in Jakarta he made no mention of Genevieve but talked about BI. “Barry,” as Ann called him in a letter to Alice Dewey, “is working in New York this year, saving his pennies so he can travel next year … he works for a consulting organization that writes reports on request about social, political and economic conditions in third world countries. He calls it ‘working for the enemy’ because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in those countries. He seems to be learning a lot about the realities of international finance and politics, however, and I think that information will stand him in good stead in the future.”
With Genevieve, Barack spoke of BI “only to be disparaging” and only “very rarely” did he speak about his actual five-days-a-week work tasks. “His entire attitude was bearing a necessary burden” and one he was deeply uncomfortable with. “Even just putting on the clothes to go to work in that environment was a political divide—it divided him from how he really saw himself,” she later explained. “He definitely wore it like a penance.” On weekday evenings, Barack’s posture was “They’re the enemy, and I’ve just spent all day at work” but also that “I’m above being emotionally affected by my job.”
His coworkers at BI quickly picked up on Barack’s emotional distance. Cathy Lazere, his immediate supervisor, noted his “aloofness.” “He came across as someone not interested in other people,” she said. Beth Noymer, his closest colleague, said he was “quiet and kind of kept to himself.” To vice president Lou Celi, Barack came across as “shy and withdrawn” and “always seemed aloof.” Lou’s deputy Barry Rutizer thought Obama “was kind of self-involved” and “somewhat withdrawn.” Lou’s assistant Lisa Shachtman remembered Barack as someone who was “sitting back and observing” others rather than interacting with them. BIMR editor Dan Armstrong recalled that Obama “really just kind of kept to himself” and “never joined us” when everyone went out after work. Dan thought “diffident” was the perfect adjective, and in Peggy Mendelow’s memories Obama “had an obvious ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on him.” Years later one colleague would describe Barack as “the whitest black guy I’ve ever met.”45
Barack’s life with Genevieve on 114th Street, where she came on Thursdays after a class at Bank Street as well as on weekends, was a separate world from his workday week. In mid-February, Genevieve recorded that Barack the night before had “talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and spring born—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me.” The next day, Presidents’ Day, she recorded her worries about her “unwillingness to believe that he really does like the time spent with me, that he likes me.” Alluding to BI, it “makes me cross that he’s sitting there in that office while all the others take the day off—too soon to scorn the blatant taking advantage of the least powerful on the totem pole—but I hope he will soon find a way to make it clear he sees limits to what can be thrust on him—the loose ends, the overtime.” Her thoughts returned to their weekend together. “It means so much more than lust, after all, all this fucking we do.” Four days later, after Thursday night together, she wrote of “making love with Barack, so warm and flowing and soft but deep—relaxed and loving—opening up more.”
But Genevieve had her own self-doubts. “It’s all too interior, always in his bedroom without clothes on [or] reading papers in the living room. I’m willing to sit and wait too much.” Barack did go out to Long Island one weekend to see Wahid, who had now married his longtime girlfriend Ferial “Filly” Adamjee, yet with Genevieve their time together was interior indeed. She worried “that what men reach for and stay with is the availability to them of a warm time in bed, while they put up with or dismiss the ‘noise’ women ‘indulge’ themselves in.” While “the sexual warmth is definitely there … the rest of it has sharp edges, and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive, tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness … Both of us wary … and that is tiring.”
The next weekend found a return to warmth, with Genevieve pleased by Barack’s compliments, “his saying ‘You’re sweet to me,’ that I’m kind, as if he’s not accustomed to that, has not had much of that.” One evening at dinner, Genevieve recorded, she had an image “of being with Barack, 20 years hence, as he falters through politics and the external/internal struggle lived out.” One week later, with Genevieve experiencing a bout of tearful self-pity, “Barack said he used to cry a lot when he was 15—feeling sorry for himself.” Fifteen would have been his tenth-grade year at Punahou, when Barack was closest to Keith Kakugawa, but Genevieve was happy that he “won’t let important things go unspoken. ‘Speak to me.’ ”
Yet more often Genevieve felt a self-distancing on Barack’s part, “a sense of you biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart … there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.”
In early March, Genevieve moved from her parents’ Park Avenue apartment to a top-floor, two-bedroom apartment in a Park Slope brownstone at 640 2nd Street that was owned by relatives of a Brooklyn Friends School secretary. One mid-March morning, she telephoned West 114th Street and for a moment mistook the voice of the third roommate, Michael Isbell, for Barack. Michael’s firm “I’m good” in response to Genevieve’s “How are you?” made her realize “that Barack often doesn’t feel firmly good.”
Barack and Genevieve saw even less of Michael than they did of Dawn Reilly, whom they mostly interacted with on Sunday mornings. Michael worked in advertising, had a full-time girlfriend, and remembered Barack as a quiet, studious smoker. Michael did not get along with Dawn as well as Barack did, and Genevieve believed Dawn “had this kind of motherly attitude towards” Barack, even though she was just five years older. Genevieve remembers Dawn as “a vivacious character … very fond of Barack” and “she thought we were a very cute couple. She saw enough of us that she was very aware when things were good” and also when “things got a little bit strained.” Genevieve recalled that in mid-March, Dawn told her, “ ‘I feel more tension between you two’ ” and said she believed Genevieve was good for Barack, whom she thought was confused about what he wanted. To herself that day Genevieve wrote, “I’m a little worried about Barack. He seems young and defenseless these days.”46
Barack intrigued Genevieve greatly, but there is “so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled,” she wrote to herself. Genevieve took the initiative to buy them tickets to a one-woman performance of three short plays by Samuel Beckett at his namesake theater on West 42nd Street. In the last of them, Rockaby, actress Billie Whitelaw onstage uttered just one word, “more.” In between her four increasingly fearful incantations of that one syllable, the audience heard “the tortured final thrashings of a consciousness, as recorded by the actress on tape.” At its close, the audience experienced “relief” as “death becomes … a happy ending,” New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote, saying it was “riveting theater … that no theatergoer will soon forget.” In her journal, Genevieve wrote that “Billie Whitelaw was superb.”
At the end of March, Hasan Chandoo arrived in New York to prepare for his move from London to Brooklyn in early summer. The 1984 Democratic presidential race was in full swing, and on Wednesday evening, March 28, top contenders Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were joined by third-place contestant Jesse Jackson for an intense televised debate from Columbia’s Low Library, moderated by CBS’s Dan Rather. By that time Obama