The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (22 page)

I shrunk, I did not understand his new rules. I thought that if I could just
be
better, it would all work out. Mostly we were getting along well but when these spikes hit, I froze or argued and worried. I was not putting it all together. Part of the time Steve was kind, other times he was competing with me, while at other times he presumed I should be all-giving and have no needs of my own. Steve was driving insecurity in me by his changing moods as I sat back and tried to guess who I was supposed to be. It was emotionally primitive territory and it was starting to resemble those behavioral rat studies that had so intrigued him five years earlier, where inconsistent feedback drove the rats crazy.

If Steve had just been mean, I would have left. If he had been more self-reflective and considerate and tried to make things work, I would have grown to love and to trust him more profoundly. But he was kind and he was mean and he was attentive and he was aloof. Sometimes he did not return my calls and other times he called constantly. And those mixed messages played havoc with my instincts. I was losing sight of what was meaningful to me and I was losing sight of my value.

*   *   *

There is no creation myth in Buddhism. No Adam and no Eve. No Vishnu floating in a sea of bliss. No God. No big bang. It is without beginning and without end. This is the band of awareness Buddhism focuses on. And since it is all so endless, Buddhism places a huge importance on wisdom and compassion. Hungry Ghosts are lost souls who wander in unquenchable hunger without end. The offerings to the Hungry Ghosts are said to penetrate deep into the darkest places so that those suffering get some relief and understanding, so that their conditions and all conditions might be transcended. This kind of transcendent possibility for the happiness of all beings appeals to me no end and reminds me of the happy comforting knowledge I felt in my childhood about all being well, even though I must say, I do love a great creation myth.

Later that spring the full moon came in May and with it the time of the Buddha’s birthday meditation retreat. The hostel got changed into its Zendo self again and I signed up for the week. I would sit in lotus position for hours with intermittent walking meditation, focusing on my breath, like everyone else. When my mind wandered in that environment it was always rich, escaping into everything from the perplexing details of Truffaut’s film
Day for Night,
to what
the sound of
one hand clapping
really was about, to a fragment of song lyric that came into my head, to the way light flitted through the trees nearby. Then I would suddenly remember to get my attention back to my breath and posture.

I signed up to make the noon offerings to the Hungry Ghosts that week. But one day I forgot about the offering and held lunch up for ten minutes. I just wasn’t paying attention. When I finally got into the kitchen the cook handed me the offering plate and pushed me out the door into the main meditation room, telling me not to write until I’d found work. It was a joke, and I had to immediately cut the impulse to laugh out loud in the completely quiet room. I regained composure as quickly as I could and carried the little tray of foods to the central table where I bowed quietly and made the offering. I lit the stick of incense in the center of all that rarified focus, using the candle and then waving the flame out in the air so as not to use my breath. I placed the stick into the beautiful handmade cup filled with the fine heavy silt from trillions of other incense ashes. After this I carefully bowed and, as consciously as possible, laid the offering on the altar and then bowed once more and took a step backward and away. Kobun gave me a chastening look that seared every cell in my body. I wouldn’t miss the call again.

*   *   *

Kobun told Steve that I had a very refined sense of transmission. “Transmission” being the word that indicates the way a student receives teachings from the master. Steve was respectful when he told me this, but his respect was blinking in and out at this point and I didn’t feel I could rely on it. I wondered if it would make a difference in how he would treat me in the future. It was soon after this that Kobun told me, “You must do a better job of understanding Steve’s work.” I thought I probably could and should do better, but I resisted. I recognized that some part of me was immature and that Steve was entering an important stage of responsibility for which I needed to step up, but it wasn’t as black-and-white as that. How could I be responsive to Steve when I felt so diminished? Besides this, I also sensed that Steve was finding support in Kobun for the double standards he was applying. I would have needed a stellar committee of advisers to manage how I was being treated by both Steve and Kobun and to know how to take care of myself. I didn’t have this stellar committee of advisers; I didn’t even have a mother.

