“Run for Your Life,” an excerpt from Turn to Stone by Emily Meg Weinstein
“Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man”
—Lennon and McCartney, “Run for Your Life”
He only said it once, at an Egon Schiele retrospective on the Upper East Side.
He was wearing his camel coat. We stood in front of each painting for a long time, holding hands and telling stories, and I thought: This is why this is good.
I was mesmerized by a huge canvas called Lovers Man and Woman. A couple, nude, in bed. The man on his back, staring at the viewer. The woman on her elbows and knees, head tucked under, hips raised, feet flexed, pale back long and bony. The man’s outstretched arm snaked through the woman’s folded ones. Though the woman’s face was hidden, her posture conveyed anguish, while the man’s expression was challenging, poised, collected.
“Why does she look so sad,” I wondered, “when he looks so satisfied?”
“Maybe he cheated on her,” Robbie said.
“Maybe she cheated on him,” I said.
There was a change in the weather, his eyes, the room.
Still holding my hand, Robbie said, matter-of-factly, “If you ever suck another man’s cock, and kiss me with that mouth, I’ll cut your head off.”
My brain knew it was bad, but not what to do or say. If I said something, we might have a fight, and those were always bad.
It didn’t sound like a joke, but maybe he doesn’t really mean it. Did the Beatles really mean it, in the song? Sometimes Robbie, like Lennon, called me “little girl,” as a joke, or a term of endearment. Maybe threatening to cut my head off was a similar metaphor, or figure of speech.
Not long after Robbie told me the specific circumstances under which he would decapitate me, we spent a perfect winter afternoon at the art museum in New Haven, where he kept an apartment that was empty save for a bed, a recliner, and a flat-screen TV. We made out on the benches in the empty galleries. We saw a pink neon spiral inside which blue neon letters said, THE TRUE ARTIST HELPS THE WORLD BY REVEALING MYSTIC TRUTHS.
It was mostly locals at the horse race on the beach in Oaxaca, five months earlier, in August 2008, but there was another pair of American travelers, two guys about our age. Like my college best friend, Leila, and I, one blond, one dark-haired.
The dark-haired one, Robbie, had blue eyes and thick, tan calves. Like tree trunks, I thought, finally getting the simile. The blond one had a map of the whole world tattooed on his back. They told us they were going to import mezcal to the States, that it was going to be the next tequila.
The mezcal, the pride of Oaxaca, was everywhere—in bars in shapely glass bottles, on the dusty shelves of the little tiendas, in plastic water bottles with hand-painted cacti on them.
After the horse race, Robbie and his friend and Leila and I drank mezcal at a bar right on the beach, steps from our respective cabanas, until, hours later, it was only Robbie and me, our bare feet touching in the sand.
He was some kind of business guy, he said. Finance. I said something about capitalism, and he said something that made me laugh. Then he said, “You have a beautiful mind.”
His cabana wasn’t as fancy as ours. Our sheets were new and smooth and his were old and pilled. Our fan was on the ceiling and made of wood, and his was plastic, rattling on the cement floor. This did not matter, because we did not sleep.
I was so relieved. It had been two years since my last actual relationship, with a guilty Catholic and quiet alcoholic with whom I had guilty, quiet, Catholic sex, after I drank one or two beers in the six-pack and he finished the rest that same night, in an apartment upstairs from his grandmother’s, outside which a single pair of granny underwear flapped frequently on the clothesline like a damp flag of surrender. Then the sex with various randos that was often worse than no sex at all. Then a long drought.
Before, in my early twenties, there had been a beautiful boy who stripped down to his boxer briefs each week after yoga class, climbed into my bed, and never touched me. Then, in my mid-twenties, there was an expatriate ex-Marine hippie-hermit on a walled farm in Peru who ravaged me like the world was ending for three straight days before waking up on the fourth to tell me that he’d had “a really intense dream” and didn’t want me to get my heart broken. He said I should stay until the end of the week, but only to watch David Lynch movies and rip bong hits. Then came the guilty Catholic alcoholic, the randos, the drought.
He ordered a $300 bottle of champagne and paid for it with three hundred-dollar bills.
