Early in the fall, Phil Boerner, Barack, and another old Oxy friend, Paul Herrmannsfeldt, who was working at a publishing house, started a book discussion group at Paul’s seventh-floor apartment in Soho. Their first selection was Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy, and Phil’s girlfriend Karen plus several friends of friends attended two or three subsequent meetings, but the group petered out within two months. Barack also attended a reading by several writers at the West End bar on Broadway just south of 114th Street that his apartment mate Michael organized just prior to moving out, but his attempt to interest Michael in his own work failed. As Phil later said, they all found Barack “an interesting yet unremarkable person,” a young man whom some saw as “a bit smug” but whom no one imagined would ever be seen as an exceptional individual.53
At BI Barack’s colleagues felt similarly. In early fall, Lou Celi and Cathy Lazere launched a new series of “Financial Action Reports” that required updating BI’s data on companies’ cash management strategies in particular foreign countries, with new information gleaned from interviews with corporate treasurers. The first two countries were Mexico and Brazil, and Obama and the slightly more senior Michael Williams were given a task that Williams remembered as “my least favorite project” at BI. About twenty treasurers had to be contacted either by phone or in person in New York, and the thirty-minute interviews had to be transcribed. Williams and Obama each took half, and though Williams recalled transcribing his own tapes, Lou’s assistant Lisa got newly arrived editorial assistant Jeanne Reynolds to transcribe at least one of Obama’s more difficult ones. Williams remembered Barack as someone who “kept to himself,” spoke only when necessary, and never seemed “fully engaged.” That was atypical indeed at “a very friendly place” with “a pretty hip crowd” that offered great opportunities for advancement “if you wanted them.”
Jeanne Reynolds recalled Barack as “quiet, reserved, polite,” and Barack’s copy editor on the Mexico and Brazil reports, newly arrived Maria Stathis, would likewise remember him as “very quiet.” Another new arrival, Gary Seidman, remembered Barack teaching him to use the Telex machine that was cheaper than the telephone for international communication. Barack seemed “aloof,” a stark contrast to his “vibrant” coworker Beth Noymer. When Obama gave Cathy Lazere formal notice one day in November that he was quitting effective early December, Cathy mused that “it must have been a little lonely for him to work at a place for a year and not be fully engaged in the world around him.”
A few days earlier, his sister Auma called from Nairobi to say she was canceling her New York trip because their younger brother David Opiyo had just been killed in a motorcycle crash at age sixteen. That news may have strengthened Barack’s resolve to leave a job he found so foreign to his political views, and although he told Cathy “he wanted to be a community organizer because he didn’t find business that meaningful,” he also was leaving BI without a new job in hand. Cathy, Gary Seidman, and the young man Cathy interviewed and then hired as Barack’s replacement, Brent Feigenbaum, all had the impression that Barack was considering law school in addition to community organizing. In Barack’s exit interview, Lou Celi told him, as he told everyone leaving BI, that he was making a big career mistake, and when Barack told editor Dan Armstrong he did not yet have a new job, Dan asked, “Are you crazy?” He also told Barack he at least should “get another job before you quit.” In Armstrong’s memory, Barack simply shrugged. Feigenbaum spent one day working alongside Barack and recalled him as “remote … not a terribly warm person.” Beth Noymer’s monthly calendar for December 1984 would show “Barack lunch” on Friday the fourteenth, but neither she nor Cathy nor anyone else had any memories of a farewell meal.
Asked two decades later what he recalled from his time at BI, Barack answered “the coldness of capitalism.” He told an earlier questioner, “I did that for one year to the day,” a clear indicator of his desire to leave that world for something he found more fulfilling. But giving up his BI paycheck meant leaving the apartment on West 114th Street, and on the weekend of December 1 and 2, Barack temporarily moved in with Genevieve on the top floor of 640 2nd Street in Park Slope.
Earlier in the fall, they had taken the bus to her family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut, where they slept in an open-air cottage and joined Genevieve’s mother and stepfather for one meal. Barack later recounted paddling a canoe on a nearby pond, and a photo shows a happy and relaxed young couple outdoors in the morning sun. Their first week together in Genevieve’s cramped quarters produced minor irritations, but a nice weekend then included seeing the Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop in downtown Brooklyn. Genevieve was the only white person in the audience, but she says she and Barack never experienced any hostility or rudeness toward them as an interracial couple.
In the days just before Barack left to spend the holidays in Honolulu, their feelings of being in each other’s way multiplied, with Barack saying, “I know it’s irritating to have me here,” and telling Genevieve that she was being “impatient and domineering.” But they exchanged Christmas gifts, with Barack embarrassed when Genevieve bought an expensive white Aran cable-knit wool sweater for him at Saks Fifth Avenue. When he asked her what she wanted, Genevieve suggested lingerie, which she says “threw him into an absolute tailspin” before he returned with something that Genevieve privately thought was “incredibly tame.”54
A week before Christmas, Obama flew to Honolulu, and he spent much of his time in transit reading a book by Studs Terkel, most likely his newly published The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. On New Year’s Day, he wrote to Genevieve that “my trip has progressed without any notable events” but that “I was foolish to think that I’d have the time or energy to work on my writing” in Hawaii because “reacquainting myself with the family has proven to be a fulltime job … they all have used me as a sounding board for all sorts of conflicts and emotions that have previously stayed below the surface…. I’ve been the catalyst for tears, confessions, ruminations, and accusations.”
Genevieve had never met any of Barack’s family, but he offered her sketches of them all. “My mother is as I last saw her, gregarious and sensitive, although she’s undergoing some difficult changes after uprooting herself from Indonesia” to live in a visibly humble cinder-block apartment building at 1512 Spreckels Street, where she and fourteen-year-old Maya shared the two-bedroom unit 402, less than a block from Maya’s ninth-grade classrooms at Punahou.
“My grandfather,” Barack went on, now age sixty-six and retired, “appears immutable. He looks more robust than ever, even while eating donuts, smoking a cigarette, and drinking whiskey simultaneously. My grandmother is doing less well—she continues to drink herself into oblivion,” indeed “incoherence,” when not working. “Her unhappiness saddens me deeply…. It may be my helplessness in the face of her problem that angers me more than the problem itself. But she retires next year, and if the fortitude she’s channeled exclusively into her work can’t be transferred into the remainder of her life, not much life will remain.” With Maya, “I watch with joy her development into a fine person,” but being back in the all too familiar tenth-floor apartment at 1617 South Beretania meant that “ghosts of myself and others in my past lurk around every corner.”
Obama wrote that his relatives all “think I’m too somber…. My mother explains that I was normal until 14, from there went directly to 35.” Stan joked that Barack is “as mean to himself as he is to everyone else. The only difference is he likes it.” But Obama was clearly discomforted by this return to his childhood surroundings. “I have trouble fitting into these Island Ways,” he told Genevieve. Within blocks were “the apartment house where I was conceived … the hospital where I was born … and the school where I spent a third of my life.” But nonetheless “I’m displaced here, it’s not where I belong—sometimes I think my only home is on the road towards expectations, leaving what’s known, complete, behind. I no longer find that condition romantic—at times I resent it deeply—but I accept it.”
That sentence was as self-revealing as any Obama had ever written, but the contrast between “the incredible isolation of people here” in far-off Hawaii and “the nervous energy or self-consciousness you find in New York” was discombobulating. “My