After that spring retreat, I met and fell a little in love with the son of one of the older sangha members. Chris had joined a sitting period during one of the sesshins; we had introduced ourselves at the break. Tall and blond with light freckles on his face and arms, Chris had a streak of light across an unburdened brow. He and I liked each other immediately. In time, I learned that when I was with Chris I wasn’t cliff hanging. I didn’t feel the constant challenge to my self-worth. I wasn’t ungrounded or disaffected. I was confident and happy. I was myself.

Chris had a generous spirit. He didn’t need to fold me into the corners of his self-importance. Steve, of course, hated my spending time with him. It drove him crazy, but he dealt with it in an honest way. Later, however, Steve wasn’t so honest, and he tried to use my friendship with Chris to off-load responsibility for his own child.

The dark clouds had been gathering between Steve and me. The signs were everywhere, and yet the love and our youth kept us focused on the next bright thing as we moved toward what we hoped would be a good relationship with each other. We always felt it was just over the horizon. Within two months we would move into a house so we could live together again.

FOURTEEN

SNAKES AND LADDERS

Steve often said that he had a strong sense of having had a past life as a World War II pilot. He’d tell me how, when driving, he felt a strong impulse to pull the steering wheel back as if for takeoff. It was a curious thing for him to say, but he did have that sense of unadorned glamour from the forties. He loved the big band sound of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. At the first Apple party he even danced like he was from the forties. So I could see the fit: Steve as a young man with all that American ingenuity from a less encumbered time, with that simple sense of right and wrong. But that’s not how I pictured him in 1977. Apple was taking off and Steve wasn’t in an airplane, he was in a rocket ship blasting out beyond the atmosphere of what anyone imagined possible. And he was changing.

It was around this time that Steve, Daniel, and I moved into a rental in Cupertino. It was a four-bedroom ranch style house on Presidio Drive, close to Apple’s first offices. Steve told me that he didn’t want to get a house with just the two of us because it felt insufficient to him. Steve wanted his buddy Daniel to live with him because he believed it would break up the intensity of what wasn’t working between us. Our relationship was running hot and cold. We were completely crazy about each other and utterly bored in turns. I had suggested to Steve that we separate, but he told me that he just couldn’t bring himself to say good-bye. I was glad to hear this but I was also, by this time, deferring to his ideas way too often.

Steve also didn’t want us to share a room at the Presidio house. He said he didn’t want us to play assumed roles and that he wanted to choose when we would be together. I was hurt by this, but reasoned that he had a point, that we both needed a sense of space and choice. And so I went along with it. But I wasn’t asking myself what I wanted. Nor did I know how to negotiate for myself with who and what Steve was becoming. I wasn’t a person who played hardball. I looked for consensus and I expected fairness. Despite all evidence, I didn’t get a read on the situation partly because I assumed way too much about his being honest.

Steve selected the bedroom in the front of the house. It was like him to want to position himself as the captain of the ship—in front. He was always vying for that superior position. I chose the master bedroom and settled in, knowing I had the best room. Daniel, who was sort of charmingly odd, slept in the living room on the floor next to his piano. But after a month Steve literally picked me up and moved everything I owned and took over the master bedroom. He’d finally realized that I had the better deal: a larger room with an en suite bath and the privacy of the backyard. Steve had paid the security deposit for the rental so was, in fact, entitled to the room he wanted. But he was so graceless that I felt humiliated and outraged.

Even after swapping rooms in this way, Steve and I still shared nights of lovemaking so profound that, astonishingly, some fifteen years later, he called me out of the blue to thank me for them. He was married at the time of his call and all I could think of was,
Whoa … men … are … really … different.
Imagine if I had called him to say such a thing.

