The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (34 page)

There was another aspect of that
Time
article that shocked me, too. It was winter when I was sitting on our warm waterbed in Tahoe City poring over it for the first time. I looked at the beautiful pictures with some wonder as well as alarm to see Steve in his big Saratoga house with his Japanese meditation pillow. There’s one image in which Steve is sitting in an upright posture with a small Japanese cup in his beautiful hands. The room is sparsely furnished and luminous, lit by a Tiffany lamp. It was materialism so sublime that it looked holy. The images sent shock waves through me. Steve was building and promoting a commercial image of himself that implied the sacred. And this alerted me to the fact that he wasn’t connected to it.

It’s a brilliant marketing strategy to imply the sacred in a product. For sophisticated buyers, the sacred dimension enfolds sex—and a lot more besides. Take, for example, the name “Oracle” for a business. It’s a name that taps into the message from an elevated level, the divine feminine, the illuminated truth, the higher calling, the riddle of the ancient mariner’s song, and the longed-for mystical connection. When the sacred is used to promote material goods (or an idea or person, for that matter), an alchemical flash point is created that gets rerouted into image, exquisite design, cool products, and buyable beauty. And all that taps into the cachet of exclusivity. In this way the idea of the sacred is used to promote image-based identity, and though no real connection has been made with the soul, for a moment the aura of mystique wafts into our lives like the cool winds of heaven—until we need more. And we always need more.

I kept that issue of
Time
for many years, but after this I didn’t pay much attention to Steve’s career again. Once we started to cooperate for Lisa’s benefit, I learned to self-censor my interaction with the public side of Steve because it could set off a chain reaction between us that could produce nothing but harm and destruction. I hung back and assumed a role of silence: Lisa was my priority and so was my own sanity. If Daniel Kottke called to tell me that this or that reporter might like to talk to me, or if an article, a TV show, a magazine, a newspaper, or a book with Steve’s face on it happened to be in front of me, or if someone who had no idea of my connection to him mentioned his name, I would consider it like the
I Ching—purposeful chance
where I’d take note in a precise, but mild way. Mainly and with few exceptions, I felt that the world and the worldly did not care about love or kindness, just more toys. And if I did happen to want to test the water and talk to a reporter (they usually ended up giving me as much information as I ever shared with them), I would sometimes mention that I thought Steve was going to wake up at some point again. Well, at that point the reporter would look at me as if I was just plain stupid. How could anyone be so naïve?

*   *   *

The last of the chain reaction set off from that interview with Moritz came by way of Lisa. When she was nine and in the fifth grade, Lisa was a petite and extremely coordinated little sprite of a girl with a very bright and good nature. One day, for no apparent reason, she scrambled up the built-in bookcase in our house and snagged the copy of
Time
that I had kept on the top shelf.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, when I saw it lying on the couch.

“I found it!” she said, then added, “and I read all of it!”

She announced this in short fast high notes that told me she was proud of herself and that she was nervous and out of her depth, too. She got super speedy and alert because of how intensely I questioned her.

“I climbed and got it up there,” she added, pointing to the upper shelving, like a confident little elf.

Lisa wasn’t a mischievous child. It isn’t a trait anyone would associate with her, though I liked it in her on the rare occassion I saw it. Incredulous, I suddenly realized then that she was such a good reader that she now had access to her father’s world. I just stood there blinking and thinking
How was that possible?
Was she an intuitive like him? That magazine was placed so high up and away among my collection of about four hundred books and magazines with only its slim, worn, and stapled spine facing out that even I could barely reach it. My mind spun and I beat myself up wondering if I should have thrown it away. She was too young for such things. And I had no idea how to talk with her about it either.

TWENTY-ONE

FAMILY TIES

In the spring of 1983, I was inspired to send Steve a photograph of our four-year-old wearing a huge pair of black glasses with a big plastic nose attached. Lisa was funny and cute—they made her look like Steve—so I photographed her and sent a print to him with a note saying, “I definitely think she takes after you.” It must have made him laugh because two weeks later he sent me an extra $500.

