In this unusual love story, certain words were off limits: ‘love,’ ‘relationship,’ ‘living together’
Two Canadians in their 60s are forging their own path to sustainable love, based on independence, the lessons of two lives of failed romances — and the opposite of falling in love
In early 2017, the artist Peter Johnston noticed a woman who nine months later would nearly kill him. Sitting alone at a Balzac’s coffee shop in downtown Guelph, she caught his eye for typical reasons: looks and books. “Not only was she an attractive person about my age,” Johnston, who is 69, explained, but she was reading 4 3 2 1, the latest novel by the American writer of philosophical fiction Paul Auster. Johnston is a fan.
Over the following months, Johnston saw the woman every now and then at Balzac’s and each time his interest grew. But he didn’t find the courage to make a move until fall. “How’s the Paul Auster coming?” he asked, knowing she had long ago moved on to other novels.
They spoke for more than an hour and a half, in the process discovering remarkable parallels between their biographies. He had emigrated from Liverpool to Toronto when he was 8 years old via the Cunard ocean line; she had made almost the same trip, from Le Havre to Quebec City, when she was 9, also on the Cunard line. They remembered together the fear they felt on the docks and then the joy of being set free to play unsupervised on the vast ships. Though more than half a century had passed since their voyages, each maintained a strong hint of his or her childhood accent.
Johnston, a sculptor with the nose and wavy silver hair of a Roman bust, thought the ease of their conversation was “magical.” So he was surprised when, all of a sudden, she stood up and said, “I have to go buy a chicken!” as if the task could not be more urgent, and abruptly left.
Two days later, as he was walking down an oak-lined avenue past a limestone bungalow he had often admired, a car careered out of the driveway, nearly killing him. The woman from Balzac’s was at the wheel. But as Johnston watched her speed away, he felt no malice, only warmth.
He was not falling in love, exactly. Twice divorced, he was indisposed to emotional upheaval. But he was compelled.
Besides, the threat to his life turned out to be felicitous. Now that he knew where she lived, perhaps he would invite her to his new exhibition.
Marie-Claire Recurt had never noticed Johnston before he approached her at Balzac’s. She found their conversation interesting, noting their easy dynamic, and she admired his regard — she prefers the word in her native French to its English translations, “the look in his eyes,” “his gaze.” (Recurt, who retired from teaching French after two decades at the University of Toronto Schools, has a language teacher’s thoughtfulness about words.)
In particular, she was surprised by her total lack of anxiety. “I usually get very jumpy when somebody wants to talk to me — especially a man — because maybe I have had bad experiences in my life and some huge disappointments,” she explained.
Recurt’s feelings were strictly platonic. She had been alone for13 years and liked that she could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Yet certain aspects of the conversation lingered with her in the hours afterwards. Why, for instance, had she made such an awkward exit, sputtering something about a chicken?
More preoccupying was her curiosity about Johnston’s art. In the course of their conversation, it had emerged that Johnston in the late nineties created an installation for the River Run Centre, Guelph’s most important performing arts venue. “He was very humble and he didn’t make any big fuss about it,” she said, but she was left with the impression that he was a serious artist.
The next day, she visited the installation, a large sculpture of etched, inked and oxidized copper, called “Passages.” The piece is a palimpsest, an illustrated
MARIE-CLAIRE RECURT
history of Guelph overlaid onto a map of the city, which gives the impression of a grand but time-worn monument. (On the sculpture’s map, the spot where the novelist John Gault is said to have founded Guelph by felling an oak is marked by the handprint of a 9-year-old girl, who, two decades later, I would marry. Johnston once lived with my wife’s mother.)
Recurt was in “complete awe.” The depth of thought, the sense of curiosity and exploration, the inquisitive approach to the world — what she perceived of the artist through his art aroused in her an attraction she had not felt in a long time.
She spent much of that day googling Johnston, discovering among other things that an exhibition of his work was being mounted in the nearby city of Cambridge. As she set out the next morning on the drive to the gallery, she nearly hit a pedestrian. “I should be more careful,” she thought.