We remembered different things. Mainly I recalled how awful he was becoming and how I was starting to flounder. But he was right: our lovemaking had been sublime. At the time of Steve’s phone call, I found that as I listened I was as awed by the memory as by his strange need to risk an expression of such intimacy. After I hung up I stood still and thought,
Maybe Steve thinks that love has its own laws and imperatives. But why call now?

His timing had always been so particular.

*   *   *

In the Buddhist scriptures, it’s laid out that our environment influences one full third of who we are and what we become. (The other two thirds are divided between karma/DNA and personal choice.) I witnessed this firsthand when I went to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for a two-week stint as a guest-student in the summer of 1977, before I moved in with Steve. I didn’t have a car, so Steve and Daniel drove me down the coast a little past Carmel, California, and then east, inland from the ocean, through the hills to Tassajara. After the four-hour drive, they stayed to hike, to sit in the hot sulfur baths, and enjoy a great vegetarian meal before returning that night to Los Altos.

That day at Tassajara I saw how powerful an influence environment can be. Steve became another person there. His former profound kindness resurfaced. Softness came back into his face. His gestures were more refined and lighter. The contrast was huge because as Apple grew, Steve was becoming quick and tough. Until that moment, I had forgotten so much had changed.

Kobun believed that Steve was another St. Francis. He said so many times—it was part of the way he romanticized Steve, to imbue him with the image of the gentle monk by whose hands a church would be built. Seeing Steve at the monastery that day, I was caught by the contrast and could understand why Kobun held his ideal of him. And though it was so ephemeral, I knew this was the more integrated and mature Steve—the truer one.

It was around this time when, back home in the Bay Area, Steve had started a disturbing habit. Whenever he walked past a bush or a flowering tree, he’d rip the leaves and petals off, tear them into tiny bits, and throw them to the ground as he talked. It was as if it helped him think. I’ll wager that absolutely everyone who walked outdoors with Steve after 1977 was witness to his mad leaf-tearing practice. He always did it. It drove me crazy and I would often plead with him to stop. It seemed so insensitive and most definitely not the kind of thing St. Francis would do. But that day, watching Steve at Tassajara, I finally understood that he was more true and kind in the rarified environment around Kobun and the monastery. This gave me pause and I heard some higher part of myself say,
You must remember how different he is here.

I stayed at Tassajara for two weeks and then returned to my father’s house in Saratoga. Steve breezed by the day after I had come home to take me to a pool party for Apple employees. Since Apple was small, the party was small. I think it was the first time I met many of the spouses and significant others of the Apple employees. I remember one woman in particular, the wife of one of Apple’s top executives. Everything about her was picture-perfect: her clothing, her haircut, her healthy youth, and her bell-like laughter. I was completely entranced by her sense of ease.

She talked about how she used to be concerned about the integrity of her husband’s business dealings—specifically, about where the money was coming from—but now she just didn’t care anymore. She was about six years older than me and here she was saying quite plainly that she no longer bothered about how the money all came and went. I have no idea who this woman was or if she has since changed her mind on the subject. All I do know is at that pool party, languid and self-assured in front of about seven people, she was detached and bemused as she accounted for a change in herself. She was actually admitting that she had dropped her ethical vigilance. Was it because she and her husband were becoming so wealthy that they no longer needed the value system that most people lived by? Or was it something else? I felt that a similar change of values was taking place in Steve, and wondered at the coincidence of hearing the warning implicit in the woman’s comments that day. Was there something happening at Apple to cause the change?

*   *   *

Living with Steve in Cupertino was not as I had expected it to be. We shared nice dinners and some beautiful evenings, but we could barely sustain a sense of emotional intimacy, much less build on it. It was like a game of Snakes and Ladders, with Steve as the game master. The ups were hopeful and the downs were extreme. I didn’t know how to hold my own with him because he didn’t play fair. He just played to win—and win at any cost. I knew that a solid relationship couldn’t be built on any one person winning, but I couldn’t understand why things kept slip-sliding away and breaking into pieces.