I used the money to move back to Menlo Park and rent a room in the house of a friend. A month after that, Steve came by to take us to see his new house in Woodside. This was about a year before he was kicked out of Apple, when things were not going so well for him professionally. He was kinder. We drove in his road-hugging Porsche to downtown Woodside, and turned left onto Mountain Home Road. From there we took a sharp right and drove through an ancient stone gate onto the long driveway of Steve’s new property. Altogether it was classically picturesque in an enchanted way, as if we were entering Cocteau’s
La Belle et La Bête
.

The Spanish-style mansion, situated on seven acres, came with the rich history of old-moneyed Woodside. Steve walked us through and showed us everything: one musty room after another, including one that held the biggest concert organ on the West Coast. He stood near the door and watched as Lisa and I sat at the organ to play some music and then peek behind the false paneling to see the hundreds of pipes that mounted the wall and produced the sound. The pipes were identical, but scaled to size (from miniscule peeping to massive booming) and as perfectly intricate as insect bodies. The dining room was next, then the living room—an enormous ballroom space with huge gaping Citizen Kane fireplaces. It was magnificent elegance from another time and place, fantastic in the current one. The ceilings were about twenty feet high and the echo of our steps was weirdly poignant. I could feel the strange gravity of the large hollow interior spaces press on my senses. And I saw that day that his mansion had an etheric overlay of Steve’s plain and empty warehouse sadness. He was still the same Steve.

Eventually we walked out to the side yard to look at the swimming pool, a cool oblong of aqua surrounded by a lip of uneven cement. It seemed to float without rhyme or reason in the middle of a sea of dense green crabgrass, with no delineating fence or pathway. The three of us arrived at the pool’s edge to look in—it’s a natural impulse—and there we saw a thick carpet of dead worms at the bottom of the pool. It was so completely awful and fascinating, this mass grave. We couldn’t help but look. Subdued and sort of sad, Steve said, “Well, I’ve just bought it and so I haven’t had time to clean it.”

Which meant
get it
cleaned.

The next morning when Lisa woke up, she shouted that she’d had a dream. “Mommy! I saw all the worms in Steve’s pool turn into dragons and fly up into the sky!” “Wow!” I said as I marveled at her. I was so impressed and I told her so. “That’s amazing, sweetie.” And I meant it. Lisa’s young psyche had picked up on something in Steve. I wondered what it must be like to have a sense like this about your own father. Lisa and I had left town when she was three. Now that she was almost five and more her own person, she knew things. She could tell me about them, too. I smiled into her eyes, and as I petted her hair, I thought:
Yes, sweetie, your daddy can turn dead worms into dragons that whooooooosh up into the sky. He is not very nice, but he is special, and he is yours
.

*   *   *

After returning to the Bay Area, Lisa and I moved five times in two and a half years. I worked increment by increment to get Steve to give me money so that Lisa and I could live with strength and decency. There was every reason for Steve and me to join forces for the greatest outcome for our daughter. And though sometimes he gave as easily as fruit falling into the hand, more often he was harsh, demeaning, and unconscionably stingy. But still I returned to work with him to improve all our lives: Lisa and my material well-being, and Steve’s heart and soul. I didn’t know what else to do.

Each house we lived in was an upgrade, due to Steve’s providing small but increasing payments, until we came to live on Rinconada Avenue in Palo Alto, where we would live for ten years. At last Steve was coming closer to covering our real expenses. I am quite sure that it was his failure at Apple that brought him around to reflecting on doing better for Lisa and me … for a while.

*   *   *

Within the first four months after returning from Tahoe City, Lisa and I moved three times as I tried to establish a safe and happy environment for us both. We moved from Los Trancos Woods to Menlo Park to East Palo Alto. I used a friend’s address so I could place Lisa into the Palo Alto school district midyear; I chose the alternative public school called Ohlone. It was well known that the Palo Alto school district was one of the best in the nation, yet I soon found myself alarmed by the school’s approach to early childhood education. Until this time, I’d had no idea that I had such strong feelings about education.

