The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (38 page)

In the beginning I wanted to broaden my own academics to understand what paintings were really saying over time as a way to understand the forces behind culture and social movements. I wanted to understand my own era, I wanted to understand how women were framing the issues compared to men. I wanted to understand the subversive instinct, in myself and in artists like Goya and Manet and even Monet. Simply put, I wanted a dialogue in myself for understanding my creed as an artist. My hunger for this cannot be overstated. I studied writers Linda Nochlin, Camille Paglia, Lucy Lippard, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Frank Stella, who all gave me the handles for art and social analysis that fed my intellect. And thus began my wide arc toward my left brain. I took drawing, painting, and etching classes but my core tussle was in getting myself to put words onto the page for the ideas that mattered to me.

In the beginning I went blank with real terror when I had to write a paper. My mind scattered and I felt utterly undefended as I worked to surface even single words out from under the bottom of the oceans of my perceptions. Instinct alone told me to walk around the house on the days I wasn’t in class and talk out loud so I could hear myself and be present in the body to take words and sentences from speech into writing. Talking out loud in a big room by myself was alarming but also revitalizing. I have heard of other dyslexics learning to write in the same way.

As I walked and talked out loud to myself, I held a pencil and paper in my hands to capture the words and sentences. Often I had the feeling that my mind was a fast river, so fast that I could only participate by sitting quietly and watching on the bank. Eventually I thought to turn on National Public Radio in the background to bring an influx of ambient language into my mind so as to kick-start word fascination while I focused on this or that school topic. By half listening to the random conversations on the radio, I was able to tap into a confident parallel stream of talking where more and more individual words caught my attention like shiny fish and helped my deeper self fly up to where the mind could sparkle them into wordy shape.

In analyzing it now, I feel that the intense promptings to write were the beginning of an urge in me to get both hemispheres of my brain, image and language, to balance, relate, and work together. And it is as interesting for me to think of letters as pictorial forms as it is for me to think of paintings as documents of information like written reports.

Later I put these promptings and skills to use with a job in an emerging field called “graphic recording.” In the late nineties, I started to visualize information for corporations. It was a new kind of work and by using colored pens on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls, I tracked and captured words as well as visualized content as it flew around the room during corporate meetings. Graphic recording was the art of the iteration, and by God, thanks to Steve and my learning to work together, I knew something about the art of iteration! As many companies in the Bay Area were hiring, I started getting jobs and more experience. I was fabulously well paid for what I privately thought of as “corporate graffiti.” Most people who did this work came from an organizational development background and then learned cartooning techniques, but I came from the opposite end, moving from a fine arts background into learning about the organization of information. I was sort of the Jackson Pollack of graphic recorders and I could not believe I was being paid so well for something that was so outrageously experimental and fun. There were particular groups and companies that really liked how I was approaching it and they kept rehiring me. I also did summary maps for weeklong company offsite meetings. These allowed me to bring greater image-making skill and mythology to crystallize the visions that the companies were creating for themselves at the retreats. Years later, the group at Hewlett-Packard, for whom I had worked a lot, told me I was one of the best graphic recorders they’d ever had. I did this work until the dot-com bust in 2001 when companies returned to a meaner and leaner focus again because of the economy.

*   *   *

Steve came by one day to pick Lisa and me up in his little black Porsche to go to a party at his girlfriend’s, Tina Redse’s, house. With Lisa buckled in on my lap, Steve drove the three of us to the little town of Pescadero, about an hour west of the Bay Area over the small mountain range and down to the coast. I was enjoying the ride and feeling the lovely pull on my body as Steve took the fast curves in his low car. Halfway through, as we were just getting near the skyline, Steve started to tell me how it was that Lisa had two thirds his genes and only one third of mine. I don’t know if I’d caught him in an especially inspired state on a day when we just happened to be together or if Steve had been planning for this brilliant conversation.

