There are moments when our lives seem a symphony of weary, complicated blues. Emotions sway uncontrollably, like unleashed spirits; direction is blurred, as though you're seeking, groping through tears. Faith Evans, singer, songwriter, wife, and mama, is havin' one of those moments.On this freezing February day, Faith is tippin' out of Bad Boy Entertainment's offices into a loaded black Mercedes. "I got a run in my stockings and had to take them off," she huffs. "I didn't even have time to get a new pair." Sister caught a flight in from warm San Antonio, where she sang during a party for the NBA All-Star game. The day before that she was in chilly Detroit; before that, hot-ass Dallas. But even tired, bare-legged, and about to catch the flu, Faith, 23, is still giving down-home glamour. She looks like nothing so much as a preacher's wife on Easter Sunday: creamy, calf-length dress billowing, high heels slightly turned over, full-length fur trailing, wide-brimmed hat haphazardly cocked over one mascaraed, pretty brown eye. Simply beautiful.
  But mad stressed. After all, she's trying to maintain her own flourishing career-Faith's eponymous debut album has been in Billboard's R&B Top 20 for six months now-as well as her marriage to Christopher "the Notorious B.I.G." Wallace (a job that sometimes requires her to get a little ugly with oversexed groupies). And recently, she's had to deal with rumors of an affair with Tupac Shakur, who was quoted in The Source as saying, "[Biggie] stole my lyrics, I stole his bitch ... he touched my style, I touched his wife." Since she married Biggie after knowing him for only nine days, their love has always been questioned. Now regular relationship stuff, in addition to pressures from the ever-churning gossip mill, have caused Faith and Biggie to separate.
For the moment, she's taken refuge from the world behind the Benz's tinted windows, trying to gently shush her cornrowed, unshushable three-year-old, Chyna-who's full-lipped and misty-eyed, just like her mama. Deep and contemplative are Faith's breaths as she confronts her N.Y.C. reality. "We family today," she says, removing her hat and shamelessly exposing weave tracks that jiggle when she scratches her scalp.
  All Faith wants is to get back to her new Midtown apartment where Biggie and some of their friends are waiting hungry. After a quick blunt break, we stop by a Jamaican restaurant and pick up five orders of chicken fricassee, then head for home. "I'm usually pretty calm," Faith sighs, climbing back into the ride. "But I think I'm about to reach my breaking point."
A uniformed doorman welcomes us into this chichi wonderland where tiny old white people stroll by with equally tiny dogs. We're not in Brooklyn anymore. Inside her sparsely furnished apartment, Faith goes to the bedroom-where a week's worth of dirty laundry is shoved into a corner-to slip into silky lounging pajamas. Very Victoria's Secret.
  Chyna runs into the living room to join Biggie and his boys, gathered cipher-style around the disc player, which is blasting Keith Murray's "Danger." Wigglin' along in black sweats, the Aries child throws her head back and waaails along with the chorus. Faith is in the kitchen, quiet, scraping food onto African-motif plates and peering out her window at the Manhattan skyline.
  When I ask Faith if she and Biggie share this apartment, she flashes a knowing smile and shrugs. "Basically," she says at first, then: "It's my apartment. When I got it, Biggie and I weren't even speaking to each other. [It was] my little rebellion thing. You know."
  I do know that-rumors be damned-she still seems very much in love with Biggie. Peering over Faith's shoulder into her plate, Biggie wonders aloud why his chicken pieces aren't cut up like hers. Laughing and rolling her eyes, Faith picks up a bit of her food and feeds it to him, her loving hand beneath his chin. Biggie eventually leaves with his friends, but not before he and Faith share a damn-baby-I-missed-you kiss. Faith closes the door softly behind them, then stops, leans back, and rests her tired eyes. Bearing witness quietly, I feel her wrenching, confessional "Soon As I Get Home"-in a whole other way.
  But Faith always makes you feel. It dwells in her voice, her Baptist conviction, buried deep by God and the watchful grandmother who raised her. Listen real close to "Reasons," Faith's tribute to the Clark Sisters, and you can imagine a wordless conversation she and Grandmama probably had in church while Faith was singing a solo. The elder's eyes narrowed, warning Faith from the third pew: Remember, you in the house of the Lord. Faith's shut-eye response: But Grandma, I want to sing!