Johnston’s recent pieces, melon-sized wall-hung sculptures of coloured resin, resemble the childlike abstractions of Paul Klee and Joan Miro, but stretched out into ribbons and tied into elaborate knots. In the gallery’s guestbook, Recurt filled a full page. The sculptures “remind me of human entrails,” she wrote; the exhibit allowed her “to breathe, to pause, to think, to wonder, to feel.”
“This artwork was doing something to me,” she later recalled.
That night, inspired, she drew in a sketchbook a picture of Johnston, at 8, in his English uniform with a teddy bear in his hand, preparing to board the Cunard ship. On the next page, she drew a picture of herself, at 9, with a head of curls, on the docks at Le Havre. She put the sketchbook in a closet with her other keepsakes, thinking she would give it to Johnston if she ever ran into him again.
The next day, there was a knock on her door. On her ivied stoop, she found Johnston holding an invitation to the exhibition she had just visited. She had no idea how he had found her. They had spoken only once.
“Peter,” she said, pulling him inside by his sweater, “I need to give you a hug.”
“I usually get very jumpy when somebody wants to talk to me because maybe I have had bad experiences in my life and some huge disappointments.”
Of course, it wasn’t always easy after that. Both in their late sixties, Johnston and Recurt had seen a combined seven serious relationships sour. Not even the unusual romance of their meeting could overcome their mutual caution, even scepticism.
Shortly after they started seeing each other, Recurt asked for a week apart from Johnston to sort through her ambivalence about the prospect of a new romance. “I planned never to go out with another man — never, ever wanted to be with anyone again,” she said. Ultimately, she cut the trial separation short, deciding she did want to try — but also to do things differently.
“In my former relationships, I was never able to say what I really needed,” Recurt said. “And then there’s this kind of resentment that builds. And you’re afraid of saying anything. At 65, I need to feel good about myself. And I want him to be feeling good about himself.”
So Recurt and Johnston agreed to take things slowly, deliberately. They would see each other no more than twice a week. Certain words would be off limits: “relationship,” “love,” “living together.”
The early days took work. Recurt said she had to learn to be more flexible, Johnston to be patient. But bit by bit they found mutual accommodations. Over time, they began to see each other more frequently, taking long walks by the river or dancing to French love songs in his apartment.
Now, they say, when they are together they are sometimes more themselves than when apart. Recurt says Johnston asks her questions that help reveal her own mind to herself. Johnston says Recurt is the only person ever to understand him first through his art, and that this has helped him see that it is in his art that he is most himself.
In January of last year, Recurt broke her rule and told Johnston she loved him. Johnston said he felt the same way. In fact, this is the most sustainable love either has experienced, they say, reflect- ing as it does the lessons of two lives of failed romance.
For instance, one of their strengths, both agree, is that while they are in love with one another they never fell in love. Marcel Proust described the blooming of erotic love as an “upheaval of thought,” a sort of virus of the mind that robs one of oneself.
Both Recurt and Johnston have been infected before. It only ever ended in heartbreak. This time is different. “I’ve never felt more myself,” Johnston said. “It’s the opposite of falling.”
Another self-professed strength is their shared belief that independence is a prerequisite for romance. Philosophers sometimes argue that love is fundamentally a union: “two bodies, one soul,” as Aristotle put it. But Johnston and Recurt see this idea as the enemy of happiness.
“In my experience, whenever I felt I needed somebody else to be happy, I’ve always made a mistake,” Recurt said. Johnston agrees. “We have a really strong sense of not wanting to lose ourselves in the other,” he said. “And that might have something to do with our age.”
They still don’t live together. He sculpts. She reads. He walks down quiet streets admiring limestone houses. She spends time with her two children and her four grandchildren.
Theirs is not a subsuming union, but a confederation: two bodies, two souls, united in a common project. It may not be traditionally romantic. But that’s partly the point. It may not be for everyone. But it doesn’t need to be.
Which brings us to another lesson both say they have learned along the way: that what we talk about when we talk about love is a multifarious and shifting thing. No universal theory holds. Johnston and Recurt are neither one nor all. They are simply two who agree on how to be together — and so, happily, they are.