For years I had seen people tune Steve out because he would at times pull for a concept of reality that was just so off that one dropped into patience waiting for it to be over. Sometimes there would be the noble soul who loved the art of debate and so took time with him to argue the points and laugh and give him a run for his money. But this was never, ever my forte, I just found it annoying, until I really thought through what he was saying at times like this and then it was just outrageous. Okay, I said to myself at the point of this particular conversation, I know he really,
really
likes and admires Lisa so much he can hardly believe she is his, and this is his lame expression of it. In a convivial manner, I lightly implored in an offhanded way, “Come on Steve, she’s not more you than me.” He was pleasant and enthusiastic but kept going. It was his mental habit to cajole during this kind of conversation. I tuned out because I did not want to dip into his logic or bear up under the implications. Also, I knew that if I had paid close attention there was a good chance I was going to get my feelings hurt and then I’d get mad. He was making me invisible by percentages, again. For most of the ride I was sort of batting it away like a persistent fly while I diffused my awareness by massaging Lisa’s little hands (she loves massages), breathing in the fresh scents of the redwood trees and with the ocean air that was stronger as we got nearer to our destination. We were going to a party on a beautiful afternoon and I was predisposed to being happy.

When we arrived, Steve parked about three hundred yards away from the house and as we all got out he continued his line of thought. It finally dawned on me how long this frigging conversation had been going on. It was likely that he felt badly; if anyone had more influence in our child’s life it would be me because of all the work and time I had put in compared to him. So as per his usual method of dealing with feelings of insecurity, he flipped this into his having the dominant genes. It was also typical of him to plant a suggestion, intending it take root in my sad sense of disempowerment. The truth is, Steve never had to worry because once he and Lisa had come into each other’s lives, she lived as much in his conscious and unconscious as she lived in mine. She was like blotting paper, she soaked us both up because she came from both of us. He just did not know how love worked, and I think he simplistically/primitively thought in terms of owning more shares.

When we walked into the house that afternoon, Steve found Tina and I remember being really relieved that I didn’t have to deal with him and that conversation anymore. It was the beginning of my friendship with Tina. I adored this woman, and Lisa really liked her, too. She was a shiny, lovely person who worked to keep her heart bright and open, and in time she was someone, I came to discover, who had a fabulous sense of humor, which helped me deal with Steve. I did not know then that Tina and I would be good friends for years.

A bunch of people at the party were standing in the kitchen when Steve and Tina leaned up against each other, propping themselves against the counter, and started making out. They would do this a lot, at my house, in restaurants, and I could never quite wrap my head around how public they were about their intimacy. I steered Lisa out of the kitchen and into the living room, where she ran about talking and playing with everyone. My daughter has a bright, innate sense of friendship with all beings great and small; it is just the way she is. And as I sat drinking a beer and eating chips, I watched and enjoyed her interactions with everyone that day. Tina and her friends and family always felt like family to my heart, and they had a beautiful sense of childhood and were playful with Lisa. Steve never brought the genes issue up again.

TWENTY-THREE

THE PATH OF THE HEARTH

I think Tina believed if she could just love Steve enough, he would be okay. For my part, I think I was too exhausted to care about Steve with such earnestness anymore. We did like each other in many ways, but I no longer had the illusion that I could bolster him up or save him. There was just too much history between us; I was backed up and closed down. I was done. We sort of existed side by side, for Lisa’s sake. What I now believe is that Steve and I were well matched, but it would have only been by telling the deepest truths that we could have had a real relationship. In the end, I don’t think we knew how to be honest enough to be responsible to love. I guess that’s what it all came down to.

Tina’s father died when she was young, but she had a strong mother with a tremendous spirit who had escaped Nazi Germany during World War II. Ruth was very real and one day asked her daughter, “Tina, why are you with Steve?
He doesn’t even see who you really are!
” Ruth was angry with her daughter for wasting time with Steve. But Tina was also a keen observer, and told me a number of times that it was the result of watching how Steve parented Lisa—and how he treated me—that she knew she would never marry or have children with him. Still, when Kobun encouraged Steve to propose to Tina, there was a flutter of activity.