From these experiences, I amassed a Pandora’s box of fears about my own desires for sex and love. I feared not having sex for a long time. I feared having sex I liked a lot that suddenly got taken away with zero explanation, or came and went, like mysterious weather, according to no pattern I could prepare for without remaining in a constant state of desire with no expectation of it ever being satisfied. I feared someone I wanted body and soul telling me what a fun friend I was, and how important it was that we stayed “in each other’s lives” because of our “great conversations.” I feared someone I desired turning their back on me and curling into the fetal position in my own bed, or theirs—literally overnight, in the middle of what I had naively thought could be a love affair, or maybe even love itself, and unilaterally deciding it was “just friendship” instead. I feared being wanted by someone boring and messed-up and quietly alcoholic in a way that felt more like a mucky sucking need than any kind of mutual desire, and the only way to not be alone was to give in and pretend, which was the only thing even more lonely. Being wanted by someone I didn’t want was even more gutting than not being wanted at all, because my unmet desire had at least been real, if only to me, while the numb absence of feeling was like an empty room in myself.
The sandy, sleepless night in the cabana soothed these fears. Or obliterated them.
The next day, Robbie and I exchanged numbers while Leila glowered from a waiting cab. Then Leila and I took his recommendation and went up to a town in the misty mountains, where the locals would sell you magic mushrooms fresh from the mist, and the family that rented the cabins came to build and light your fire for you while they took effect.
It was all just as he described. Leila and I stayed up all night, and I burned a recent bestseller, page by page, because I was sure I could write a better one. Leila briefly believed she had lost her engagement ring, but then remembered she had left it at home, in New York.
Back in New York, a few weeks later, Robbie called.
It was the final Friday of September 2008. I had just turned twenty-nine.
He named a café on Park Avenue in the twenties, a part of Manhattan I never went to. When I got there, he was wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, already finishing a drink.
He ordered a $300 bottle of champagne and paid for it with three hundred-dollar bills. We drank it and talked, and it was just like Mexico. His eyes were so blue.
The hundred-dollar bills gave me pause, but they went with the shirt. He had a jacket, too. It wasn’t from a thrift store, like the ironic suits of the struggling artists in my ironic Brooklyn neighborhood. Robbie’s jacket was a finance jacket, new and expensive. There were no tears in the pale pink lining, only a label.
It was still light when we went out on the street to smoke. Robbie lit a cigarette, and we passed it back and forth. With one hand, he threw the butt on the ground and ground it out with his dress shoe. With the other, he hailed a taxi and opened the door.
“Where do you live?” he asked, standing before the yellow taxi with his red hair in his blue shirt with the white collar.
In the cab, he pulled me astride him. He tasted like cigarettes and smelled like the beach. Crossing the East River, as we squeaked on the vinyl, I saw the bright steel beams of the Williamsburg Bridge speeding by, flashing red.
It was four days before Robbie called another taxi and left my apartment. That first weekend, and for all the months after, we slept and woke and fucked and fought at all hours. We lived beyond time and did not always eat food. That first weekend, we were so in our own world that we didn’t even notice that the stock market crashed.
Right away, Robbie said he wanted to be my boyfriend. He said he loved me. He said he was a direct descendent of a European revolutionary I’d never heard of, which was actually why his dad had had something to do with the bauxite mines in Jamaica, which was why Robbie sometimes spoke in a Jamaican accent that reminded me of the false patois of the highly problematic Sacha Baron Cohen character Ali G.
At the end of that first week in October, something happened at Robbie’s job because of the stock market crash. He worked at Citigroup, he’d said. Or maybe Citibank. Chase? One of the banks. He called me, drunk, from a pay phone. His cell phone had been shut off, he said, because of work.
He hadn’t lost his job, but he was going to work in London now. He was going to fly there every two weeks. He’d already been going once a month, but now he was going to be relocated to the London office, and they would give him his new phone.
He didn’t have a cell phone for the whole rest of the time I knew him. I could only call him on the landline at his condo in New Haven, where, he said, he was also attending the low-residency executive MBA program at Yale. When he was in London, he called from numbers that showed up with the country code 44.
My junior year of college, I studied abroad at Oxford. I knew the country code for England. It really is 44.
The first time he came back from London, Robbie called me from a pay phone and asked me to meet him at Penn Station.
At Penn Station, he said we needed to go to Grand Central, to get oysters at the Oyster Bar. Even though it would have been only a short walk, Robbie insisted on a taxi from Penn to Grand Central, and paid with a crumpled bill.
At the Oyster Bar, we ate oysters and drank martinis. I drank one and a half martinis, which was the most I could drink without puking, and Robbie drank two and a half, then ordered another.
The check came. It was well over a hundred dollars. I waited for Robbie to pull out his hundreds, but he told me something was going on with his money, with his bank, with his card, because of the financial crisis and the new job in London.
