Once classes ended at Brooklyn Friends School, Genevieve left New York to spend a week at her stepfather’s family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. She dreaded the next school year, when she would be teaching first grade at PS 133 in Park Slope. “I’m feeling really bad about myself in general,” she wrote in her journal, and by phone Barack sought to reassure her. By early June, Hasan Chandoo had an apartment at the Eagle Warehouse building on Old Fulton Street underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and both there and at Sohale’s apartment on East 94th Street, Barack and Genevieve joined some assortment of the Pakistani friends almost every weekend. If Wahid came into the city, or if Beenu and his girlfriend Chinan were present, drinks and dinner would be the centerpiece of an evening. But with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad, pot and cocaine were usually involved, though Barack’s ambivalence about those activities was crystal clear to Genevieve and obvious to Hasan too.
Sometimes Barack would beg off, but most times he asked Genevieve to come along—“We’ll go together,” he would say—knowing that one or both of them would try to leave before the evening got too late or the activities got too “out of control and manic,” as Genevieve described it. For all her pot smoking, Genevieve did not care for cocaine, yet Barack “didn’t like it when I said ‘Well I’m going to leave now’ or ‘I don’t feel like coming’ ” because “that made it harder for him to ignore the fact that he didn’t really want to go either, that he would have rather stayed home and read.”
But Barack’s bond with Hasan was stronger than his self-discipline, and Genevieve thought “it seemed important to Barack that I bolster him in his desire to maintain allegiance to the guys.” To her, Barack’s indulgence “was definitely out of loyalty and an inability to kind of give the flick to people who had been so incredibly loyal and embracing” of “this lost boy, who had no group, who had no community, and they knew him from before,” from Oxy, “and embraced him warmly.” Hasan was “absolutely” the driving force, not Sohale or Imad, and while that trio was “doing lots of cocaine,” Barack “did not do as much as they did.” Indeed, Barack did “a lot less of everything, like for every five lines that somebody did, he would have done half, and for every scotch that Hasan poured, he would have had one out of every ten compared to what Hasan was drinking.”
In a more understated voice, Hasan agreed with Genevieve. “We dabbled in drugs,” but with Barack “there wasn’t anything excessive by him, by my standards.” As of that 1984 summer, Obama was “much more serious” than the college sophomore Hasan had lived with three years earlier, and at times Barack “would tell me to go easy on my drinking or my smoking pot, and I’m saying ‘What a change!’ ” Genevieve recognized a tension between Barack’s loyalty to his Pakistani friends and his emerging realization that “somehow splitting himself off from people is necessary to his feeling of following some chosen route which basically remains undefined.” She continued to worry about “veils and lids and control,” but Genevieve enjoyed being “cosseted in Barack’s apartment” on weekend nights before returning to her Brooklyn apartment and a new roommate whose presence she found irritating. Genevieve found her intimate time with Barack special and uplifting, but she was sometimes troubled by his behavior toward the Pakistanis, writing one night that “the abruptness and apparent lack of warmth with which Barack left them was jarring.”51
A few days later Hasan and Barack had dinner at Genevieve’s apartment, and she remained fascinated with Barack’s deeper, preoccupying thoughts. He talked about Ernest Hemingway “and the integrity of grasping for those times, those visions that are ones of true magnificence and profundity,” but “when Barack speaks of missing the signs of some central, centered connection with the powerful maelstroms of deep feeling, grand scopes, I have responded with comments such as ‘Maybe you need not to look for them at such dizzying heights, but on other levels.’ ”
In mid-July, Genevieve took offense at “all the artifice in his manner,” but a large Saturday-night dinner at Hasan’s that included his cousin Ahmed, Beenu and his sister Tahir, and Wahid and his wife Filly left Genevieve impressed with Filly’s intelligence and independence. Yet Genevieve’s persistent self-doubts continued to trouble her feelings about Barack. “How long will it take him to see that I am silly and insecure and inarticulate in a way he will find repulsive rather than acceptable?” she wrote in her journal.
A trio of cheap photo booth pictures the couple took of themselves that summer shows Genevieve looking exceptionally energized, striking, and happy, and a somewhat full-faced Barack looking pleased and happy as well. On the first Sunday in August, Genevieve challenged him to a footrace in Prospect Park near her apartment. Barack greeted the challenge with gently mocking bemusement, but then, to his utter amazement and chagrin, Genevieve won, demonstrating that he had seriously underestimated her. “Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend” as they showered and then went to see a new film, James Ivory’s The Bostonians, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve. “Being beaten by a woman,” especially when Barack prided himself on his almost daily running, “really unsettled him,” Genevieve recalled.
Genevieve believed that Barack’s running was motivated by unpleasant memories of having been a chubby boy in his pre-basketball years. “There was still quite a bit of ‘I was a fat boy’ feeling lurking underneath his resolve to be so disciplined with the running. He was very trim, except for a bit of pudgy tummy,” which “he couldn’t get rid of” and “was quite self-conscious about,” she remembered. “That’s why he ran,” to “get rid of that last little bit of being a pudgy boy.”
That did not hinder what she described as “passionate sex,” and after a week apart when Genevieve went to London, she returned to find Barack troubled after having been told by his African sister Auma, who hoped to visit New York in November, about a rumor that their father may have been murdered rather than killed by his own drunken driving. Barack and Auma had become irregular correspondents following Obama Sr.’s November 1982 death, and either just before or just after this latest word from Auma, Barack had a memorable dream about his father that he shared with Genevieve, who had also “grown up without my dad.” But now he also told her that a month earlier he had cried when he saw television news coverage of a mass murder that claimed the lives of twenty-one people at a fast-food restaurant near San Diego. “Interesting that he was connecting the two,” Genevieve wrote in her journal, “when in fact the tears he cries are, I’m sure, buried tears over his dad, and the loss over all the years without him. He was very subdued” for the balance of that weekend.
To Genevieve, who was “constantly looking for an explanation for this wary guardedness” she so often felt from Barack, the answer lay in how “he was not in touch with how deeply wounded he was by his mother’s and his father’s relationships with him.” In her mind, Barack’s “woundedness” and “abandoned child persona” meant “the amount of suppression of negative emotion is just heroic” and explained why “there was a ‘no go’ zone very, very quickly” whenever talk about deep personal feelings threatened to undermine all of that successful suppression.52
In late August, Alex McNear called Barack to say she would be arriving in New York on August 23. The two of them had dinner that night, although years later Alex would have no memory at all of that evening. Genevieve was not looking forward to the start of her school year at PS 133, but in her journal she again wrote, “I love him very much.” Obama met up with Mike Ramos for a beer one night when Mike came to New York for the first of two training events for his job at a large accounting firm. Barack talked about quitting his job at BI so he could do