Meet Me at Provence

provence.jpg Valentine’s Day marks the anniversary of the day I turned left at a crossroads. I’d like to say I never looked back, but I look back all the time. On February 14th, 1995, I left New York for good, although of course I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t be back.

I was a mere 21 years old and had recently graduated from college. I had graduated, too, from my college boyfriend, who was, in short, a complex individual. Someday, I thought, maybe I will go out with someone who enjoys the company of other people and will go to parties with me.

In New York, I found a terrible job with a joke of a salary and a refreshingly normal boyfriend who liked to go to parties. One night we went to a charity ball and there was a silent auction. Up for sale was dinner for two at Provence in the West Village.

crossingdelancy.jpg With fondness, I recalled a scene in "Crossing Delancey" where the sublime Jeroen Krabbe, playing a dashing novelist, is arguing on the phone with his ex-wife, Marguerite. He slams down the phone and a few seconds pass before it rings again, causing his gorgeous nostrils to flare in annoyance. Only it’s not Marguerite – it’s Amy Irving, the prettiest nice Jewish girl in the world, who works at Shakespeare & Company and lives in a darling apartment and has finally screwed up the courage to phone the object of her girlish crush only to have him mistake her for his ex-wife. He picks up the ringing phone and barks, “I don’t do this on the phone. Meet me at Provence in an hour.” Amy Irving gives a little start as he slams down the phone. Obviously the invitation was not meant for her, but she has no choice but to go and meet him at Provence in an hour.

I wanted to be Amy Irving and work at Shakespeare & Company and live in a darling apartment and meet someone at Provence in an hour. So I bid on the auction item and won.

A few weeks later, I was offered a job in Los Angeles. I would be working as an assistant to a director whose work I admired enormously, but the catch was that the job started immediately.

There were a lot of reasons to turn down the offer: I didn’t know anyone in LA, I had five months left on my lease on my 93rd Street apartment, and I would have to leave behind my nice normal boyfriend. But at the last possible moment, I accepted the offer. When would an opportunity like this come around again? Never, that’s when. My departure was scheduled for February 14th. So I decided the dinner at Provence would be a fitting farewell meal.

On the evening of the 13th, my nice normal boyfriend and I got all cleaned up and headed downtown, settling in uncomfortably at a marginal table as I realized I was quite overdressed and out of my depth in a room full of sophisticated regulars who all looked like they used to be married to Jeroen Krabbe. I tried hard to look relaxed, but I was juggling not just my social anxiety but my disappointment at the prospect of leaving New York just as I was starting to figure out where the N and the R train went.

provence2.jpg The menu swam in front of my eyes as our snooty French waiter eyeballed the voucher from the silent auction. Dinner for two plus a bottle of house wine, it read. I wished dearly that it had also come with a guarantee that my nice normal boyfriend would not dump me the minute I boarded the plane to LA.

The waiter left – I was sure he was fixing us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen – but then he came back with a kind message from the manager: since we’d bought the dinner at a charity auction, they wanted to send over a nicer bottle than the house wine. I relaxed a bit. Perhaps we did not appear as hopelessly out of place as I feared.

I ordered the cod cheeks, trying to impress the waiter with my worldliness and show him that the bottle upgrade was not for naught.

I still remember the dish when it arrived – whole cod faces staring passively at me from the plate. This was my big chance – I could still change my mind and tell my boyfriend I was staying, that I loved him more than I loved the job offer, that I could meet him at Provence in an hour forever. But I didn’t. The next morning, I got up at dawn and went to the airport.

My nice normal boyfriend waited a while before he dumped me. A few years later we rekindled things briefly, mainly because we were both conveniently single and invited to a lot of the same weddings. In hopes of sealing our destiny (for surely we were meant to be together after all this time, I thought) I flew to visit him at his business school in the dead of winter. As soon as I got there, though, I knew it was all over. I spent the weekend watching Iron Chef in his living room while he balanced his checkbook in his bedroom. We barely spoke to each other.

On the day I was supposed to leave, it started to snow, and suddenly bleak Ann Arbor looked pretty and quiet. We went to dinner at a little pizza place and finally acknowledged that the romance was over. And just like that, a cloud lifted – in an instant, we were comfortable around each other again. He drove me to the airport the next day and we said good-bye for good. It was February 14th.

Provence
38 Macdougal Street (between King and Charlton)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 475-7500

 

Emily Fox writes both feature films and television when she is not whipping up the same three recipes over and over again (chili, coq au vin, and Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and baby girl.