David Diaz

Life has its ugly little secrets, and sometimes it exposes them prematurely, before a pragmatic philosophy gleaned from age can act as insulation. One of these cruel insights: While an emptied spot in a romance is filled — sooner or later — by someone as good or better, the loss of a best friend carries no compensation. A lover eventually becomes a part of your life’s history; a best friend never really moves into the past tense.

Faye left San Diego almost two years ago to join the Scientology organization in Los Angeles. (Her name and the names of others in this story have been changed.) Like most friends who move out of town, she’s not completely lost to me. We exchange letters now and then, and I can call or visit her in Los Angeles. But I rarely do. It’s not the military uniform she wears or the small, abysmal dormitory room she lives in that stops me.

David Diaz

I adjusted to the Orwellian trappings of Scientology after my first visit. It was my initial reaction to her leaving, my inability to dilute or delay the real meaning of losing a best friend that made saying good-bye such an unexpected devastation.

We first said hello in Jack La Lanne’s on University Avenue. It was a slow night for membership sign-up, so Luis, the spa manager, had begun hawking people in from the street to meet his quota. I was behind the nutrition counter in my white smock, making protein-laden smoothies and feebly trying to sell vitamins to guilt-ridden exercisers. Faye was walking home from a bus stop and Luis lured her into the club. He was a smooth-talking and good-looking guy who did well with the ladies; Faye was no exception. After the ten-minute tour with a leotarded instructor, Faye and Luis entered the small, windowless back room reserved for closing the deal. They emerged with a signed three-year contract.

Part of the tour included my introduction as a nutritional educator. (If Faye had been overweight I would have been called the diet counselor.) Faye looked about my age, twenty-three years old, and was on the taller side of short. Her brown hair was cut into a shag, a style she never changed. Taken individually, her facial features —large nose, full lips, eyes an ordinary blue — were not the makings of a Cosmopolitan cover. But she was attractive in an androgynous way. “You look like Carly Simon,” I told her.

“I hear that a lot,” she said, “but I think I look more like Mick Jagger. All three of us have black relatives, but those two won’t admit it.” And then came Faye’s smile, a close-lipped curve that spread across her face and pulled down on the corners of her eyes, almost shutting them. “I’ve got to clean up my diet,” she said in a confessional tone. “But first I have to ask you something: Will you make me eat wheat germ?”

“Come talk to me later,” I replied, with no thought of selling her anything. I felt an exciting attraction to her that I had experienced few times in my life, and always with men who I thought could be the one. I had no fear of latent lesbian tendencies, but I knew that something special was happening — the two of us were going to become close friends.

Faye lived two blocks from the spa, on Florida Street. Luis persuaded her to start exercising immediately, so she walked home and returned in a black leotard that still bore the glue-and-paint remnants of a Halloween cat costume. Faye was proportioned like an elongated bell: from the shoulders to the waist she was small and delicate, but from the hips down she had five pounds too many. Her instructor assigned her leg lifts and buttocks squeezes. Ten minutes into her routine Faye got bored and came over to the nutrition bar. One of my weight-loss clients was bemoaning the coffee I had cut out of her mornings. I violated my holistic-health fanaticism (a Spartan bend in my thinking that Faye eventually straightened out) so I could get rid of the woman. “Okay, one cup,” I quickly relented. “But follow it with two full glasses of water.” The dieter headed for the parking lot without even arguing about her morning irrigation.

When I asked Faye what kind of job she had, she smiled with a look of amusement. “I take care of leeches,” she said. “Thirty-four of them, as of today. You get kind of attached to them after a while.” She had just started a job at a UCSD medical research lab and was responsible for keeping the leeches clean, fed, and fit for experiments on their single-celled nervous systems. Faye had no science background or lab experience when she answered a bulletin board ad, but was hired over more qualified applicants, she said. “The head of the study liked me, I guess. He’s a middle-age professor who lives for his results. I made him laugh a lot during the interview.”

I abandoned any thought of commissions and closed the nutrition bar early that night. I walked Faye to her house, ostensibly to look at the apartment next door that was for rent. The inside of Faye’s apartment looked like the last day of a liquidation sale. Starting with the dishes, everything was scattered in asymmetrical piles — a bookcase that she was building had fanned out to govern half the living room, the trash was begging to be taken out. A trail of clothes led to her bedroom, where heaps of chino pants and button-down shirts — Faye’s primary wardrobe — leaned against the walls. Some of these clothes would be mine someday, as Faye was inclined to lev me keep any borrowed clothing that she thought I looked good in.