Ultimately it came to this: I never questioned my child’s intelligence and ability to learn, but I did question the emotional tone in the classroom and the school as a whole. And I didn’t like what I saw. So, at the end of Lisa’s kindergarten year, I placed her in a Waldorf school for her first grade. I always felt it was important to choose a school that reflected my value system, so I chose Waldorf because its stated goal is the protection of the emotional life of the child.

After a week at the Waldorf school all the toughness that Lisa had built up to protect herself from the hurt at “the best kindergarten in Palo Alto” dropped off of her. At her previous school, the “best kindergarten teacher” was paying kids with bright shiny toys to get them to read, and this was creating competition. Lisa, who by nature is extremely competitive, wasn’t ready to read and so had started to become mean to the weaker kids in the class because she felt so bad about herself. I saw Steve in this behavior and it alarmed me: they were both so good at competing. However, once Lisa was at the Waldorf school, she became the sweetest, softest, happiest little first grader. This was the school that promoted awareness for the integrity of the whole child, where love and respect was fostered in the classroom and on the playground. It was such a good environment that Lisa and her friends didn’t like breaking for vacations because they didn’t want to be apart from each other.

Within a few months of Lisa’s entering the Waldorf school, Steve had finally increased the monthly money so that we were able to move into a nice apartment in Palo Alto. It was so solidly built and well laid out that it felt like a home. My spirits were uplifted and I had a new sense of safety and overall well-being for us. Still, I often didn’t have enough money for food, rent, and Lisa’s private school, much less furniture and new clothing.

When I returned to the Bay Area from Tahoe I found freelance work illustrating for a magazine and also on a book about the English colonization of China. We had moved around so much that getting a full-time job was problematic, because I never wanted to leave Lisa for forty hours plus commute. I considered Lisa to be my job and added outside contract work doing illustration when I could find it. I also cleaned houses so I could bring in extra money, control my hours, and be there to pick her up after school.

One day Steve had his secretary call to ask if I would be willing and able to bring Lisa to an Apple event. It cannot be overstated that when a man puts money into his family, he starts to take an interest on a number of important levels. The invitation told me that Steve wanted Lisa to be a part of his life. I wanted to respond to his efforts so that he also felt respected and connected to Lisa. I took her out of school for the day and we went and sat near the front of a ridiculously large auditorium filled with Apple devotees to watch the opening. The presentation was overwhelming for Lisa, seeing her father on stage like that. And a new experience for me, too. Steve spoke so rapid fire that it felt as if I’d have to unfold my ears into two big dish antennas to capture it all to match his mind’s extraordinary acceleration. There wasn’t a wasted syllable or a missing beat in service to the logic of his presentation. It was an exhilarating river of pure content. No wonder people were so excited about him! Later when Lisa was older she told me how disturbing that day was for her. She felt it was too magnificent for a little girl to see her father like that. I would not have known better then. In many ways over the years I took actions to connect them to each other with the best intentions, though things didn’t always turn out the way I’d hoped.

It was a wonderful feeling to have the Waldorf community to return to after the Apple event. These were lovely people and many were very thoughtful, old-soul types who wanted to hear how it went. I remember being happy that Lisa was being so thoroughly cared for, that we had a community, and that I was no longer alone with my situation. I could share things, and these people were interested and interesting.

*   *   *

Soon after, Steve called and invited us for breakfast at his Saratoga house. It was a Saturday morning and I picked up berries on the way. Walking into his house, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and spaciousness. Beauty feeds me, but Lisa and I had been living so close to the stressful line of barely making it that my insides seemed to expand to acclimate to the beauty I had not experienced in a long time. This was the house I had seen in the pictures in
Time
. In Steve’s mind, it was very simple: he was entitled to all wealth. We were not. I numbed myself to keep my rage in check. It was easier to push down than to confront him. Standing in his kitchen, I pointed to his espresso machine and made a distracting comment to help me stuff my sorrow. He said, “I am never going to use that again!” Indicating that Steve on espresso was a very bad idea. Whew, I could imagine! He then showed us the rest of his expansive two-story house. He’d had a sauna put in and talked about how very important it was for him to relax. His casual indifference to our needs made me feel like we were the orphans.