The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (29 page)

After a month at Robert and Abha’s house, I was becoming a strain in their lives. It would have been too much for anyone. Their house wasn’t that big, so Robert ordered a teepee so we would all have our space. It was truly generous of them to say I could stay on their property, and I tried to imagine living in a teepee with a newborn. But my sister Kathy called when she heard about it: “You need running water, a kitchen, and a washer and dryer near at hand. Please come down and live with us for a while.” She and her husband and their child had a home with enough space for Lisa and me. I knew it was the right next step.

*   *   *

When I drove back to the Bay Area on my way to Idyllwild, I shared the driving with a woman who was traveling around with a tape recorder interviewing people who had been close to the guru Neem Karoli Baba. She was collecting stories for his biography and had come to Robert’s house to interview him. Robert and she were old guru buddies and she was a savvy earth mother type, impressive for all the right reasons. It was good to drive with her. A few years later
Miracle of Love: Stories about
Neem Karoli Baba
would be on bookstore shelves. Remarkably, it was on the way up to Oregon for Lisa’s birth that I gave a ride to Ken Kesey’s secretary. I had serendipitously traveled with two women, up and back, carrying small tape recorders who were directly connected to two significant counterculture influences of our time. What are the odds!

I stopped over for two weeks on the SF Peninsula on my way south. I didn’t stay at my father’s house because his wife was concerned about “the baby peeing on the furniture.” So I stayed with Bert and Betty Wilder whose children, Dave and Camille, had gone to school with my sisters and me. Steve came by to see Lisa and me during my stopover. He was used to people not liking him, but he managed to come when the Wilders were out doing errands and so avoided their glares. Not that he ever cared much; it was more of an issue for me that he was so disliked.

That day Steve asked me if we could go for a walk, so I strapped Lisa to my front. And within fifty feet of the Wilder’s front door Steve’s body slumped in wild agony. His head hung down in shame. He was deeply sincere. He looked at me from an oblique angle and said with a heavy, heavy heart, “I am really sorry. I’ll be back, this thing with Apple will be over when I’m about thirty. I am really, really sorry.” A promise to be back in six years moved through my body like a deep, aching river. Everything in me wanted to hear him say this. This was the most real I had seen him in a very long time. It was the first decent response to what had been happening for almost a year. I felt strengthened by his acknowledgment, disarmed.

Yet in the next ten seconds and four steps, Steve lit himself up in a super cartoony way and began to tell me about a flowering tree that was in his front yard and how beautiful it was. I observed the emotional roller coaster and watched his crazed showmanship. Here was the inspired maniac. At a loss for any words that could possibly matter, I managed to say, “STEVE, I lived at that house, you know I—lived—at—that—house. I know what the goddamn tree looks like. Why are you talking like this?”

He responded with a glossy sigh.

It was all so strange, this weird loss of memory. It was as if Steve had created a fictional state in which he didn’t have to concern himself with responsibility or reality, as if simply not remembering could give him a way out. This odd behavior seemed to me to be all about a lack of connection and an inability to string together shared experiences that made him somehow unique. His sentimentality and inspiration gave him no-stick accountability. It was a way out. Disconnecting from the simple shared experience of the flowering crape myrtle tree that grew in front of the house that we shared, he was in essence telling me that my experience didn’t count for him: that Lisa and I did not count, that he did not recount, and that he was not accountable. And that was the point.

Kobun used the same methods. During the two-week window of my being in the Bay Area before leaving for my sister’s house, there was a night that my father and his wife took care of Lisa so that I could go to the Zendo for the Wednesday night meditation. I had not seen Kobun since Lisa had been born, although he had called a day after her birth to express his best wishes. At the Zendo that night I practiced the forty minutes of sitting zazen and then listened to the lecture and had tea. When it was all over and everyone was outside putting their shoes on, Kobun asked me if I would be coming to the next Zen retreat that was in about two weeks. My jaw dropped. Who would leave a five-week-old baby to sit a meditation retreat? He had young children at home—how could he possibly think I would leave a newborn for seven days? My mind raced and I felt a weak breathlessness, but I managed only the obvious: “I have Lisa to take care of.” My heart felt like it was contracting with his betrayal. He didn’t ask how Lisa was or how it was going for me. It was as if the last nine months hadn’t happened. I looked at him closely to make sure he knew who he was talking to. But it was like the many dreams I’d had about him, where he held a mildly frozen smile with what seemed like an intentional fog over his eyes. Here it was again, the refined aesthetic of the misty cloud-covered mountain peak. It was pure irreproachable indifference. After all that Kobun had offered, it turned out that in the end, he would never be helpful to me in any way—not memory, not money, not babysitting, not food, not even a baby gift, and not in defense of me and Lisa with Steve.