The night we met I went home with an iron skillet (she had two; I had none), an almost-antique desk lamp (I admired it; she never really liked it), and a new pair of pantyhose (I had forgotten to buy some for the next morning). Her generosity overwhelmed me at first, bristling my instincts as I wondered what she was really after. But I suspected that possessions were extraneous to Faye’s values, and I was right. As we sat at her kitchen table and talked, her attributes started tumbling out, one after the other, until they rolled into each other and took shape as my dream girlfriend. She was articulate, irreverent, empathetic, direct, perceptive, urbane, and exceptionally witty. I had met women with some of these qualities, but not all together in the right proportions. We talked for hours, slicing through to the truth (as we both saw it) soon after we lighted on a topic.

Faye had worked as a technical illustrator and a graphic artist after completing a training program at City College. While in school she had a job at the downtown Hoagy’s convenience store, stationed at the cash register. Faye often lamented having to leave Hoagy’s to take her professional place in the world. After two years of drawing airplane wings for a firm that thrived on Navy contracts, Faye gave notice. The company offered her a new set of pens, a raise, and finally a promotion, but she refused. Her reason for leaving that and other jobs was usually a simple declarative sentence: “I’m bored here.” She often quit without any idea of where she would work next. But her skills and her charm, combined with excellent recommendations from past employers, made jobs easy for her to find. Faye had never been unemployed for more than a couple of weeks unless it was by choice.

Faye's restlessness also made her fearless when it came to making changes, whether they be life-altering decisions or leaving a bar we had just walked into. We became immediate pals, capable of turning an evening’s sentence at the Laundromat into an adventure worth recalling for months.

The only thing I didn’t like about Faye was her reaction to marijuana. She became as dull as boiled eggplant when she got stoned. She would sit anywhere, with anybody, and smile at anything being said. Or she would watch inane TV sitcoms for hours — if she could stay awake. Usually she fell asleep right away, regardless of location or company. Often our plans were stymied by pot or stagnated by a slow-moving stream of guests. Faye’s variegated group of friends would have delighted a sociologist, but those who regularly dropped by made me uncomfortable. Her pot dealer seemed to be in a trance most of the time and preferred unfocused staring to conversation. Then there were the supercilious lesbians who believed that a person was either gay or unenlightened. Faye, who only dated men at the time, had been bestowed with a special exemption. But I was just another fern to be pitied.

The evenings of condescension and boredom became numerous, and I decided to stop seeing Faye. Although we had glided into a quick camaraderie, it only worked when she was straight and we were alone. She seemed to sense how I felt, although there was no discussion or definite break in relations.

A couple of months had passed when I got a call one morning from Faye, asking for a favor. She needed a ride that afternoon to a slaughterhouse in Escondido — part of her job was picking up a monthly supply of blood for the leeches. Faye had never learned how to drive but usually had no trouble getting places via the bus or through her huge car-pool of co-workers, friends, and acquaintances. But this time her ride fell through, and she was almost out of blood with some hungry leeches to feed. Being a vegetarian, I was reluctant to transport the remains of murdered cows, but I had missed Faye and doubted that she would get stoned in the middle of the afternoon. I agreed to meet her at UCSD.

Faye took me on a tour of the lab, explaining how she tricked the leeches into eating by putting them on pieces of animal skin soaked in blood. She noticed my aversion and assured me that we wouldn’t be long at the meatpacking plant; her order would be ready when we arrived. On the way there Faye told me how she had recently trimmed her lifestyle into shape: no more pot smoking, evening classes in drawing circuit boards (a specialized form of technical illustration), and free-lance work in graphics. “I felt like I was just wasting away,” she said. “I think you saw it. You should have told me.”

“I didn't think it was that serious,” I said. “And what right do I have to tell you how to live?”

“Every right in the world,” she said. “We can dispense with the don’t-infringe-on-my-personal-space bullshit because we’re not a couple. So tell me if I’m fucking up. If you’re wrong. I’ll ignore you.”

I never saw this conversation as a plea for guidance, or even a license to make gentle suggestions. People don’t actually want to hear it, and they resent you as well. I’ve always believed. But maybe Faye was different, and maybe my silence was just the easy way out — of a friendship.