Tina and Steve had broken up and she was beginning a relationship with another man, but because of Kobun’s influence, Steve walked back into Tina’s life and asked her to marry him. Despite her awareness and all of her misgivings, I saw her consider it—all the hope and the bright possibility. Tina confided in me to some extent. She told me how Steve had driven to her house in Pescadero, and how awkward it was for her new boyfriend to leave the house because Steve had suddenly arrived with his proposal. Tina was discreet about the details but I got the picture.

It was during this window of time that I drove with Lisa to NeXT to meet up with Steve. It was on a Saturday afternoon and except for Steve’s Mercedes, the parking lots around NeXT were completely empty. When I drove up I was surprised to see Tina. She and Steve were talking to each other next to his car. They seemed upset. I parked, with the nose of my car pointed to the south, and suddenly I gasped: in the parking lot one over, crashed and crumpled, was Tina’s new car, totaled. That day, we canceled the plans and Lisa and I left. Tina later explained that upon getting into her car after a fierce argument with Steve, she accidently put it into reverse and accelerated backward, crashing about fifty yards over a six-foot embankment on the south parking lot. She was okay, but she told me the incident made her realize that she couldn’t endure a life with Steve. She would end up killing herself, she said, whether by “accident,” as in accidentally driving off a road, or worse. She ultimately declined the marriage proposal and they separated for good.

Tina shared two insights with me that still boggle my mind. In the late nineties she told me that Steve shared with her that I was one of the most creative persons he had ever met. Why oh why didn’t he tell
me
this? She also told me, some twenty-five years after the fact, that while she was dating Steve there was a moment in which she understood that his and my coming together would have created the deepest peace inside Steve, which is what she wanted for him. I believe this to be true. I had my own sense of it, and now I feel that the most radical piece of insight I have ever understood about Steve and me is that—it was our souls that matched, not our neuroses. Moreover, not only would our coming together have created the deepest peace in Steve, but it would have done so in Lisa and me, too. But this was not to be. The closest we got was when Steve came over a few times to the house on Rinconada and happily said, “You know, it’s like we are married!”

Indeed.

Tina contributed to my understanding of myself in a number of ways. She told me many times over the years that it was through me and my example that she learned the value of the feminine way of doing things, something she never thought highly of before. For years I wondered what she could possibly be talking about, but then another woman I knew told me the same thing. Eventually, it dawned on me. They were talking about
the path of the hearth.
There used to exist religions that connected women’s homemaking to a sacred dimension—from cooking, cleaning, and making things feel good and beautiful to raising children and loving men. What could be more sacred than a home?

About two years after I moved into the Rinconada house, in 1987, I started a new business. It was inspired by a dream I’d had in which I was at Steve’s Woodside house where I saw a set of intricate carvings of the story of Beauty and the Beast. The dream eventually got me wondering about developing fairy tales in huge mural format as a business for children’s environments. I couldn’t shake this idea after it had landed, so I began figuring out how to do it. Eventually I was in full swing. I began making huge stenciled fairy-tale murals that made whole rooms into storybooklike experiences for children to walk into. I made all my own designs, hiring artists to assist when I needed extra help. I made them for homes, but mainly for pediatric environments such as hospitals, doctor’s offices, and Ronald McDonald House. I worked locally and also had some big installations in L.A. and in Boston. It was a business that would allow me to work commercially, retain a fine arts sensibility, and provide excellence in children’s environments for families in crisis. Eventually I got to the point of making all the murals in my studio on huge gessoed canvases that I would roll up and FedEx to clients to be hung like extremely expensive wallpaper. Everything was done with the love of layered paint and colored patterns, with textures you could run your hands over. This was the opposite of the infinitely replicable computer-generated image; I wanted children to feel the hand and the aura of the original. I worked to make my murals playful and daring and sweet, like childhood. I knew at the time this was not my real work, more like a placeholder with stacked purposes. It allowed me to work at home late into the night while being within earshot of Lisa. It gave me flexible hours and was hugely important in providing me with years in which to develop my color and form awareness, while making money. It was a lot of work but it was gratifying and fun, especially when I had enough work to hire other artists to help.