The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (25 page)

I realize now that we were all expressing the cultural norms of the time. None of us recognized that we were links in a long chain of broken and unresolved issues. I had no models to teach me about the value of the feminine aspect, and neither Steve nor I had models for an evolved male/female relationship. Adding significantly to this dynamic was the male bias of Kobun’s Japanese culture. More than once I had heard Kobun say that a really good man runs from women who want to marry him.
And well he should!!
But I never once heard him say that a really good woman should run from men who want to marry her. It seems to me now that the teacher’s influence may have been very worse than none at all.

*   *   *

Steve barely made time for the two of us anymore, so I was happy when he surprised me by suggesting we take a walk together. As we ambled along, however, we ended up listing our grievances with each other. Neither of us felt we were getting what we wanted from the other. And it was turning into a pretty lousy walk when, halfway across the school lawn, we were distracted by a compelling sight. There among a row of newly planted trees was a clump of about a thousand bees hanging from a branch, all clinging tightly onto each other like a dangerous cluster of grapes. It was a buzzing, half-flying, half-heavy thing, weighty enough to bend a tender sapling branch down about five inches.

We were riveted.

Neither of us had ever seen such a thing. We came in close to have a look at the mishmash of jillions of tiny repeating insect parts vibrating with their harsh yellow-and-black-colored bodies. The buzzing alone was unnerving. I wondered out loud if they had lost their queen. As fascinated as little kids, we looked around to find a stick to poke at it. We were scared that they’d swarm us but way too curious not to investigate. Steve took the stick and I stood half behind him and with both of us bent over and peering, we got as close as we dared while making ourselves ready to run. Then Steve said, “Okay, one, two, three!” and jabbed into it. Suddenly and anticlimatically, half of the clump dropped to the ground like whipped cement: the bees splattered on the grass, seemingly dazed as they continued to buzz and crawl all over each other. Some flew up to hover and then shoot off. In the rush of shared excitement we finally stopped all the blaming and were quiet. Turning around, we headed home in silence.

In the chaos of the bees I saw a symbol that my world was disconnecting from Steve’s. We had extraordinary codes for creativity together, but I would be excluded from his trajectory and he from mine. History unfolds like this. Some of the finest impulses in people go unrealized because of the crosswinds of ignorance, distraction, power abuse, jealousy, bad timing, faulty memory, scarce resources, a lack of confidence, sexism, racism, wrongful ambition, laziness, wars.… The list of goof-ups is long. Overwhelmed, I excused myself from him, not wishing to go in the soul-numbing direction he seemed to be headed.

Soon after that walk, circumstances finally turned forever. It was late on a Saturday morning right before Steve left for work, and he and I were in our unfurnished dining room, arguing. His face contorted as his voice launched the harshest, most critical words at me—heavily concentrated explosives in every syllable. I don’t remember what the fight was about, only the rapid fire of his dronelike strikes. In my defensive state I separated myself out and studied him as if from the wrong end of a telescope, making his horrible behavior tiny and more manageable through its contracted lens. I thought to myself that he was just meaner than anyone ever needed to be. And then I realized that for me it was over between us. Every cell within me, from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, knew I didn’t have what it would take to withstand any more of this. Normally I was caught up in the blame, but this time I became peaceful because it was over. His meanness had won. There was no contest. I was done.

Once I see something with this kind of clarity, I can never go back, no matter how much I want to ignore myself. And though it would take me time to take all the steps, from then on I was fully programmed to leave. It would be hard to do it because commitment-to-self was not one of the noble metals of my family experience—there were other noble metals, but not that one. So this was where I would stumble toward maturity.

Ten days and fifteen arguments later Steve was chasing me around his car in our driveway late at night. Daniel was out for the evening so we had some blessed space without his sidekick presence. I was both laughing and crying, trying to let the air out of Steve’s car tires in a playful and tearful attempt to make him stay home with me. He was laughing too, and crying as he chased me from one end of the car to the other. Suddenly, his voice pierced the air with a cry, “I’ve never told you what I wanted you to know.” I stopped short and let that sink in. It was true; in our last years together we had never understood our love in the same way at the same time, and so the love between us never had been fully expressed.