Faye had straightened herself out, as she saw it. She had just ended an affair with a woman — her first — whom she described as “a neurotic black dancer plagued by her wealthy past.” After her homosexual litmus test, Faye decided to let her membership in the lesbian community expire. “Gay women are too serious,” she told me. “It could be that they think too much.”

On foot, Faye knew certain areas of the city like a mail carrier. Downtown San Diego was her specialty, and she often took me to places that existed for maybe a dozen people, including the owner. But inside a car Faye’s sense of direction was uncannily wrong. Luckily, everyone we stopped in Escondido seemed to know where the slaughterhouse was. “They probably give tours,” Faye said. “Maybe we can go on one.”

We finally found the parking lot, which was populated by crushed beer cans, weeds, and American-made cars in equal numbers. The office smelled like air conditioning, Formica, and warm blood. No one was there, so we walked through a door into a warehouse-size building. It smelled like the office, minus the air conditioning and Formica scents. A moving metal chain ran along the perimeter of the ceiling. Dead cattle in various stages of disassembly swung along the conveyer belt on big hooks. The carcasses were spaced about six feet apart and so were the butchers, with their industrialized gray plastic buckets. The men (I saw no women) all wore white paper hats — the boat-shaped kind favored by short-order cooks — and white aprons that looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. Each butcher was responsible for hacking off a different part of the steer with curved knives almost the size of floor lamps, or in some cases, electric saws. The man closest to us left his place to pull two white hats (in the same style as his own) out of a drawer. “Put these on,” he said quickly, hurrying back to catch a carcass leaving his station with tenderloin intact.

A man with a clean blue tie and a clipboard approached us. “We’re here for the steer,” said Faye, winking at him. He didn’t smile.

“You the one who called?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I ordered three dozen lips and I have a two-for-one coupon.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be right back.” He walked toward the rear of the place and disappeared through a metal door. A short time later he returned with the blood.

Faye signed an invoice and we soon discovered that the R&D department had hot put much thought into the packaging design of steer byproducts. The blood had been poured into old apple juice and mayonnaise jars. One jar, which didn't have a lid, was covered with a piece of animal skin held in place with a rubber band. I had nothing to say while we walked through the parking lot. We wedged our jars in the trunk, except for the lidless one, which Faye held in her lap to keep from spilling. (She was successful, but the scent of blood didn't leave my car for weeks.) I rolled down the window and put my head outside.

“Are you okay?” asked Faye, who had seemed as comfortable in the place as a traveling salesman in a phone booth. She was still wearing her paper hat and had somehow gotten drops of blood and a piece of gristle on it. “Take that thing off!” I said. “That place was disgusting. Your whole job is revolting.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew the leeches better,” she said. “They can be rather endearing. I’ll give you one, if you want. They’ll never miss it at the lab.”

Faye eventually brought one home in a Mason jar, but it wasn't until her last day at work. Her reason for quitting — besides the fact that the job was boring — was that it wasn’t taking her anywhere, wasn’t making her feel as though she were accomplishing anything in life. The head professor had trained her to conduct some parts of the research, but running voltage tests was electrifying only to the leeches. What really bothered her, I think, were her fellow workers, a humorless collection of neurology grad students and aspiring young scientists dreaming of their own leech lab someday. Although they laughed at her jokes and invited her along to Friday happy hour, she was ignored when serious conversations took place. They made her feel like an outsider, she said, and it seemed deliberate.

Faye and I went out for a drink the day she gave her notice. She called me from work, sounding depressed, and I agreed to meet her at the Red Fox, a lively bar attached to the Lafayette Motel in North Park. Both the bar and the adjoining restaurant were decorated in deep scarlet, and the lights were kept low on both sides. There was usually a piano player surrounded by impromptu singers who provided enough background noise or entertainment to cover anyone’s wishes. Faye always compared the place to a noisy womb.

When I got there she was in a corner of the bar, talking to three men who had formed a triangle around her. She was telling them about her job, and had just gotten to her favorite part of the narrative — the baby leeches. The young ones, it seemed, were finicky eaters. The only way they would take their nourishment, she explained, was through a condom. The men, who were squirming on their stools when I walked up, welcomed me with the fervor of old army buddies. They simultaneously noticed that I didn’t have a drink, and all three tried diligently to get the bartender’s attention. I gave Faye an eye signal, asking if she wanted to get rid of her admirers. She shook her head no and smiled. We could talk later.

