The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (21 page)

While I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock I experienced upon my arrival in India, I knew to expect it. What I never saw coming was the culture shock I felt on returning to the United States. I needed big spaces, fresh air, and nature. Lots of nature. So, within two months of coming back from India, I left my father’s home and moved to a place called Duveneck Ranch in Los Altos Hills. Once a single-family farm, Duveneck had developed into a hostel and an environmental education center, a place for children from all over the Bay Area to come and learn about nature, farm life, and ecology. It’s still going strong, but now, after Josephine and Frank Duveneck have died, it’s called Hidden Villa Ranch. Living at the ranch after India would give me the best environment to ease back into American life. And it would give Steve and me a place to spend the nights together.

The ranch sits between about eight hills on a relatively wide valley floor that fans out to Moody Road, a bending two-lane highway that will take you into town or, if followed long enough, to the Pacific Ocean. Duveneck had farm animals, gardens, hiking trails, olive trees, and a big clinking bamboo garden. And it had barn-type buildings for every kind of farm need, crouched in corners all over the property, delightful in total. Back then, in any given year, the Duveneck had a cow or two, lots of chickens, about four sheep, and two to three pigs. The numbers would increase with newborns in spring, and would decrease again in the fall.

I lived at Duveneck for four months, moving into one of the rear cabins in exchange for thirteen hours of work each week. I did odd jobs at first, but it was Trout who suggested I teach. In addition to being a lay monk at the Zendo, Trout was the head of the children’s nature program at Duveneck Ranch. He saw me playing with newborn lambs one day and had the children stop and hang with me because, I think, he wanted them to pick up on how much affection I felt for the sweet floppy creatures. Soon after that, he invited me to be a part of the teaching staff for the city kids who came to visit. I am a born teacher but Trout wouldn’t have known that. It was the philosophy at the farm to teach children, not through filling them with lots of information, but by allowing a natural passion for nature and animals in the children themselves. Feelings first, names and facts later, and only after children had connected to their awe and were asking questions from a place of intrinsic curiosity.

It was a gift to me to be given a job that was inclusive, playful, and interesting. I’m sure Trout knew this. The two most remarkable groups of kids to come through the program were a group of wealthy children from a school for the gifted in Hillsborough, and a disadvantaged group from East Palo Alto. So it was the wealthiest and most highly served children and the poorest and most underserved children who touched me the most. The kids from East Palo Alto had so much joy moving through them—so much life—that I can still feel their explosive wonder. And the kids from the gifted school were just so off all charts in terms of being self-possessed and intelligent, that I tagged that memory and would later send my own child there.

I had spent some time at the ranch before I’d left for India—Steve, too—because five times a year the Los Altos Zen Center made it into a Zendo for their meditation retreats. At these times the sangha members transformed the hostel into a monastery by removing the furniture in the dusty old community center and covering the floors with tatami mats. We cleaned windows, swept porches, and placed pictures and statues of Bodhidharma and Gautama Buddha around the walls and on altars. Outside we hung huge bells and slabs of wood with big mallets for the 3:55 a.m. wake up, and the other calls to meditation that the strict monastic schedule required.

In 1974 and 1975, after Steve had returned from India but before I went, we both sat for many retreats. My impression of those times was of Steve setting himself apart from almost everyone. He seemed frail and alone, without root but gathering strength under the pressures of solitude. Steve chose whom he wanted to befriend, but otherwise seemed to glare at people. There was a kind of dark buzz around him that came up to the edges of his body and ate at him. To me he was both magnificent and tragic.

Steve seemed slightly amused by my presence at those retreats in 1975; but it was a bemusement mixed with slight hostility. (It was how I imagined the early Christian and Buddhist monks felt about women.) He stood apart from me, and if he considered me at all, it was from a wary distance. For my part, I was a little magnetized, but also afraid to look at him. I tried not to pay any attention, but unless I was disciplined, I ended up tracking his locations. And I always knew where his meditation pillow was. If Steve and I caught each other’s eyes, we mirrored each other with feelings that I did not want to feel. I would shudder at the cold darkness in him. I wanted to reach beyond, but didn’t dare. He sort of called the shots because he was so harsh. Other times he was friendly like the old friend he was.