The truth is I think Kobun taught Steve how to be unaccountable.

*   *   *

Lisa must have been twelve when we met up with Kobun again. It was at Steve’s Woodside house, where she and I had gone for a swim. From the time that Lisa was eight until she was about thirteen, Steve and I had what was, for us, a relatively decent balance in our working together. I had kept the door open and when Steve got kicked out of Apple he did find his way into falling in love with Lisa and returning to a friendship with me. It was never easy between us, but it was workable and sometimes very enjoyable. We would share birthday parties, major holidays, dinners, and some NeXT events. Mostly it was like family downtime, with the significant people in our lives.

At Woodside that day I discovered that Kobun had moved into Steve’s house with his girlfriend, Stephanie. They had come from Taos, New Mexico, where, according to Stephanie, they had one bathroom to ten people. At the Woodside house it was more like ten bathrooms to one person. Steve was living in Palo Alto at this time, so Kobun and Stephanie had the whole place to themselves. They sort of took care of it, too.

When we got out of our car, Kobun walked over to us across the huge green lawn from the big backyard. He had on his beautiful traditional Japanese “casual” clothing. I was always curious about how Kobun dressed because there was such beauty to it. His informal wear was what he worked and relaxed in, and that day I noticed that he had leather shoes on, too. Normally, when I saw him, he wore his formal Japanese robes and had the crisp white socks with a tailored indent between the toes so he could fit perfectly into his sandals. I could tell that the leather shoes were very old but had been beautifully cared for and shined for years. Kobun knew how to take care of things and had a rich sense for things themselves, something I had very much enjoyed and admired about him.

On that sunny afternoon we greeted each other with wide smiles. It was always special to be around Kobun and I was surprisingly happy to see him after all these years. Standing there talking, I remembered to tell Kobun that Lisa had been studying Japanese. I thought he would be delighted to hear this because he, of course, had a deep abiding love of his country and language. Kobun’s eyes opened when I told him and he turned to Lisa and said, “Since you can speak Japanese, you can be my secretary.” I was standing about five feet away when it registered that Kobun had made this proud determination, this opportunity to serve the worthy master. But for me it was as if Beelzebub had reached for my daughter’s hand. The thought of this man and his notions influencing Lisa caused my psyche to blow. The implications were clear.

Lisa would be nobody’s secretary, least of all this guy’s. And though I didn’t want to be rude to Kobun (in fact, hated to be so), there was no way I would let him anywhere near my daughter. And no way would I smile and pretend it was okay. Taking a giant step between then, I said, “I am sorry. Lisa will absolutely never be your secretary!” I was smiling as I said this, but I was intense. Neither Lisa nor Kobun acknowledged what I had said, they just ended their conversation as nicely as it had begun—as if I had said nothing, as if I wasn’t standing awkwardly between them. Lisa, at twelve, was often mad at me for embarrassing her, but this time she never said a word.

Within a month Lisa and I were again visiting Steve’s Woodside house and I saw that Kobun had set up a large multilevel altar with pictures of all of Steve’s relatives. Here he had draped beautiful cloth on some long boards, and placed candles and incense cups and bells around the framed images of family members. I didn’t look closely at the photographs because I felt it was private. At the moment, it was enough to grasp the broad stroke of an ancestor’s altar in the cavernous living room.

I remember being surprised by the number of photographs on the table because I wondered who all the people could have been. I never knew Steve to have a big family because I had never met, and rarely, if ever, heard about grandparents or aunts and uncles. Maybe these were people who had died. I wondered about Clara and Paul and Steve’s biological mother and father. I wondered about who was included and who was excluded. To me, that altar implicated the wiggy rat’s nest at the heart of all Steve’s complexes.

