She Answered His Ad for a Roommate, Moved In and Never Left

New York: Kerry Ryan needed a new place to live; her crazy Yugoslavian roommate had become unbearable. So, as people did in 1991 in New York City, she turned to the classified ads in The Village Voice.

Ryan was 21 at the time and had immigrated from her native Ireland only a month and a half earlier for an internship in the fashion industry. She was naive, by her own description, but apparently not lacking in gumption.

"29th & 3rd Ave-3 mos. poss longer," the ad said. "M seeks non-smoking F, strictly Platonic. Own room in 2BR apt. elev bldg A/C."

She called the listed number, and the man who answered the phone invited her to come check out the place.

That man, John Juback, then 43, was a stage actor, born in the Bronx and raised in New Jersey. He had been living alone in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Kips Bay and for reasons that he can no longer remember - perhaps he needed some extra money for something, he said - he had decided to sublet the second bedroom. He had rented to a woman once before, a college student who spent a summer in the city, and it had gone very well. So he decided to try it again.

Juback hoped that the ad would provide public reassurance that he was not laying some sort of trap. Furthermore, he was in a long-term relationship.

"I wanted to really make the women feel comfortable," he said.

Things did not start off that way. As Ryan, wearing a dress printed with sunflowers, ascended the stairs to the apartment on Aug. 16, Juback, standing in his doorway, exclaimed: "Well, look at you!" ("I always thought that was terrible," she said. Juback, for his part, said he did not intend the comment to be provocative: "She looked great!")

Still, the "interview," as Ryan calls it, seemed to go fine.

"I met him; I thought: 'OK, here's this dude. He's not really what I was thinking about as a roommate type. He's a lot older than I am. I was just off the plane. I had never been to the United States before. He's a New Yorker. He's an actor. He's really out there.'" But it was the best option she had.

"I didn't know about John," she continued, "but it was better than living with the Yugoslavian lady."

Days passed without word from Juback. So Ryan, who grew up in Fethard, a village in County Tipperary, started calling. It was the era of answering machines, which mystified Ryan. ("We didn't have answering machines where I came from," she said.) Though she was brave enough to start a new life in New York at 21, her courage flagged at the sound of the beep.

It was also, of course, the era of real-time message-screening, of which Juback was an accomplished practitioner.

There were a lot of hang-ups. Ryan, using pay phones, ate through a stack of quarters.

Finally, she mustered the courage to leave a message. "Hi, John. This is Kerry," she began hesitantly. Juback, listening in his apartment, picked up immediately. "I'd love for you to be my roommate," he blurted. He had lost her number.

Ryan moved in at the end of August after sneaking out of her old apartment, her belongings stuffed in two garbage bags, because the Yugoslavian woman had forbidden her to leave.
Juback had a busy professional life and a serious girlfriend. Ryan, on the other hand, "tore the city apart," she said, hitting clubs at night and dating voraciously. "I had a lot of men in the city. I did the United Nations." ("Don't put that in!" she quickly added. Then just as quickly: "OK, OK, put it in.")

Juback said he admired how "fancy free" she was and recalled one emblematic scene from that time. He was coming home in a taxi late one winter night and spotted Ryan walking alone down Third Avenue. "It was 1 or 2 in the morning," he said. "There was a light coat of snow on the ground, and Kerry was doing a sort of loose, laid-back version of a German lock step. She was kicking snow up as she was walking. She was pretty much the only person on Third Avenue."

The two gradually became very good friends. They went out for meals, drank, took walks and hung out. They made each other laugh and confided in each other. "We talked talked talked talked talked talked," Ryan recalled.

For a long time, the thought of something more did not really occur to either of them.

Juback's first inkling of deeper feelings came one night in early 1992. Ryan had joined his girlfriend and his sister for a performance of "Search and Destroy" at the Circle in the Square Theater; Juback was in the cast. Afterward, they had all gone to Joe Allen's for dinner.

Juback's relationship with his girlfriend had begun to wane, and over dinner he thought to himself that he wanted to find "someone just like Kerry, only older."