The men, we discovered, had escaped from a Toyota dealership party in progress in the restaurant’s back banquet room. When we finished our drinks they invited us to join the others, promising champagne. The party, however, was in an advanced stage of bathos when we got there. Dolorous young salesmen sat around two long tables, forming a shackled audience for a boisterous, fleshy man who was obviously their boss. They feigned weak smiles as he told ribald jokes and ridiculed those who weren’t drinking to excess. There were only two women among some twenty men, and both were dressed as ladies of the evening. The beefy fellow either assumed that we were also for rent or didn’t care if we weren’t. He lighted on me like a flying cockroach.

“You’re awful cute, honey,” he called across the table. “You need bigger tits, though.” A dinner roll came sailing through the air from where Faye stood, followed by a chewed piece of steak and a baked potato wrapped in foil. Only the steak missed him. “Eat some more, you fat pig!” Faye yelled, right behind me as we went out the door. We ducked into the ladies’ room and were soon joined by one of the two women. She acted as though nothing had happened — despite the fact that we were gleefully recalling the impact points of the food missiles — and concentrated on layering on more cosmetics. As we were leaving she stopped us with an incisive question: “I’m going to do my first trick ever at midnight,” she said. “But now I want to back out. What do you think I should do?”

Her story would have put a television scriptwriter at ease: she needed money to buy textbooks for her classes at SDSU; the semester had already started and she was falling behind; her cousin the hooker, who was getting paid for the Toyota party, had set up the date, assuring her that it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.

I tried to think of a simple but effective argument. The money she made would spoil her, I said. Other jobs wouldn’t be as lucrative and she could get locked into a prostitution career. Faye, however, engaged in overkill. She pleaded with her not to do it. She tried to scare her with images of sexual psychopathy. The woman wanted to return and I feared that Faye might physically bar the door. The would-be prostitute realized that Faye wanted a promise and gave her an empty one. We all left the bathroom.

The rest of the evening was a futile attempt at feeling better. Faye was morose and nothing I said or did could change her mood. Her depression lasted for weeks and her sense of humor remained comatose. We saw a lot of each other but our relationship resembled that of a convalescent and her nurse. I diagnosed Faye’s condition as too many sad things intersecting at once — she had no idea what was wrong, or right, with herself.

I tried to persuade Faye to find a new apartment, different surroundings. At the same time my roommate announced she was moving to San Francisco. It seemed logical to ask Faye to move in, but I had my doubts. Lovers who decide to live together, citing the waste of paying two rents or the annoyance of shuttling clothing, often discover that common sense has an unsteady shelf in the closet of emotions. I had the same fear of ruining a good thing.

The first thing you notice about a roommate is how she conducts herself in the morning. Faye’s style was to oversleep, tear through the house, miss her bus, and then ask me for a ride to the classes she had enrolled in to complete the twelve credits she needed for her psychology degree. She also operated on the universal possession theory: whatever she had was yours, and all your belongings were fair game. This can be agreeable until you find your crystal vase in the refrigerator, impersonating an orange juice container. I tried to be tolerant, and kept reminding myself that you often love and hate people for different sides of the same personality trait.

Faye volunteered at the battered women’s shelter in the downtown YWCA and her position soon turned into a paying part-time job. She answered a telephone hotline on the graveyard shift three nights a week. I often called her late at night with a disguised voice and a ludicrous story, which she usually believed past the point of reason. Afterward she would excuse her gullibility with a more egregious tale of abuse that she had just heard (and believed). These calls were our means of keeping in touch after Faye also took on a full-time job as a technical illustrator. She had to give up her classes, which riddled her with guilt. “I’ve done it again,” she said. “Every time I enroll in school, I quit before the semester’s over. I don’t think I’ll ever get my degree.”

“It’s not your fault,” I rationalized, thinking of my struggle for a B.A. in anything. “Life is too tough sometimes.”

Faye left her hotline job after five months. The horror stories didn’t bother her as much as the women who kept going back to their husbands, she said. So many of the calls were repeats that she wondered if her efforts were really making a difference. At the same time, she entered into a multiple-boyfriend phase, bringing men home from bus rides, department stores, and the nearby 7-Eleven. Faye

was an equal-opportunity vamp, and our home became a small United Nations; I never knew which ethnic group would emerge from the bathroom in the morning. We went to Ensenada around this time with two other women, planning on a lost weekend. In Hussong’s we acted like dogs in an Alpo commercial, and Faye was greediest of all. She wasn’t satisfied with having one Mexican boyfriend to last through the weekend; she had three, alternating among them until the hour we left, when she engaged a fourth (who spoke no English and she no Spanish) in a session of physical communication.