I knew it was intended to honor the ancestors and the living relatives but it felt embarrassingly large and cluttered and very unlike Steve. My first impression was of generosity; that Steve gave Kobun the room to be and act as Kobun. But, I also felt a bit scandalized because I felt it was gross with a sense of pandering. It was just a feeling I had about it but it was clear and strong. Was Patty Jobs on the table? And what about Lisa? Would she be honored in the panoply of hosts and decedents? Steve had a designer’s concept of DNA whereby he insisted on picking and choosing family and identity as might fit his moods. Because once he had made himself into one of the most sought-after men of the centuries, he could be precious and despotic about who was in and who was out. And
when
they were in and out. I’ve wondered if Kobun had adapted that altar to fit Steve’s charade or if Kobun used it to needle him. I regret that I hadn’t looked at it more closely.

*   *   *

There was another evening that year, in mid-October, when I again saw Kobun at the Woodside house. There were a number of us for dinner: Lisa; Kobun; Kobun’s girlfriend, Stephanie; Steve; Steve’s girlfriend, Tina; Steve’s sister, Mona; and my boyfriend, Ilan Chabay. Steve’s cooks had created a sublime ravioli made from wheat ground that day, and just-picked garden vegetables for the stuffing. It was a dinner that melted in the mouth, and the setting itself was so old-world beautiful, with at least twenty squat candles of different shapes and sizes lighting the long wooden table. This was Tina’s artistry, I was sure.

After the meal everyone lingered at the table over water and wine. A gentle fire flickered in the huge fireplace and we were all enjoying the deep fall and the chilly promise of winter in the air. It was then that Kobun threw out a number of testing insults at Steve, like the old wife. My nerves jangled with the breach. Kobun was a teacher and a guest. Why this offense? A tenuous discomfort permeated the room. Steve held his tongue. Kobun, glinting and sly, sent out several more demeaning little remarks. He wasn’t behaving like a master who saw through everything and spoke on behalf of the group; rather he was speaking like someone who had been jilted, ignored, and cast off. It looked to me like Kobun was using the persona of the Zen master to settle a personal score.

I don’t remember Kobun’s exact comments except one—something about making a computer being no different than growing a bigger potato. I had by this time heard the analogy twice, the first time in one of his lectures, and both times wondered if I was missing something. It would be like Kobun to expand out into simplicity so profound that it sounded weak and stupid. He was trying to put Steve in his place, but it wasn’t working.

Later that night I talked about it with Tina when we snuck off to share a cigarette together. She had seen it, too. We discovered that both of us had witnessed the same behaviors on several other occasions, separate from one another. Neither of us liked it. We felt it was degrading for everyone within hearing. At home that evening I spoke about it with my boyfriend, and he said, “Yes, and did you notice also that Kobun never directly answered a single question anyone put to him?” Ilan, a scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, had taken his contact lenses out and was eyeing me through Coke-bottle glasses to see if I understood how obvious it was—and how serious.

If my life has been about studying power abuse, then this night watching Kobun and Steve was truly the night of all nights of my erudition. Kobun, acting out of blinding pain, had not resolved his issues with Steve and so had addressed them in a group setting. Kobun was drinking too much during this time, and there were stories. I also noticed he was extremely disregarding of his girlfriend, Stephanie, that night and in general. She, an accomplished musician, acted ditzy, as if she couldn’t think for herself around him. This behavior was not unlike what I had fallen into right after I got pregnant with Lisa when I couldn’t think for myself. Whatever on earth Steve and Kobun had going, that night it had risen up between the two of them.

Here was the teacher with a capacity for insight way beyond all of us, and yet he had stepped out of impeccability. For what? And why wasn’t Steve more loyal to Kobun? I didn’t particularly admire either of them by this time. Later I understood that Steve was jealous of Kobun’s capacities, and that he didn’t want to share the spotlight. For his part, Kobun had taught Steve many things, one of which was to ignore people. Steve turned that teaching back on Kobun, and Kobun was not happy about it. So it all started with Kobun.