GIVE ME A BREAK:I'M AT one of those industry dinners where we've all dressed up and made small talk and eaten the four courses and listened to the speeches and clapped for the award winners and now it's the Cinderella hour and time to go home in order to be up to take little people to Saturday morning football, etc.
I’ve ordered the taxi and am saying my goodbyes when this lovely young female industry colleague is talking to a lovely young male industry colleague (they went to school together but haven’t seen each other in years) and says, “I hate fly-fishing. It’s destroying my marriage.” Cancel the taxi.
“What’s so bad about fly-fishing?” I ask.
“It’s more boring than you can imagine. And he wants me to do it with him.” The man interjects in defence of fly-fishing. “It’s about not having to think. That’s the whole point. It’s about not even thinking about the fact that you’re not thinking.” “Or talking,” she says to him, with a wry sharpness that is both charming and challenging. This conversation is obviously about a bit more than fly-fishing.
I ask her, “Are you one of those women who, after sex, asks the guy, ‘what are you thinking?’” (Yeah, I know, it’s a bit of a leading question, but I can’t help it.) She looks at me conspiratorially and smiles. “All women ask that, don’t they?” I add.
“Yeah, and all men never answer the question,” she answers.
My colleague says, “That’s because we’re not thinking! We’re staring into . . . into . . . nothingness. We don’t want to think. It’s like fly-fishing!”
The young woman nods in recognition. “I know that. He wants to stare into the eyes of a fish. It’s why I don’t want to go on another fly-fishing holiday.”
I wonder does Michelle Obama ask her husband in moments of mutual quietude, fly-fishing, post-coital or otherwise, “What are you thinking?” I bet she doesn’t have to ask. My money’s on the president being the one to ask: “What are you thinking?” The way he courts her, instinctively reaches for her hand, looks to her for a reaction when an aide says something into his ear . . . You could see it in their chemistry during CNN’s coverage of the inauguration last week. If ever there was a visual map of a relationship presented to the public, this was it.
Dripping with mutual sexual attraction, they were. It’s the thing that no one dares say, but it’s what a lot of people were thinking. Michelle and Barack are sexy together. And they’re over 40. And they’re powerful yet vulnerable, with a constantly changing balance between them.
I was holding my breath when, during the inauguration parade, the first couple disembarked from “the beast” – that souped up Cadillac tank they call USA 1 – by separate doors on to the street, where they made for each other like lovers who hadn’t seen each other in days. For a long seven minutes they walked in the open (or as open as the Secret Service will allow it to be), and for every second of that time I kept holding my breath, wanting them to be alive by the end of it.
They were courageous and took strength from one another. The first lady hung on to her husband’s left hand with her right, letting it go only to wave, when she would immediately replace her right hand with her left. “He’s my man,” her body language was saying, but there was something else there too. They were two against the world. She was both protective of him and seeking his protection. Likewise, he held on to her hand instinctively because it came naturally. So unlike George W Bush, who seemed to rarely notice that his wife Laura was even present, so that she had to pathetically reach for his hand.
After seven minutes, the Obamas got back into the car for a spell and then, to everyone’s amazement, they did it again, obviously frightened, no matter how hard they tried to appear relaxed and spontaneous. And get this: Michelle did it in high heels.
In their White House bedroom, the steel blockades come down at night so that no light or air from outside seeps into the room. Everything is utterly hushed and darker than anyone of us can remember, what with the street lighting these days.
During the Bush era, bedroom bunker time began at 9pm and at 6am a valet woke George, who stepped to the bedroom door to receive the newspapers and a cup of tea.
In the Obama era, I bet that valet will find life quite a lot more interesting. Look at it this way, after the two years of campaigning, Michelle and Barack will probably be spending more nights together than they did before. And their conversations, on those fluffy white house pillows, will be about the things they both care about: their daughters, politics, each other.
This will be a pillow-talk presidency in the best possible way. Because unlike ambitious Hillary and bad boy Bill (who could never get the balance right) and hapless George and stoical Laura, this couple share values founded in mutual ideals, love and respect, and innately display a balance of masculine and feminine, yin and yang. They have one another’s interests at heart and know how to parlay power within their relationship. It’s rare to see that in couples nowadays.
kholmquist@irishtimes.com