I found Faye’s promiscuity amusing and somewhat endearing because she seemingly felt no guilt over it. I’ve always admired women who disregarded the rules, and I saw Faye as a modern-day George Sand. The changing roster of men made her ebullient once again. Until she met Raoul. I immediately recognized him as a womanizing lizard, but she was thoroughly charmed. He was the kind that never broke dates — he just didn’t show up. Faye would feign anger every time, vowing she would never see him again, but I knew she was covering up a desperate yearning for his attention.

Their final scene was in the International Blend, a dimly lighted cafe/theater on Thirtieth Street. Faye asked me to come with her for support while she returned his record albums and said a last good-bye. But when they came face to face, she began crying and ran out of the place. He didn’t bother to follow, but I found her sobbing and moaning uncontrollably on the doorstep of a nearby store. When I tried to comfort her she pushed me — hard — and began screaming that no one really knew or cared who she was. I tried to get her to come home. She told me, in menacing tones, to leave. I had never seen anyone in this condition, and thought back to an expression from my childhood that had always been unclear: “nervous breakdown.” Faye was having one, I concluded as I drove home alone.

Late that night she came in and went directly to bed. The next morning she could recall only parts of the evening and was surprised to hear that she had shoved me. We went out to breakfast and discussed the evil nature of men, and she decided to wean herself from their constant company. She didn’t date anyone for a few weeks and stayed home most evenings, a change in her lifestyle that both of us had to adjust to. I fended off all her phone calls from males, but a guy named Chris got through while I was out.

Chris was an acquaintance of Faye’s whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. He was the former boyfriend of an old chum of hers. Chris now lived in Los Angeles and wanted to come back to San Diego for a visit. Faye invited him down. One week later he was on a bus, leaving his wife and two kids at the Scientology center where they all lived.

He arrived on a Saturday afternoon and they went to the liquor store for a bottle of gin. The rest of the day they spent in her bedroom, emerging only for ice and tonic water. Late that night she took him to the Greyhound station and he boarded a bus for home.

“Chris was fun,” she told me later. “He must have really needed a good lay, because he’ll pay dearly for it when he gets back.’’

“Did they tail him?’’ I asked.

“No, worse,’’ she said. “He has to tell his wife and the other Scientologists that he was unfaithful. They have some stiff penalties for that.”

“He has to tell them?” I asked.

“More or less. If he keeps it a secret. then he’s being dishonest. When you hold things back from others, it puts up barriers that interfere with other forms of communication. Those barriers will stop your progress through the Scientology process.”

“You sound like you believe all this,” I said.

“Well, it might make more sense if you heard him explain it,” she replied.

“It’s bullshit,” I concluded. I’m a firm believer that total honesty in relationships, especially with regard to infidelity, is a lousy idea. Sharing your transgression with a couple of hundred people is simply weird.

Chris left behind a copy of Dianetics and started calling often. Faye’s daily number of phone messages already averaged four, and he began pushing it to five. I disliked him, and I doubt I camouflaged my feelings well. I didn’t say anything, though. Meanwhile Faye was reading through Dianetics and telling me how interesting and well written the book was. She went to the Scientology center on Adams Avenue to buy the sequel, and while she was there they conducted a “personality test” on her. She later told me how amazingly accurate the results were. After reading the second book, she wanted to enroll in an evening course they offered at a

discount to those who worked at the “org” (short for organization) a few hours a week.

I wasn’t worried about Faye's interest in Scientology. She was too cynical, I told myself, to get hooked. That sort of thing happened to losers and lamebrains. And she seemed to be getting happier, more positive about life. I took advantage of her new enthusiasm to persuade her to learn how to drive. She had lost many of her male chauffeurs and I was tired of giving her rides everywhere. The ability to drive, I told her, would bestow an unfathomable independence when combined with one’s own car. I offered to teach her myself.

She turned down my offer but took my suggestion. Sears put her behind the wheel and she soon bought a 1965 turquoise Rambler for $300. Most ’65 Ramblers are driven by elderly ladies; Faye drove hers like a very old lady. She assumed there was a stop sign on most corners. Her top speed was thirty miles per hour. She stayed off the freeway.

