A new Vanity Fair piece profiles a young Barack Obama and two of the girlfriends who may have later become the president’s "composite" girlfriend in "Dreams of My Father" while he was living in New York City in the early 1980s.
The adapted excerpt from David Maraniss’ upcoming biography of the president—"Barack Obama: The Story"—describes his relations with two women, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook. The material comes mostly from a series of letters between Obama and McNear, as well as diary entries Cook wrote in 1983 and 1984. The letters skew intellectual—a discussion of T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land," for instance—and feature Obama as the "central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way," but Cook’s diary entries offer personal details of her relationship with Obama.
Cook notes Obama’s Sunday routine of "[lounging] around, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong." This Sunday morning tableau is one of several in the piece; in February of 1984, Cook describes an unaware Obama:
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character. Today, for the first time, Barack sat on the edge of the bed—dressed—blue jeans and luscious ladies on his chest [a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women], the end of the front section of the Sunday Times in his hand, looking out the window, and the quality of light reflected from his eyes, windows of the soul, heart, and mind, was so clear, so unmasked, his eyes narrower than he usually holds them looking out the window, usually too aware of me.
In the diaries, Cook describes Obama repeatedly as distant, even thanking her after she told him that she loved him:
The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not "I love you, too" but "thank you"—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world.
Another episode details Obama’s frustration after Cook beat him in a foot-race:
On Sunday Barack and I raced, and I won. I ran so fast my body transformed itself onto another plane. We ran, he started off behind me and I just said to myself stay ahead, stay ahead and my body became a flat thin box w/ my arms and legs coming each precisely from a corner. And I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, but I was going to try—my whole sight concentrated on the lamp post when I felt him slow and yell you beat me, at first I thought he was giving up, but then I realized he’d meant the lamp post on the left and I’d really won! The feel of the race was exhilarating, but I didn’t feel very victorious. Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend, I think. He was more startled to discover that I had expected to win than anything else. Anyway, later in the shower (before leaving to see The Bostonians) I told him I didn’t feel that good about winning, and he promptly replied probably cos of feelings of guilt about beating a man. In which case, no doubt, he’d already discovered the obverse feelings about being beaten by a woman. Nevertheless, it was a good metaphor for me, despite, as I confessed to Barack, that in some ways it would have appeased some aspect of my self-image to have tried and lost. But I didn’t; I won.
In "Dreams of My Father," Obama admits that the New York girlfriend he describes is a composite of a few women.