I received the blow—his vulnerability, our love, and the loss of it hitting me all at once. The grief I felt was so overwhelming, I bent over holding my stomach and wanted to die from the pain. This was Steve all over, always hitting the grief note to accent loss and blame, when continuity of love and kindness could have saved us.

*   *   *

I resisted the idea of actually leaving Steve, but acted on it nonetheless. Eventually I planned to move to Palo Alto, which I thought was a beautiful little jewel of a town well before it was overhauled to become the hub of the computer age and its money. First, I arranged to get an IUD. Once I woke up to how impossible it had all become, I also woke up to a number of things I had not been taking care of for myself. Birth control was at the top of that list.

Our birth control method up to that point was Steve’s coitus interruptus, also called the pull-out method, which for him was about his conserving his energy for work. Not reaching climax is a practice from the eastern traditions of India and Japan that is passed between teacher and male student for the purpose of building focus and power—presumably for spiritual growth. But it is also a practice taught in the 1937 motivational book inspired by Andrew Carnegie,
Think and Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill, which speaks to building power and wealth by conserving one’s vital energies. I knew that coitus interruptus was a bogus form of birth control, but until then I’d suspended my better judgment and watched my cycles.

I called Family Planning in Sunnyvale. They would only place an IUD at the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle, so I waited until I’d nearly completed a period and then drove down for the procedure. I felt uneasy about the down sides of using an IUD, but it was a better risk than the pill, which would make my body lethargic and fat with the extra hormones. I knew this because I had taken the pill off and on through the years. That night I told Steve that I had gotten birth control and he ridiculed me. Knowing that I had done the right thing enabled me to finally see the pattern: he would continue to demean me for each and every independent thought and action. It was like a disease in him.

After the IUD had been placed, I felt I could be confident after nearly a year of risky intimacy with Steve. I knew I was not going to get pregnant and I was relieved, even giddy, to have that one huge pressure taken care of. Or so I thought. Within twenty-four hours of getting the IUD, I got pregnant. I know exactly when conception happened because Steve was truly kinder that night. He breathed as if he were letting go of everything and he’d cupped my face with a deep sense of real connection in a way he hadn’t done for some time. For a moment I relaxed, feeling his full acceptance of me. Love shone that night, and then it was eclipsed again.

SIXTEEN

AN OLD STORY

Within a two-week period, somewhere in early October of 1977, the clock was up on everything. I realized I could no longer endure an intimate relationship with Steve. I got “reliable” birth control as the first of many steps to get out and away. And Rod Holt, one of the first ten employees at Apple, approached me about a paid apprenticeship designing blueprints for the Apples. Steve and Rod saw me as a good fit for the job, and it was, but I was concerned about taking a job like this because I just wanted to be an artist. As a caring older adult offering me a tremendously valuable opportunity, Rod saw my resistance as profoundly misconceived. I told him I would think about it. Then I found out I was pregnant.

It took me a few days before I told Steve. We were standing in the dining room, talking about something else entirely, and I told him: “I’m pregnant.” Steve’s face turned ugly. He gave me a fiery look. Then he rushed out of the house without a word. That was day one.

I know it’s widely believed that Steve asked me to have an abortion. And Steve, himself, has apparently been quoted as saying he had asked me to end the pregnancy. He even actively led people to believe that I slept around. But none of this was true. It served Steve’s purposes to appear as the victim of a crazy woman to whom he’d had a slight attraction, but never loved. The truth is that at the beginning of my third trimester Steve shook his head and said: “I never wanted to ask that you get an abortion. I just didn’t want to do that.” And he never had.