Nervous drivers tend to infect their passengers with the feeling that there’s something to be nervous about. While riding with Faye I had to restrain myself from gripping the dashboard whenever her foot went near the brake pedal. But I wasn't too successful at refraining from driving instructions. “You don’t have to give a five-minute warning with your turn signal before changing lanes,” I found myself saying. Her usual reply was, “Cut me a break! I'm a new driver and you’re wrecking my self-confidence.”

A mutual friend of ours, Lynn, was more vocal than I in her criticisms of Faye’s motoring. Faye felt obligated to drive when the three of us went out because Lynn and I had previously provided all the transportation. But the inside of Faye’s car became a battleground on these occasions. Before arriving at our destination, we reached advanced stages of discord, with Faye sulking, Lynn vowing to drive thereafter, and my efforts at negotiation failing.

Friends shouldn’t nag each other, I reminded both Lynn and myself. That behavior is for married people and their facsimiles. But love — especially the long-term variety — inevitably brings a breakdown in good manners. What level of courtesy is necessary in a friendship?

Faye set her limit one day. She told me that Lynn was deliberately attempting to depress both of us because Lynn herself was doomed to unhappiness. “She’ll downgrade every achievement you make because she resents your success,” said Faye.

“Well, she does have a negative outlook,” I said agreeably, trying not to react to her seeming paranoia. “But that’s just her personality. She’s a cynic.”

“No,” said Faye. “She wants people to be miserable. She thrives on it. I’d stay away from her if I were you.”

Lynn did complain frequently, but I’ve always thought that all friends complain to each other, some more than others. It’s one of the services of friendship, I told Faye. But she was convinced otherwise. She stopped calling Lynn and refused to go out with me if Lynn was also coming. “It’s those Scientologists,” said Lynn. “They’re telling her to cut ties with her old friends. Cults operate that way.” I made excuses for Faye, citing her preoccupation with Jack, a Scientologist she was dating. Jack was an ordinary sort of guy, nothing phony or fanatical or weird about him. I enjoyed his company until he moved into my house. There was no discussion preceding his installment, he just

started being there when Faye wasn't. I discovered months later that he had put all his possessions in storage and was trying to save money before moving to the Scientology headquarters in Lo.s Angeles.

A lack of communication between close friends always seems so foolish in retrospect. Faye and I never talked about Jack and my resentment grew. It got to the level where I avoided being in the same room with them. One day Faye confronted me with the fact that our relationship had deteriorated. “We never go out together anymore and I feel that you don't even want me around,” she said. I disagreed, lying to us both. “Roommates rarely share a social life because they see so much of each other at home,” I explained. My lack of congeniality I attributed to the combined pressures of work and school. I didn’t want to offend either of them; what I did, instead, was alienate them.

A couple of weeks later Jack left for L.A.,and Faye told me she had decided to get her own place. She found a studio in Old Town and the two of us rented an oversize U-Haul. I drove. We were each reminded of how the other could turn an ordinary outing — or in this case, the drudgery of moving — into a festivity. Faye took me to dinner that night and we emptied our minds of hoarded gripes and regrets. We vowed to go out together more often.

We didn’t, though. Faye was rarely home when I called and almost as difficult to reach at work. Over the next three months I only saw her a few times, and on each occasion she had to go somewhere or meet someone else in an hour or two. She always apologized for being out of touch, saying that she spent a lot of time at the org in Golden Hill. She was taking classes there and working in the bookstore in lieu of paying for them. She described the classes as “very expensive but worth it.”

At this point I started worrying, but my own problems with romance arose and became my overriding concern. I asked Faye to meet me one Saturday afternoon at the Book Mark, a coffeehouse in Kensington we once frequented. I wanted to talk to her because my current boyfriend had given me the hackneyed “I don’t want to get too involved” line. Faye was indispensable when I was upset or depressed. Her advice was always mixed with empathy and comedy; one of the three usually worked. But this time she was clinical and detached. Everything she said was in the form of a question: What were my goals in the relationship? Did he make me feel unworthy or insecure? Had he and I discussed the problem or was it a one-way communication? I left the coffeehouse feeling well analyzed but miserable.

Although Faye was acting differently, her behavior was mixed with more stability and self-confidence, it seemed. She was mysterious, though, and I lost the ability to tune into her thoughts. But I knew that she loved me (she had told me so a few times, even recently), and I relied on our mutual feelings to allow her the distance she was taking. Faye is going through another phase, I told myself. She’ll be around more often when she gets bored with it. Give her time. Don’t bug her.