Still, he kept his distance. "I didn't want to be a lech," he said. "My whole deal was, 'I'm not going to be one of those guys,' so I didn't make any moves."

For Ryan, something shifted decisively on the cusp of that summer. She had an opportunity to rent a great apartment on Delancey Street and suggested to Juback that they look at it together.

He was reluctant to move for practical reasons: He had a good deal on his place and did not want to give it up.

In the course of this discussion, Ryan realized she did not want to move without him. That realization led to an even deeper epiphany. "I decided I wanted him," she said. "And that was it."

"I made it my business to go about getting him."

And so began what Ryan calls "the whole hot buildup."

As the summer heat escalated, so did the electricity between them.

There was the night Juback massaged Ryan's feet when she hobbled into the apartment after breaking her heel at a club.

There was the trip to hear evensong at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, after which their eyes met knowingly as they picked out peaches at a street vendor's stand ("dripping fruit," Ryan noted).

There was the time Juback bought sunflowers, which Ryan read as a poetic echo of the dress she had worn the day they met; the time Juback asked Ryan to recommend a scent for him; the time Juback invited Ryan to watch the film "Swept Away."

"There was this whole question in the air," she said.

In mid-August, Ryan secretly made strawberry shortcake, one of Juback's favorite desserts, in honor of the first anniversary of their meeting. "I made it from scratch," she said, "because that's what I was brought up to do."

On Aug. 16, she reached into the refrigerator and said, "Look what I made you." As he went to kiss her on the cheek, she swiveled and met his lips with hers. The kiss was momentary, somewhere between chaste and lustful.

They kept each other at bay until the next day, when, after returning home from brunch at the Noho Star, their resistance melted.

Neither knew where they were headed. "I was, like, 'Was that an accident between roommates?'" Juback recalled. But it continued.

Early on, Juback urged caution. He worried that Ryan might wake up someday, decide she wanted someone younger and move on.

"He told me he worried that I was messing around with him," she said.

The weeks became months. Ryan kept the relationship a secret from her parents, knowing that they would not approve. But she blew her cover with a misstep. She had written separately to her sister and her mother, mentioning the relationship in the letter to her sister but omitting it in the letter to her mother.

Then she switched the envelopes.

Ryan's parents were livid, refusing to accept her choice of a boyfriend. "World War III," Juback said. "Kerry's mother would write letters telling her to come to her senses."

("John, Mammy may read this," she interjected, referring to her mother. "Good!" he replied.)

It would be several long years - not until the couple decided to marry - before Ryan's parents finally accepted their daughter's choice.

In 1997, after returning from six months of traveling alone - a trip she took partly to test her commitment to Juback - Ryan proposed that they get married. They were on the subway returning from brunch. "I said, 'Let's do it,'" she recalled.

They married in April 1998 in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.

Both are quick to point out that their marriage, like any long relationship, has not been without its turmoil. They declined to offer much detail except to say that Ryan - who calls herself "the hothead" in the relationship - once stormed out of the apartment and got a room at the Bowery Hotel in the East Village.

Later that night, however, she called Juback in a gesture of détente to invite him over. In an echo of their first telephonic pas de deux, he missed the call and did not hear her message. Each slept alone. They made up the next day.

In 2011, after more than a decade of trying to have a child, Ryan gave birth to their son, Jack.

Apart from the stares of strangers trying to do the math, the age difference between them has not been a big deal. The divide manifests itself only in the realm of technology, they say: Ryan, who continues to work in the fashion industry, is more comfortable with technology than Juback, something they both attribute to their having come of age in different epochs.

Juback, who still works as an actor, looks remarkably youthful for his age, and the difference in years seems to fade amid the obvious chemistry and ease between them.

They now celebrate two key anniversaries in their relationship: the date of their marriage and the date they met, Aug. 16, when Ryan went to see Juback's apartment. That older anniversary has greater resonance, in part because it is imbued with the seven-year foundation they built before getting married.

The Village Voice ad that brought them together is now framed in their apartment.

"Good for a laugh, that platonic thing," Ryan said.