THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Thirteen

My mother wasn’t looking at the time. She was what, 18 or 19, staying with a kinswoman for a couple of days, putting the rubbish out in the alley. She wasn’t well. She thought she was looking a little wan. But someone in the alley kept looking at her. Some boy next door, having a smoke outdoors. The boy who would be my father. Reportedly – according to my mother’s reports – he clapped eyes on her in the alley in Kota Bharu and he knew they were going to be together. He just knew.

This was the mother of all tales I grew up with. It wasn’t a fairy tale but it was fantastic enough to have damaged my brain. This was, I thought, proof of destiny, proof that it was knowable. You could meet the love of your life just like that; he would know just like that, even if you didn’t; and you could live happily ever after or not-unhappily for decades. Not-unhappily isn’t shabby.

I was fascinated by fate. I was a fan. One of my favourite films, when I was 18 or 19, was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, in which a young model and a youthful judge don’t quite meet. But as she connects with an old ex-judge it becomes profoundly plain the three are connected by the dotted lines of destiny. You know she is meant for the judge, even if she doesn’t. It was a movie after my own heart.

Away from fiction I saw more dotted lines. A friend studied at the same poly as her Mr Right, lived in the same district as him but never got to know him, not until she resigned from a company, he replaced her – getting her work, her desk, odds and ends like her slippers – and they got to know each other as almost-colleagues. Where some would have seen chance I saw fate.

If a friend’s faith in her relationship wavered I would recall the fortune teller’s positive prognosis. I wouldn’t be telling her, “The fortune teller said so.” I wouldn’t be thinking it. I would be thinking about the science of relationships – thinking about psychologist John Gottman, who can analyse 15 minutes of a married couple talking, track negative emotions from defensiveness to contempt and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married 15 years later – thinking about the absence of contempt in the friend’s relationship – and quietly believing the fortune teller.

I was sold on the idea of cosmic certainty, the bigger the more inevitable the more inescapable the better. I am still. Of course, in my lucid moments I don’t think my father knew. He was as old then as Bak is now: Would Bak know destiny if it kicked him in the face like a football hooligan? Maybe my father said the same thing to a lot of girls. Maybe my mother was the only one who believed him. It might have been luck that a hardworking woman like her happened to a high-maintenance man like him. (I also don’t think Oscar knew. He said a similar thing to me and I now think – I now know – it was talk.)

In my normal moments, however, you can still sell me a show by titling it Destiny Love or I Was Fated to Love You. It gets me every, every time.

Till death did they part

…as much as the priest tried to capture the importance of Mr Saint Laurent, it was his former companion and business partner, Pierre Bergé, who spoke most movingly.
The two men, who remained business associates and friends long after their romance ended, decided to create a civil union together in the days before Mr Saint Laurent died, Mr Bergé said. The French union, known as a “civil pact of solidarity”, carries mutual rights and responsibilities, but is short of a marriage.
“It’s going to be necessary to part now,” Mr Bergé said, addressing his friend in the coffin. “I don’t know how to do it because I never would have left you. Have we ever left each other before? Even if I know that we will no longer share a surge of emotion before a painting or a work of art.”
Mr Bergé’s voice broke. “But I also know that I will never forget what I owe you, and that one day I will join you under the Moroccan palms.”
Mr Saint Laurent, born in Oran, Algeria, will be cremated and his ashes buried in a botanical garden he restored in Marrakesh, Morocco, near a home he and Mr Bergé bought together… (NYT)

Pierre Bergé was with Yves Saint Laurent for 50 years.

Being with the greatest living couturier wasn’t 50 years of sweetness and light: How could it have been? From Saint Laurent sprang not just extreme creativeness – he put women in trousers, tuxedos, safari jackets, camouflage, transparent blouses and ethnic dresses, all styles that are in fashion even today – but also extreme destructiveness. There were bitter, dark years when he was depressed, on drugs and falling for homme fatal Jacques de Bascher and further into self-destruction and what did Bergé do? He stayed. He stayed to look after Saint Laurent’s fashion house. He stayed to look after him. He stayed even after officially moving out and moving on to other boyfriends.

This is qing. It isn’t the first flower of love. It is the plant that has to be watered day in day out year in year out - or two trees too intertwined to be free of each other.