Faye woke me up three Saturdays after our coffeehouse session by banging on my bedroom window. She was smiling when I pulled back the curtain, but it was a guilty, grim smile. When I looked at her I knew she was leaving, although I had not even considered the possibility before.

“Let’s go out to breakfast,” she-said.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” I asked. She didn’t say, “Wow! How did you know that?” She just said yes.

I was crying by the time we got into her car. As close as we were, I was still embarrassed by my lack of control. People resemble gargoyles when they cry, so I avoided a full release and managed to ask some questions about the inconsequential but jarring details. She was leaving that same night for Los Angeles. The Scientology people were sending down a truck for her things. They would provide her with housing, food, and employment within the main org. She had visited the place over the weekend and decided that she was ready. They told her it was best to come right away.

We went to the Big Kitchen in Golden Hill, a place Faye liked, she said, because she could smoke cigarettes and eat tofu at the 'same time. The Big Kitchen seemed to be frequented by people with a similar age and attitude that morning. Everyone was in the twenty-to-thirty-five-year-old bracket and enjoying a lazy breakfast. I envied them, placidly paging through the newspaper or chatting with each other about mundane subjects. I would have traded lives with anyone at that moment, no questions asked.

There were no booths left so we sat at the U-shaped counter. It was not my imagination that everyone was staring at me, some more furtively than others. I pretended I was having an allergy attack. I tried to concentrate on the menu, but it kept blurring before my eyes: high-protein pancakes, sprouts, and cream cheese omelet (How could she have joined a cult? What will they do to her?) granola with raisins (Should I try to talk her out of it? Would I alienate her further?) choice of toast or tortillas (She’s leaving for good; this is the end). The last thing I wanted was sauteed vegetables, bulgur, and one egg; any style.

Faye ordered for both of us, insisting that I eat. She tried to coach me through the meal with banalities. “Are you enjoying your anatomy class?” she asked. “Do you like your professor?” When the small talk didn’t distract me, she tried humor. “Have you dissected a corpse yet? I hear you need a microscope to find the penis.” I kept my index fingers at the corners of my eyes to provide a covert run-off for the tears. A woman I had once met approached me but acted as though she were heading for the rest room when she got a closer look. The waitress continually refilled my coffee cup as though she were pouring me a good stiff drink. I ate like a zombie.

As we were leaving the Big Kitchen I offered to help Faye pack. I just wanted to be with her, to get a deathbed dose of her while I could. But she had business to take care of and people to say good-bye to at the org. She dropped me off at my house and told me to come by her apartment later.

I spent the rest of the morning sitting on my couch, staring at different sections of my living room. Some people remedy mental anarchy with pharmaceuticals, but that takes some planning ahead. There was no escape for me that day; going to the beach, shopping, or walking into another room would not change the fact that I was losing Faye. I felt as though I had been victimized by the appearance of death in an evening gown, trying to pass itself off as an invited guest at a Life’s Inevitable Changes party. But the true scenario was all too clear: my best friend had joined a cult and was starting a new life that I could not be a part of. Scientology would put more than a hundred miles between us.

We both realized this. Soothing dishonesty would have been a mutual insult, so no perfunctory promises of writing or visiting often were made on either side. I now wish we had gone through some of the usual motions, for our good-bye was too stark. Most friends have the benefit of tapering off communications after one of them moves away, spreading out the loss over the years. But I had to digest mine all at once, and the intensity hurt in a way I had never experienced in any romance. For when a lover leaves you shattered, there is always one consolation: I’ll be better off without him in the long run. But in a world where understanding and built-in laughs are subject to famine phases, a wellspring of empathy and enjoyment that doesn't drown you in obligation is indeed a treasure. There is no consolation for losing such a person. And in most people’s sympathy rating, this type of loss falls just below the death of a pet.

I helped Faye pack her things the night she left, although most of them were eventually left behind. The truck that was coming from the org in L.A. turned into a Ford Pinto that was five hours overdue by the time I went home. The next morning I stopped by her apartment to tag the remains for the Salvation Army. I loaded her antique vanity, which she had painstakingly refinished, and a couple of other items into my car, thinking that she might want them someday.