He asked if I could cover it. He said he’d pay me back. As soon as things got sorted out in London.
I had only recently gotten my first credit card. It had JetBlue miles.
This is good, I thought, throwing it down. Miles.
Quite quickly, despite the condo in New Haven, Robbie was basically living with me, when he wasn’t in school for a weekend or in London for a week or two at a time, working at Citigroup. Or Citibank.
We went to art museums and walked in the park. We had sex for hours at all hours and then lay on my velvet couch in silky bathrobes, reading philosophy aloud to each other and then had sex again on the velvet couch in the silky bathrobes.
“Anytime,” Robbie said.
That part was true. He’d have me anytime, and I had never had that.
There were other reasons why it was good. He was an amazing cook, a magician. He could make a delicious meal out of anything. If there was a can of sardines in the cabinet and a single, slimy scallion in the fridge, somehow, with condiments and spices, Robbie made something delicious. Later, when nothing made sense, I would wonder if I let it not make sense for so long because he made things that did not make sense—like a can of sardines and one slimy scallion—taste so delicious.
One night, I came home from my day job tutoring kids all over the city, and Robbie had made two pots of soup. One was dark purple—he’d found a can of black beans. The other was light and creamy—he did something with coconut milk. He put them in bowls in the shape of a yin-yang. He put a dot of the dark in the light, a dot of the light in the dark. He didn’t touch his, just waited, watching me, as I tasted.
“How is it, baby?” he asked, tenderly.
“It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted,” I said, and I was telling the truth.
By the end of October, the problem with Robbie’s credit card had not been resolved. Every meal we ate and every drink he drank went on my credit card. Miles and miles.
At the end of that first week in October, something happened at Robbie’s job because of the stock market crash.
Robbie wanted to go to Bermuda for Thanksgiving. Robbie wanted me to get an IUD.
He bought plane tickets with his frequent-flier miles. I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood.
Robbie wanted to buy expensive knives to give to Leila and Simon for their wedding gift in June. That, I didn’t do. June seemed far away.
The night Obama was elected, we were at his place in New Haven, having a fight. I wanted to go out and watch the victory speech in a crowd, but the fight went on too long, though I didn’t understand how it started.
Suddenly, for reasons unknowable, he would be very angry—maybe screaming, maybe crying. He always said it was something I did, or said, but then the next time, when I tried not to do or say that thing, it was something else.
When the worst of it passed, I could hear the people outside, shouting and honking their horns, but Robbie didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want me to go out, either. He said I’d get raped. It sounded more like a threat than a concern. So I watched the speech on my phone in the condo bathroom, listening to Barack Obama’s kind, sane voice echoing off the marble walls.
As November darkened and things got weirder, I’d think of Bermuda, and decide to figure it all out after that. I hated everything about Bermuda from the moment we arrived. The water was not warm. It was like a subtropical Britain, Union Jacks everywhere. White people being rich and Black people still working for them. Every other building in the colonizer town was a bank, and I hated every moment I spent hanging, terrified, on to the back of the motorbike Robbie insisted on renting and drove too fast.
I was homesick for my family in a way I hadn’t been since kindergarten. My parents fretted, as usual, about how to contact me while I was in Bermuda, and, once there, for the first time I felt scared by the fact that they couldn’t reach me instead of liberated, as I usually did by travel. I felt bizarrely disappeared, like I’d never come back from the Bermuda Triangle.
Robbie brought hash, cleverly packed into emptied-out vitamin capsules, and it was surprisingly strong. I hated hash anyway, but Bermuda made me hate hash more, and the hash made me hate Bermuda more.
We broke the headboard of the bed in the dark, cheap room he rented us. It was a cheesy, eighties pastel curve. I looked at the broken plastic and thought, I want to go home.
When we arrived at the airport to do just that, there was a misunderstanding. Robbie had not, as promised, bought round-trip tickets with his frequent-flier miles. His miles had bought one-way tickets, the ones that got us there. Robbie insisted otherwise, but I couldn’t make him look up the email in his phone because he had no phone. I couldn’t make him look up the email in my phone because we were in Bermuda, and I had no phone service.
But it’s no big deal, baby, he said. I’ll pay you back, I promise. Besides, he frequently reminded me, we were going to get married one day and would be very rich.
In order to leave Bermuda, I had to pay for our tickets. On the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. At the counter.