But in the spring of 1977, Steve and I were close again and though I could remember what he was like before, this was a new time and we were falling in love all over again. Steve would come to find me at the farm after work, wearing Birkenstocks, jeans, and pressed white shirts wrinkled in all the right places. With his soft-mustached face and his dark sparkling eyes, he would arrive with the bright air of his well-spent hours. I loved seeing him at the end of the day. When he came early enough we went out for dinner, and three or four nights a week we’d spend the night together in my threadbare little cabin, which I otherwise shared with some spiders. When Steve came in late he’d throw his clothes on the bunk that was against the other wall, then get into bed with me, all laughing and gorgeous. I would see him in the moonlight that cut through the old cabin windows, and it was in this brief breezeway between the earth bed and the towers of the skies that my India and his mounting trajectory at Apple swirled together and then scrambled.

Steve and I had opposite qualities running through us then. His days were defining, accelerating, and focused. He was working in an office carrying out a big plan with older businessmen. My days were spent outside in the fresh air with animals and children, doing odd jobs and living a be-here-now life. It was the promise of everything anyone could hope for between a young man and a young woman. I believed that I’d always loved Steve, that there had never been a time when he wasn’t important to me. And though he had been harsh off and on since he was twenty, I knew the same was true for him. Through the lens of the double negative, he’d also never not loved me.

At Duveneck I had the room to integrate back into Western life. India had given me a way to more naturally know the feminine in myself. In that ancient matriarchal society I could literally make the physical motion of covering my head with my sari and look down, a gesture that would communicate the right of the female to go inward. Walking around with a little tent of color over my head gave me such a luscious feeling of quiet protection in the chaos of the marketplace. But in the United States, I felt undefended in my femininity. I knew of no equivalent action I could take to be in the world, while also being covered. It was a relief that at Duveneck, I could camouflage myself within the subtlety of nature.

*   *   *

Steve wrestled in his sleep. And I think it was in his ascent to power that he worked out many things from his dream states. One of the most dramatic expressions of this happened on a night when we were together at Duveneck and he sat bolt upright from a dead sleep and shouted: “A man must lead.” With his right arm outstretched, Steve repeated this even louder, in a noble, Shakespearian tone, “A MAN MUST LEAD!” God, he was cute. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or if he was on the steppes of Mongolia roaring at the world, but I knew for sure that the message had Kobun’s signature on it. Inevitably after these outbursts, he would fall back onto his pillow, completely asleep, and I would be left awake and wondering.

I would bet that, when one value system takes over another, or we’re wrestling with big changes in ourselves, the evolution manifests itself first in our dreams. Steve and I were not only working out the power dynamics between us, but he was processing the power that was being newly vested in him from the other aspects of his life as well. That’s what I believe I witnessed when Steve got really sick with a fever and Clara asked if I would take care of him through the night. We were in Patty’s bedroom for some reason, and I sat in a chair beside the bed where he lay, watching him toss and turn, breathlessly fighting, shouting out and mumbling. I had never seen anything like it: an archon in a blur of sound and movement, wild with anxiety and fever. It would seem that Steve was processing a huge amount of information, that vast territories of time and space were being argued over, chosen, and cut up. He wanted me there with him, but whenever I touched his forehead or searched for his hand to offer comfort he’d scream, “Get away!” and the sharp crack of his voice would rip through me.

Then there were the nights when I wrestled in my own stunning dreams. In one recurring nightmare I was being suffocated underneath hundreds of masks. In the way of dreams, these masks were also prison locks. And not just normal prison locks, but prison locks of such technical sophistication that I knew, even within the dream state, that they could not have been of my own making. One night in the middle of one of these dreams, I woke up and pulled myself out from under the layers of the locks to get myself down to the bathroom. But when I stepped outside the cabin door, I saw a ghost for the first in my life. At least it certainly seemed like a ghost and not fifteen feet away. It was glowing and it had the silhouette of Kobun in his robes. I told Steve about it when he came to visit me later that week, but he must have been in league with the ghost because he jumped up with a big circus smile and asked, “Well, did you shake his hand?”