Steve didn’t and wouldn’t talk to me about the pregnancy. When he wasn’t arguing with me, he would hold me off with his tightlipped silence. It would take me years to understand why he wouldn’t discuss something so important to both of us, especially since he and I had dealt with this situation five years before and had come to a mutual and comfortable decision about how to handle it. This time, I tied myself in knots trying to work out why he wouldn’t just talk with me. What I saw is that after I told Steve I was pregnant, and once he’d adjusted, he behaved with unnatural calm in the face of my panic and tears. If I had just gotten mad, I would have broken the spell, come to my senses, and taken action because clearly I had no way to care for a child. But I didn’t even have it in me to get mad because I think I was too deeply affected by his silent abandonment and what amounted to months of his negative projections on me. So I spun between two poles: the pregnancy itself and the chaos that was unfolding around me. I had a sense of there being no place to stand with this.

Steve’s silence reminded me what it was like to be around my mother’s mental illness, where I struggled to make sense of her insane and cruel behaviors. She, like Steve, lived in a symbolically rich world in which she would perceive my actions in starkly negative terms—things just too terrible to repeat. I realize now that I believed her worst perceptions of me rather than admit that my own mother was so mentally ill. Equally, I came to realize that it was easier to think there was something wrong with me than to see that Steve was leveraging my pain and confusion not only because he wanted to protect himself, but because he was inclined to torture. I looked weak and this would have brought it out in him.

If I had hammered Steve for a conversation, we might have found our way through. But he behaved as if everything was my fault and I didn’t know how to push back with the force necessary to match the strength of all his blame. This all took place just before the common availability of DNA testing, so it was difficult to prove paternity. When Steve ran out the door, or at least soon after, I don’t doubt that he went to a legal adviser who told him that if he said nothing, then nothing could be used against him. I believe that the motivation behind this was all that was happening at Apple.

Steve was fully aware of the big picture, but I had no way of knowing that Apple would go public within three years and that my pregnancy would have been perceived as a threat to Steve’s public image and therefore, the Apple brand. I think they had it pretty much figured out by then that Steve was a wild card and a public relations nightmare. But spin it just right and you could romanticize him as the upstanding, if quirky, genius. Apple was a young company and needed to build public trust. So they created a persona for the gifted, good-looking young man. It was all identity branding and power. It was about money. Done.

*   *   *

Abortion was an option, and an important one. A woman knows whether she has the capacity to care for another life. Adoption was also available. But I went blank. I had no idea of what action to take. And I wasn’t eating well. I was idealistic about being a vegetarian when I probably needed some meat. I also suspect I had parasites from India that were affecting my focus as well as my strength and sense of well-being. Added to this was the Buddhist precept Do No Harm that was very important to me. Inexperience. Idealism. Health issues. The flood of hormones raging through my body. I just didn’t have the clarity to make smart decisions.

I didn’t talk with my father. He knew something about having children and supporting a family so likely he would have been very helpful, but I didn’t fully trust his take on things and I think I was a little too private and maybe even arrogant. I didn’t want to talk to him—there had been many betrayals by this time. None of my friends had enough experience to help me, either. They were still growing up into their lovely lives.

As time went by I felt more alone and more paralyzed by conflict. I did not want a baby, but neither did I want to harm the little one developing inside me. On top of that, I was having a recurring nightmare, charged with bizarre hostility, where I saw a faceless doctor coming toward me with a blowtorch to give me an abortion. So I went to the Zen master. Kobun, unlike Steve, would talk to me. Kobun, unlike my father, didn’t seem full of chaos because he, Kobun, appeared to be kind and intellectually sound. Kobun embraced the situation. He wanted to be helpful and I was relieved to have someone to talk to. Now I see that Steve and Kobun had exchanged roles. Kobun gave me to Steve to help with my enlightenment, and Steve left Kobun to assist with the decision about our pregnancy.

More than anything, I wanted Steve to just talk to me so we could make a decision together. This was our dilemma but instead he blamed me as if it were mine alone. At one point, well into the pregnancy, he told me he felt like I was stealing his genes. He had begun to think of himself as a high-end commodity—despite the fact that he was acting from low-end accountability. I didn’t dare imagine Steve wanted to marry me. By all his actions it was clear that he had started considering me an embarrassing inconvenience.