As they swiped my card, I didn’t feel the usual queasiness that struck as the tally of Robbie’s expenditures rose. I’d have given literally anything to leave Bermuda.
By December, we were fighting all the time, but we still had sex all the time, and when this was over, was I really ready for another long drought, and did I really want to be dateless, yet again, at Leila’s wedding in June?
Also, the money. I had to get him to give it back first.
One night, we had a fight about whether our future kids should go to boarding school in Switzerland. Another night, he told me that my writing was “like an emerald covered in moss,” and for some reason that made me cry, and for some reason that made him yell. Another night, we put up water for tea and then started having sex and didn’t hear the kettle whistle. All the water boiled away, and the teapot my mother had bought for me was melted and charred and smoldering, almost on fire. I opened the kitchen window and threw it, sizzling, into a pile of snow.
Every meal we ate and every drink he drank went on my credit card.
I went right online and ordered a new teapot, even though I owed a lot of money on my credit card already. I couldn’t not have the teapot. I’d loved it so much. The teapot arrived two days later, and I placed it on the stove. It was just like the old teapot, but a little too new. It was not the same teapot. Or maybe I was not the same person.
When he got in a mood, I just tried to give him what he needed. That’s what I learned, in all earlier iterations of intimacy—that having “trauma” meant needing “support,” and getting “support” meant “sharing your feelings,” and if that meant screaming or crying, then later, we could “repair,” which meant that I apologized for whatever I did to cause the screaming and the crying, and then tried my very best not to do it again. Sometimes Robbie even noticed me trying, and he whispered into my hair, “Get to know me. I’ve had a crazy life.”
It wasn’t the thing he said at the Egon Schiele exhibit on the Upper East Side, when he casually told me he’d decapitate me. It was the night a few weeks later, in February, when, riding the subway back to Brooklyn from the Upper West Side, I decided to hop off at Penn Station and take an affordably off-peak Amtrak train to New Haven, instead of going home to Brooklyn first and taking the cheaper, grosser bus the next day, as planned.
When I called Robbie’s landline from the train to tell him I was coming, he started yelling at me that I couldn’t come, I just couldn’t come, he couldn’t tell me why, but I couldn’t come there, not tonight, please don’t. The whiplash of the way he yelled “DO NOT COME HERE,” and then pleaded, tearfully, “Please, baby, please don’t come,” turned me around.
I got off the Amtrak train somewhere in southern Connecticut, crossed the platform, bought a different ticket, and took another train back to Penn Station. Rather than go through the subway turnstile to take the A train to Fourteenth Street to get the L home to Brooklyn, I walked through the familiar tunnels to the Long Island Rail Road and took another, very late train to the very last stop—Port Washington.
I always told people that I didn’t grow up there, just “adolesced.” I always told people that it was East Egg, where Daisy lived in The Great Gatsby.
The station was so quiet, and the air so sweet, late at night coming back from the city. I crossed the parking lot to Deluxe Taxi and climbed into an idling Cadillac reeking comfortingly of air freshener. I charged the ride to my father’s business account and signed for it on triplicate carbon paper on a little clipboard with a ballpoint pen. Then I let myself into the house with the key under the mat, and crawled into my childhood bed.
I broke up with Robbie over Google Chat from my parents’ house. He called me a bitch.
When I got back to my apartment in Brooklyn to change the locks, Robbie had left me a suicide note under the doormat. It said he had jumped off the Williamsburg Bridge, called me a bitch again, and said that he loved me.
When I worried he was dead, my parents encouraged me to call their couples therapist, who told me, very calmly, “That man is a pathological liar, and he is manipulating you.”
Then my mom sent me to another therapist, who had me tap on my upper lip while repeating the words “I am safe.”
My parents came to Brooklyn and packed up all of Robbie’s clothes in two cardboard cartons so I didn’t have to get near enough to smell them. My dad was so swift with the tape dispenser; it was just like I was leaving for college again. They helped me pay off the credit card debt, and I felt so fucking privileged—and so fucking stupid.
“At least it’s not rehab,” I mumbled.
“Or legal fees!” said my mom. “Could be worse!”
Eventually, they told me they’d gotten rid of the boxes. The camel coat. The blazer with the pale pink lining. The blue shirt with the white collar. Were they in a landfill? At Goodwill?
Put it out of your mind, they said. And I began to.
I slowly went back to being myself. And then I went looking for someone else to become.
Excerpted from TURN TO STONE. Copyright © 2025, Emily Meg Weinstein. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.