At Duveneck, I went about thinking about next steps for my life on both a practical and metaphysical level. I worked hard at my meditations every morning because I had the sense that there was a ledge I needed to climb up and onto. Josephine Duveneck inspired me in this. A Quaker and a very practical woman, she was also metaphysical. Her farm—the very land—was alive with these two qualities. Later she would write a book about it, called
Life on Two Levels.
This impressed me as a wonderful way to be. Indeed it was. And the longer I was at Duveneck—the more I worked and developed newfound capacities to see beyond the mundane—the more I, too, began to live life on two levels.

One day I was sitting on a log in the cool damp valley area behind the hostel cabins, under some big spreading bay trees. A buck approached and stood in dappled sunlight. It was about eighteen feet away and we stared straight into each other’s eyes for at least ten minutes. While we stared, I would shut my eyes for breaks and when I did, images appeared in my mind’s eye, rendered in a style of art I had never seen before. They were not unlike Peter Max’s artwork from the sixties, except these were fresher and bolder, with an aesthetic brevity of startling honesty. The images were of hills and dales and flowers and sky, with flowing water and various plants, all in primary colors. These simplified images were clear, soft yet boldly shaped. I felt without question this was cross-species communication, and from the deer’s huge unblinking eyes I knew that he knew he was sending me these pictures. I still find it almost unbearably touching that the buck trusted me enough to show me its world. It was as if he were saying; “These things I know and love and I share them with you.”

I attempted to tell Steve about the buck and the pictures that week and he told me, “Humans are not meant to mate with animals.” He said this calmly as if he were giving me some sage advice. I just blinked. This was the type of comment that my mentally ill mother could have made, insinuating bestiality and missing the point of the story by a million miles. The way Steve’s mind perceived me at times like this caused me to retreat into my own silent world, overwhelmed. I literally couldn’t get myself to respond. It represented an enormous betrayal, and a warning that I couldn’t trust him to understand me.

*   *   *

Steve lived in a symbolic world of his own and always had. He had a rich and meaningful inner life and it was by his example that I learned to pay attention to my own inner symbolic life. Yet in this most essential connection between us he was unable or unwilling to allow me my gifts. It was around this time that Steve asked for my opinion on the first draft of possible Apple logos. He rarely asked for my contributions in regard to his work, but he wanted my reactions now. It seemed to me he went out of his way to pull me aside. He showed me a page full of adeptly rendered ideas on a single sheet of semitransparent paper, and asked, “Which one do you like?” The word “Apple” was sketched out in all kinds of fonts and combined with about ten to fifteen different images of apples. As I recall, the apples all had bites out of them. I scanned the images and calculated what the symbol meant. Bite out of the apple? Eve going for knowledge, Eve carrying the blame for the fall of mankind, Steve making a business out of knowledge management? At that time, I very much appreciated, close to awe, that the logo, a singular image, could tell such a huge story. I told Steve that I liked the one with the horizontal rainbow stripes. (I loved that it looked like a piece of jewelry.) He said that a number of people had responded to that one, too. Then I added, “And by the way, what you really want is an image that’s so strong and appealing that there is immediate recognition of your company without the word ‘Apple’ written under it. Image speaks louder and with more immediacy and power to people. And that apple is beautiful!”

“That shows how little you know!” he spat.

Steve had been protective of me before, but now he was jealous and acting as nasty as a mean old snake. Except I didn’t understand this then. His meanness had a way of making me blank and confused in self-doubt. Steve sometimes asked me where all my confidence was going, with as much blame as confusion. He wasn’t reflective enough to make the link between how he was treating me and how I was losing myself. I believed in him. I let myself be influenced by him. And I let my defenses down because I loved him. But this was a mistake. Ironically, when I made myself vulnerable to Steve I fell prey to his vulnerabilities and projections. Steve felt so bad about himself that he wanted to win at everything with everyone. Including me. And yet—irony upon irony—it was Steve’s belief in his own specialness than made him look so disapprovingly at me.