Paulina Porizkova went back to where it all started.
The Czech-born stunner posted a bittersweet reminisce on Instagram Monday of the first time she met her late estranged husband Ric Ocasek.
“I’m sitting at a table at the Odeon restaurant, the very same table where, 39 years ago, I had my first dinner with the man who would become my husband,” she wrote alongside a photo of herself beaming at a banquette in New York City.
Porizkova, 57, explained that although the dinner included actor Timothy Hutton, the rest of the band, and their manager, she only had eyes for the “tall, lanky and akwardly [sic] elegant man with turquoise eyes.”
The former Lancôme spokeswoman then recounted that she had dared the Cars frontman — who died in September 2019 — to go and wordlessly sit on a small table “where a couple was having a romantic dinner.”
“Without a word, he pushed condiments and food aside and then got up on the table, folding his body so the entirety of him fit right on the table top, along with the plates and food,” she wrote, adding that he sat there mutely for a whole minute as the couple “gaped at him” before coming back to the table as if nothing had happened.
“I thought he was the most compelling man I had ever met. Confident and funny in a absurdist Monty Python-esque way,” she recalled.
Porizkova confessed that she is not sure she would find his antics so enticing today.
“I must admit- not sure if it would have the same effect on me today. 😁,” she added.
The Sports Illustrated model met the musician when she was hired to star in the music video for the Cars song “Drive” in 1984. She was 19 and he was 40, twice married with four sons. They tied the knot in 1989.
“He became my entire world, my entire universe,” she wrote in her recent memoir, “No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful.”
They went on to have two sons together — Jonathan and Oliver — and announced their separation in May 2018. They were in the process of divorcing when Ocasek died unexpectedly following heart surgery in September 2019 at age 75.
Despite their split, the couple still lived together and it was Porizkova who discovered his body.
The “Anna” star told Page Six in an exclusive interview that she was bereft following Ocasek’s death.
“It’s not even so much that I thought about how to kill myself or when to kill myself; it was just that feeling of, ‘I just don’t know how to go on. I can’t do this anymore. … I just want to go away. I can’t bear waking up tomorrow morning, being the same person with the same feelings. I can’t carry it anymore,’” she shared.
Porizkova was even more shocked to discover that Ocasek had written his estranged wife out of his will citing abandonment.
It was finally settled in October 2021, but Porizkova labeled the exclusion “vindictive.”
“It was really, really hard because obviously, first of all, you’re grieving a person that has been your whole life, the most important person in your life … there was so much pain just stacked up on top of each other … and then this betrayal was a lot,” she revealed.