Faye never had time to inform the phone company, SDG&E, her landlord, or numerous friends and acquaintances that she was leaving. The first three were easy to take care of, but two years later I’m still meeting people who wonder why she disappeared. They always act incredulous when I tell them, and my response is always the same: “I think she’s happier now.” But I don’t really know. I tried to visit her in Los Angeles two months after she left, hoping that I could exorcise the despondency that was causing me to cry in all the wrong places, at all the wrong times. But Faye slept through the one evening I could reserve with her, explaining the next day (during which she was too

busy to see me) that she hadn’t called because she was exhausted from her “purif.”

A purif involves an hour or so of jogging followed by three or four hours in a sauna. The idea is to purge your cells, through sweating, of any of the mind-altering drugs you've used in the past. Scientologists believe that these drugs (including marijuana) become lodged in your cells for years and can be unexpectedly released, causing something akin to an LSD flashback. The purif is done every day for two to three weeks.

It was a blessing that Faye stood me up that night, for anger displaced my bereavement. I wrote her a letter after my botched visit, telling her that Scientology was no excuse for rudeness. This was the first time I had said anything negative about Scientology, a fact I reminded her of. She sent back a letter immediately, apologizing for being inconsiderate and telling me that she still loved and missed me and thought of me often. “I feel like I’ve really done something against you for getting up and leaving like I did,” she wrote. “You are the only regret I have.” Then she tried to explain how Scientology can make crippled people walk and cure incurable diseases. But her letter was filled with so many unfathomable buzz words and acronyms that I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying. Another letter she wrote sounded as though it had been composed by a third grader. I showed it to Lynn. ‘‘They’ve given her a lobotomy,” she said after reading it.

I did get to visit Faye one year later. She lived in a cinder-block-style dormitory that was part of a complex of Scientology buildings off Sunset Boulevard. People were constantly moving between the buildings like extras on a movie set. Some wore uniforms that made them look as if they were in the Air Force: white shirts with navy-blue and gold epaulets, along with a gold braid that crisscrossed the chest. Faye was wearing hers when I met her for dinner at a restaurant across from the complex. On my way there I felt as though I were heading for a job interview, to be followed by an appearance in traffic court. But as soon as we began talking, I felt as all old friends do when they catch up on each other’s lives.

Faye’s biggest news was that she had married Chris, the one who first introduced her to Scientology. He divorced his wife, whom he and Faye see, along with his children, every day. They got married four months after her arrival. The ceremony was performed in a neighboring dorm room by a fellow Scientologist who had a minister’s license. When I asked her why she did it, Faye replied that Chris had been bugging her to marry him and one night she just gave in. When I questioned her about the rules for sexual conduct at the org, I discovered that one of the strongest taboos is against premarital sex (as well as adultery). Scientology may have reformed many of Faye’s weaknesses, but there are some instincts, I'm sure, that can only be redirected.

Another of Faye’s traits that survived, in some form, was her independence. It was causing some marital problems, she recently told me, between her and her husband, who objects to Faye’s fourteen-hour (often overnight) work schedule. She considered divorcing him, but instead they entered a special “clearing” class at the org. “It’s kind of like marriage counseling,” she said, “but a lot different.” Faye is trying to have a baby, but not very hard. “I had a tubular pregnancy, and after I got out of the hospital I decided to stop using birth control and see what happens. I think a baby would be fun. but either way is okay.” When I asked her how she would fit motherhood into her work schedule, she explained that the org has twenty-four-hour child care.

Faye’s ultimate aim is to rise through the levels of Scientology until she gets to the top, which will enable her to give sight to the blind, among other things. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “I wouldn’t believe it if I were you. But there’s proof that it works.” Unfortunately, Faye’s job — the production of Scientology newsletters and brochures, including copy-writing, paste-up, and four-color overlays — leaves her little time to take the classes necessary to process into the upper levels.

I’ve often wondered, of course, if I could have somehow diverted her from the direction she took. I can’t answer that because I’ve never asked, or completely understood, why she needed Scientology. Part of it may have been her restlessness, her insatiability. Like so many of us, she was always unfulfilled, dissatisfied with herself. Some people can live with that, and do so for their entire lives. Others need a solution, and Scientology provides an easy one. Faye is more content now, I believe, at least in a philosophical sense. But I’m sure she hasn’t escaped life’s daily annoyances and periodic traumas. She just has an extended family and an adopted set of beliefs to give them meaning. I have a selfish hope that her discontent will surface again, and she will come back to me like a treasured piece of jewelry that was lost. But not forever.