Born in Lakeland, Fla., Faith moved in with her grandparents in Newark, N.J. before she was a year old. "My mama used to sing with a white rock band," she says, laughing. "I don't know the name of it, but she used to take me to her shows sometimes." Faith sang her first song in Emanuel Baptist Church when she was two years old. An honor student at University High School, she received an academic scholarship to Fordham University. But then she started writing songs.
Since 1993, Faith has been supporting herself as a songwriter for acts like Mary J. Blige, Usher, and Soul for Real. She wrote or cowrote 14 of her album's 15 tracks, with production by Puffy Combs. Despite the absence of MCs on the album, her music's often referred to as hip hop/R&B, which Faith doesn't understand. "There's nothing wrong with that," she says. "But it's not what I set out to do. I think being on Bad Boy has something to do with it." Being on Bad Boy has also brought incessant comparisons to Mary J. Blige. "I don't mind the comparisons," Faith admits, casually popping a stick of Juicy Fruit into her mouth. "It's just the misinformation. Like, me vocal-coaching her or she being my boss. And I was never anybody's background singer."
  Blond weaves notwithstanding, they are different. Faith's voice is, for the most part, controlled and steady. Unlike sister Mary, she doesn't get into too much caterwauling. But when she surrenders to a riff, she's exceptional. And her vocal instrument is steadily maturing. In the future she says she wants to record "at least one gospel album." Faith's motives and actions have been under constant scrutiny since August 4, 1994-the day she and Biggie wedded. "People assumed I was just some cute girl that was using him," she says with a sarcastic laugh. "Hello? I was already doin' my thing." The honeymoon was over soon after they married. Biggie had to go on the road, while Faith stayed in Brooklyn, working hard on her album. "Not seeing him at all," she admits, "was terrible." After her album was done, Biggie started working with his protégés Junior M.A.F.I.A. "A few months after our anniversary, it seemed like he was getting caught up in all that Big Poppa stuff. But I couldn't see myself being without him. He was real...real ..." She searches for the right word. "Real."
  Which is not the word she searches for when speaking of Tupac Shakur. Faith says she met Tupac in October 1995, a couple of days after his release from New York's Clinton Correctional Facility. She was in Los Angeles, writing for an R&B group called Tha Truth while Shakur was recording All Eyez on Me for Death Row Records. "He was mad cool," Faith says with a hint of surprise. "I saw him at a couple of parties, and we was chillin', havin' drinks, him and my friends. And I knew Biggie always said he had mad love for Tupac." (At least he did before Shakur insinuated that Biggie was somehow involved in the attempt on his life in November 1994.)
  According to Faith, Shakur asked her to work on All Eyez, and she agreed, pending Bad Boy's okay. Before heading back to New York, she recorded a rough vocal for Pac. Next thing Faith knew, people were telling her she was on Shakur's new album, on a track called "Wonda Why They Call U Bytch" (though according to Death Row, the vocalist is Jewell). It wasn't until January-a month before Eyez was released-that Faith says Death Row (then entangled in a ridiculous East-West rivalry with Bad Boy) sent a letter requesting clearance for her to sing on the record. But the two labels could not reach an agreement.
  "I heard the rumors," she says, "and thought, Tupac's bananas. But there's so much garbage now, I don't even pay it no mind." For the record, Faith says she never slept with Tupac. She says she hasn't spoken to him since she was in L.A. "And if I saw him," she says quietly, "I don't know what I would do or say."
  Faith's ordeal is a clear reflection of the misogyny that thrives in hip hop. Tupac, in a tired effort to regain his player role, attacks Biggie's wife. And like Anita Hill and Robin Givens, Faith is portrayed in terms that are repeatedly used to devalue black womanhood. In her book Killing Rage, bell hooks writes, "Black women are represented as liars, as uppity, disobedient, disloyal, and out of control."
  Actually, Faith remains poised and centered. "I know I'm a good person," she says with a slight neck roll. "I don't even have to pay extra close attention to how I deal with stuff, 'cause I know God ain't gonna let nothing happen to me that's not meant for something to be learned behind it." You can tell, too, that the symphony of blues that threatened to consume her life is lifting, the bluriness slowly coming into focus.
  Tucked demurely on the back of Faith's right shoulder is a new tattoo, a crucifix. "I got it in L.A., before all this extra drama," she says, throwing her shoulder toward me to show it off. "I was going through a lot with Biggie and just mad other stuff in my life. So I got my cross," she testifies, " 'cause the cross I got to bear."