Redse came from a troubled family, and Jobs shared with her his own pain about being put up for adoption. “We were both wounded from our childhood,” Redse recalled. “He said to me that we were misfits, which is why we belonged together.” They were physically passionate and prone to public displays of affection; their make-out sessions in the NeXT lobby are well remembered by employees. So too were their fights, which occurred at movie theaters and in front of visitors to Woodside. Yet he constantly praised her purity and naturalness. As the well-grounded Joanna Hoffman pointed out when discussing Jobs’s infatuation with the otherworldly Redse, “Steve had a tendency to look at vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.”

莱德斯来自一个问题家庭，乔布斯跟她分享自己被领养的痛苦。“我们都在童年受到伤害，”莱德斯回忆说，“他对说，我们都生错了地方，正因如此我们才属于对方。”他们充满激情，也喜欢公开表现他们的感情；他们在NeXT大堂亲热的场景，很多雇员都记忆犹新。他们吵架也同样公开，在电影院，在伍德赛德的访客面前，都曾发生过。然而他常常称赞她的纯洁和自然。他还赋予她各种各样的精神特质。我们后来讨论乔布斯对超凡脱俗的莱德斯的痴迷时，就像直言不讳的乔安娜·霍夫曼所说的那样，“乔布斯会把柔弱和多愁善感当做一种气质。”

When he was being eased out at Apple in 1985, Redse traveled with him in Europe, where he was salving his wounds. Standing on a bridge over the Seine one evening, they bandied about the idea, more romantic than serious, of just staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely. Redse was eager, but Jobs didn’t want to. He was burned but still ambitious. “I am a reflection of what I do,” he told her. She recalled their Paris moment in a poignant email she sent to him twenty-five years later, after they had gone their separate ways but retained their spiritual connection:

当乔布斯1985年被排挤出苹果时，莱德斯跟他去欧洲旅行，陪他在那里疗伤。某晚，在塞纳河的一座桥上，他们浪漫多于严肃地争论着一个想法：留在法国，也许永久地定居在那儿。莱德斯很渴望那样，但是乔布斯不想。他很受挫但依然野心勃勃。“我做的正是我想做的。”他告诉她。他们后来分开了，却一直保持着精神交流，25年之后，她在给他的一封令人心酸的邮件中追忆了在巴黎的那一幕。

We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast. We leaned against the smooth stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below. Your world had cleaved and then it paused, waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what had come before. I tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world and emerge, anonymous and new, in simple lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could be together every day, like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself. I like to think you considered it before you laughed and said “What could I do? I’ve made myself unemployable.” I like to think that in that moment’s hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived that simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages, with a brood of grandchildren around us on a farm in the south of France, quietly going about our days, warm and complete like loaves of fresh bread, our small world filled with the aroma of patience and familiarity.

1985年夏，我们在巴黎的一座桥上。阴天。我们倚在光滑的石栏上，看着绿色的水从桥下流过。你的世界破裂了，停滞了，等着你选择方向再重新安排。我想逃离过去遇到的一切。我试图说服你跟我一起在巴黎开始新的生活，抛下我们过去的自我，体验别样的人生。我希望我们可以穿越你那破碎的世界黑暗的深渊，走出来，隐姓埋名，重新开始，过简单的生活，我为你做晚餐，我们可以每天厮守，就像孩子玩一个美妙的游戏，没有任何目的，只为了游戏本身的快乐。我多希望你能先想一想再大笑着说，“我能干什么呢？我已经把自己槁得没人敢用了。”我多希望在我们被冷酷的未来俘虏之前，在那一刻的犹豫不决中，我们选择了一直过那种简单的生活直到我们平静的晚年，在法国南部的一个农场，儿孙铙膝，尽享天伦，日子像新鲜出炉的面包那么温暖充实，我们小小的世界里弥漫着耐心和熟悉的芳香。

The relationship lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his sparsely furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had once worked at Chez Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made her feel like an interloper. She would occasionally move out to an apartment of her own in Palo Alto, especially after one of her torrential arguments with Jobs. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.

这段恋情起起伏伏持续了5年。莱德斯讨厌住在他简陋的伍德赛德房子里。乔布斯聘请了一对曾在潘足斯之家餐厅（ChezPanisse）工作的时髦的年轻夫妇担任管家和素食厨师，而他们让她感觉自己像个外人。她有时会搬出来到她自己在帕洛奥图的公寓居住，尤其是在她跟乔布斯的一次大吵之后。她曾在通向他们卧室的走廊墙壁上写道：“忽视是一种虐待。”她为他着迷，可是也因为缺少他的关心而困扰。她后来回忆，爱上一个如此以自我为中心的人，那种痛苦令人难以置信。深深地关心一个似乎没有能力关心别人的人，那是某种地狱般的感觉，她不愿任何人去体验。

They were different in so many ways. “On the spectrum of cruel to kind, they are close to the opposite poles,” Hertzfeld later said. Redse’s kindness was manifest in ways large and small; she always gave money to street people, she volunteered to help those who (like her father) were afflicted with mental illness, and she took care to make Lisa and even Chrisann feel comfortable with her. More than anyone, she helped persuade Jobs to spend more time with Lisa. But she lacked Jobs’s ambition and drive. The ethereal quality that made her seem so spiritual to Jobs also made it hard for them to stay on the same wavelength. “Their relationship was incredibly tempestuous,” said Hertzfeld. “Because of both of their characters, they would have lots and lots of fights.”

他们的不同体现在很多方面。“在从残忍到仁慈的坐标轴上，他们分别接近相反的两极。”赫茨菲尔德后来说。莱德斯的仁慈体现在从大到小很多方面：她总是给街上的流浪汉钱，她做义工去帮助那些（像她爸爸一样）患精神疾病的人，她努力让丽萨甚至克里斯安跟她在一起都感觉很舒服。她比其他任何人都更多地说服乔布斯要多陪伴丽萨。但是她没有乔布斯那样的野心或进取心。这种让她在乔布斯眼里与众不同的不食人间烟火的特质，也使他们很难保持在同一频段上。“他们的关系充满了风暴，”赫茨菲尔德说，“由于他们的个性，他们会有很多很多争吵。”